Mount Cardigan - March 20, 2011
When we made the final turn onto the road that led up to the Lodge, the top of the rise was so washed out that a line of hoodoos seemed to block our way. Driving over the crest, they gained a dimension and stretched into rows of ruts, dug out from the backcountry ski season. The car tires found valleys of milk chocolate frozen mud, and onward we jostled slowly and with much bumping around. At the top of the hill, as far as the road would go, parked trucks and Subarus appeared along a field. So, there are a lot of people hiking Cardigan today. I looked up at the bluebird sky, the expanse of glacial blues interrupted by a few wisps of edelweiss white. The snow gleamed in the early afternoon sunshine. Ahead, bare trees and evergreens filtered the glare in the old woods. There was still a chill in the air, but the sun warmed our skins to feel like upper 40s.
The Lodge was open. An older gentleman walked with a dog in the front yard of the property; he watched as I talked to myself about snowshoes. The number of cars in the lot on the first day of spring, the rutted road, an AMC Lodge erected smack-dab at the trailhead, indicated a packed trail. As I decided, possibly out loud, on wearing the Microspikes, the man with the dog was glaring into the sunlight, possibly looking away to the mountain or quickly away from me. “Hello!” I called. He gave a greeting with a certain finality about it, and turned. When Brigid returned from the Lodge she saw my choice of traction and agreed. “The trails are probably pretty packed. The Lodge was nice inside, with pretty new windows.”
Brigid had scribbled a quick map of the few trails up to the mountain. “My friends around here say it’s a rite of passage, your first climb up Mt. Cardigan.” The beginning of our approach was a singular trail. Then a Y introduced options. One route, Cathedral Forest, took a meandering 3ish miles to the top. The other trail, Holt, jumped to the top in a surprising 0.8 miles. “We can take our time up Cathedral Forest and then scoot down the Holt Trail. There was a sign inside the lodge that Holt is pretty steep and iced over.” Thinking about the thick spring air through the forest and a rocky top full of tourists, I agreed. The trailhead began an easy sweep along a stream, ascending slightly with the natural rise of the mountain base. We chatted about easy things, friends and family. We met one couple at a stream crossing, smiling from an accomplished summit. I’m liking this state- a date during the day is a hike. We proudly agreed that snowshoes would have been a burden over this icy white road. Then the sign at the Y. Holt Trail is Icy and Steep. “Brigid, if the trail is really steep, I would rather go up it than down. Cuz if you’re gonna fall, it’s better to fall onto the mountainside, than off of it. Then we can go down the nice easy trail. We’ll have plenty of time. But if there’s an icy section, it’s really better to go up.”
“Ok. That makes sense.”
After we turned onto the Holt Trail, the conditions changed suddenly. This route obviously got less traffic. We hiked on softer snow, sometimes postholing a couple feet. Hooray! As usual, the mile we had hiked had awoken the, I don’t know what to call it, reserve power, hardwired habit, woodsy spirit, which makes hiking supremely calming. The mere act of walking in the woods releases the stories of the AT, the memory of power and strength and ability, which my muscles revert to- it’s the corny version of muscle memory. When I’m hiking, my body is happy, simple as that. “I’m so happy!” I told Brigid. It was true. I was happy.
Almost a half mile later, I was wondering when the trail was going to get steep. With not much more than a quarter mile remaining, as far as I could tell, we had most of the elevation to go. The rocky pate of the summit rose above the trees like a balloon held out in front of us. The trees ahead appeared darker, and as the trail rose ever slightly, we could see an abrupt change in pitch. Scrawled in the snow was a message, an arrow pointing ahead to three squiggly lines, stacked atop each other.
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Didn’t you guys have code and stuff you wrote to each other on the trail?”
“Not really code, nothing more than an arrow. But we didn’t have enough snow.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“It’s probably telling us this is where is gets icy and steep.”
“We’re going to find out.”
And just like that, we were scrambling up a very different trail. The ice stuck like glass leeches to the pitted rock face, pointing their slick foreheads to the heavens. The slope of the mountain had taken on an expeditious grade. The final 0.4 miles of the Holt Trail account for 1,000 feet of elevation gain, but we didn’t know what was coming. The snow seemed to grow out of the ice like a fungus, and hikers before us had settled footholds into the mushy bits. While the trees lasted, the refrozen steps carried us up, as rungs on a ladder.
“I am so glad we’re going up this” was about the least expository statement I uttered. A discussion of footholds over the varying thickness and softness of ice eclipsed the easy conversations during the ambling section of the approach trail. We could pull on the thin conifers growing out of the nooks for extra leverage. Climbing steep terrain is like doing long lunges with acrobat arms: our stride was steady until it wasn’t. The few times I postholed, near the base of a larger tree or in a patch of sunlight, the snow swallowed my entire leg. But that only happened a couple times before I learned better. Then we had a conversation about tree holes and that skier who just died out west. Bring a Buddy was more broadly apt in winter than we had previously considered. I had broken a sweat. Our words were scarce and important. After a couple hundred feet, the trees opened up to the final climb- a sort of forehead. The mountaintop ahead of us was rock patchworked with snow and alpine mosses. We were getting beyond steep- the snow and ice covered the natural rock stairsteps, leaving a smooth silhouette at an angle I would never want to descend. Footholds required handholds for stability.
