The lady was perhaps a third of the way up the Chimney Pond Trail at Mount Katahdin, and it was clear she was in trouble.

She was attempting to climb over a steep mound of rocks and onto a short wooden bridge, but her hiking poles were not having it. The poles trembled in the woman’s bony arms as she tried to lift them higher to take that next big step.

But it was too much for her. Exhaustion showing, she’d lower the poles in defeat, their tips clanging back against the rocks at her feet.

Her face was red and streaked with dusty sweat as she awaited the next round of energy. Bugs swarmed her — mosquitoes and midges and crane flies — as if they had been shot out of a fire hose.

As we descended the trail toward her, it was our intention to help the poor woman any way we could, and perhaps convince her to hike back down with us and try again another day.

There was no need. The closer we got to the woman, the happier she looked. Even as the bugs dove in for their blood meals, even as the daunting trail stretched out before her, steep and unforgiving, the lady was smiling. Her eyes were bright like a child’s on Christmas morning.

This was the happiest woman I’d ever seen, and you see a lot of happy people on the trail.

She was 81 years old, as it turns out, and was climbing to Chimney Pond — not for the first time in her life, or the second or the third.

The scrappy lass had climbed this trail so many times, she couldn’t begin to remember the number.

“It’s the best place in the world,” she told us, the bliss upon her face as radiant as a lantern.

A little while later, another hiker told us he’d seen her nearing the end of Chimney Trail and that she was moving right along.

“Is that badass or what?” the hiker asked me.

It was, I agreed. It was badass all over the place.

Another woman we met coming down the trail was considerably younger than that 81-year-old dynamo, but she shared that same glow of personal contentment. Shining on her face was a glorious blend of gratitude, relief, awe and fatigue. The face of a conqueror.

This lady was perhaps a little bit beyond middle age, and I don’t know what tumult had been visited upon her life, but at some point she decided that what her soul needed was to climb Maine’s most forbidding mountain.

“I had no idea if I’d be able to do it,” she said. “No idea at all.”

And so to find out if her legs and soul were up to the challenge, she packed herself a bag, strapped on some bottles of water, and headed up Chimney Pond Trail to see what she was really and truly made of.

When she reached the end of that trail, the cloud-strewn summits of Katahdin were fully in view and the idea of stopping never occurred to her.

She filled up her bottles with the sparkling cold waters of Chimney Pond, strapped her pack a little tighter and headed up the Saddle Trail to Katahdin’s highest peak.

She made it, too, and then she had the rest of the day to descend the mountain, basking in the warming glow of an immense personal triumph.

“I still can’t believe I did it,” she told us, before we parted ways.

Another hiker tells the story of meeting an old man halfway up the mountain.

The old man was sitting on a rock and weeping, as it turns out, and when he was asked why he was in such anguish, his plaintive response came at once.

“I can’t climb Mount Katahdin anymore!” the exhausted old man wailed.

And that may have been true, but at 80 or 90 or whatever he was, he had climbed HALF of a mountain that most people will never even attempt in all their lives.

Whether that brought the old fellow solace, I have no idea.

Five years ago, I wrote a story about the late Joe Lelansky, a Boy Scout leader from Auburn said to have introduced no fewer than 500 people to Katahdin.

I remember sitting on Joe’s porch and listening to all his stories: about perilous hikes along the mountain’s deadly Knife Edge; about encounters with moose or bear up on the mountain; about eating bean hole beans or beef stew at Chimney Pond en route to the high peaks.

I enjoyed talking to Joe immensely at the time and we became fast friends.

But I also had no real appreciation, back then, for what he was telling me.

Why so much joy over a single mountain? Why so much passion for this dense patch of wilderness that practically bordered on romantic love?

I get it now, and I kick myself for not having a taste of that mountain before Joe died so that we could talk deeper into the night about that wild and wonderful place.

I feel about hiking mountains the way I feel about downtown city streets — every single person you encounter there has some kind of story to tell, and those stories are always worth listening to.

My main regret is not asking that 81-year-old mountain climber for her name so that I might hear more of her story at a later time.

I’ll never know more about that other woman who had clawed her way to Baxter Peak, either, because in spite of a rather long conversation mid-trail, I know nothing more about her.

Which is just as well, I suppose. Mountains, like streets, have to keep SOME mystery or the thrill of walking them wouldn’t be so supreme.