“I guess we know what those squiggly lines mean now.”
“Yeah, future reference: squiggly lines on top of each other mean slick ice.”
“Must be.”
We learned quickly- avoiding the sunny spots and big trees after my adventures in leg-swallowing snow, watching for exposed rock where the snow and ice couldn’t stick, using the established footholds until, sadly, we spotted deep handprints dotting the edges of thigh-deep postholes. The route was compromised. So we zigzagged across to shade, then back to bare rock. About fifty feet up two figures were scooting down the sunned ice. We had left the trees and they were among the sparse alpine shrubbery. I wondered whether they were having any fun. The climb ahead struck me as needing some ropes and anchors. The warning bell of ‘we might want to turn around now’ rung dully in my hyperactive brain and ceased. My brain in the middle of a climb wants to solve puzzles: safety was a priority, sure, but the challenge was surmountable. We stayed to the side of their line of descent. I thought, gosh they could get some serious momentum going down that way. When the two, who were a man and a woman, likely on a disastrous date, reached their first tree higher than his head, they ceased to scoot, sat down, and tried to smile.
“Oh, okay” I shouted politely, weighing whether to explain that mountain etiquette gives the right of way to hikers going down. They sat precariously in the sliver of shade, holding the sapling, squinting up at us. Looking the dude over I saw cheap softshell pants and a thin windshirt darkened with moisture, traction no better than Get-a-Grip studs on his sneakers, and fancy sunglasses. The lady was looking into the distance but not at any mountains through her fancy tortoise-lensed sunglasses. Maybe she was traumatized from the terrible adventure, but at least she had on a hardshell jacket and thicker pants. Brigid whispered to me as we dug our toes into grainy stairs, approaching them, “they don’t look local” and when I attempted to describe the trail they were descending into, there was little response. Instead, the guy asked “is that Lake Winnipesaukee?” I looked at Brigid.
“Umm, I think that that’s Newfound Lake. Because the two are both southeast from here, right? Newfound is first and farther, past those hills, you can see Winnipesaukee.”
“Uh, yeah okay, and is that ski mountain over there Whaleback?”
“Well, that’s way southwest, and this one is pretty close and more south, it’s probably Ragged Mountain. Yeah I was thinking it was Ragged Mountain before, it’s pretty close by.”
He lowered his arms, thinking, and raised to point again “Oh, so what about that big mountain right there, is that Mt. Jackson?” I followed his point, which found a lonely mountain speckled with snow like powdered sugar, rising high above the other peaks in the range.
“Oh, well, the presidential range is farther away, and it has a tree covered summit.”
“Could it be Mt. Cube?” Probably not, but it was worth a shot.
“Mt. Cube is farther west,” Brigid corrected.
“Oh, you’re right, when I saw it a few months ago it was pretty substantially covered in snow. I bet it’s Moosilauke. And look at that white range way out there, do you think that’s Mt. Washington?” I asked.
“No, it’s too close to be Washington,”
“Of course, there’s nothing on top, silly me,”
“But it actually might be the Franconia Ridge.”
“Beautiful, look at that.”
The couple seemed to be respectively seething or disinterested in our corrective geography lesson. So we wished them safety and caution, and kept making our stairway to Cardigan.
Within another fifty feet, handholds were necessary again. I would grab edges of refrozen ice lifting off the rock, or pockmarked grooves in the softer ice or palm the curving rock. Then we left the blazed trail. It followed a hump of ice smooth as metal, shaded by its precipitous pitch, where without real crampons and an axe, we would be walking on water. So we stepped laterally into the shade, looking for another route. Brigid took ten extra steps while I attempted to scurry up a nodule with an icy base and sunny top. My first slip pulled my right leg down a few feet on glassy ice to remind me to be careful. Steadying for a moment, I lifted a foot to a flatter node, tested some ice for a right hand grip, and pulled up on an edge. I wished I had an axe just then. My left foot was next. Alpine moss covered the node I chose for it, concealing the reliability of my foot placement. With a crunch I scrabbled the gnarl with the teeth of my Microspikes, and called to Brigid-
“I’m afraid of hurting the Fragile Alpine Zone Species!”
“Our elevation isn’t high enough for the protected species, you’re ok!”
But I wasn’t. Surveying this slippery base, I determined that climbing the nodule would be closer to bouldering and therefore unattemptable.
“Uh, Brig, this way isn’t gonna work. How’s yours?”
“I think I got it, come on back this way.”
I paused. From here I had to pivot my right body left, where I had a tentative foothold on my front leg and a right handhold, so that to step forward would cross my legs and turn my hip into the rock. Briefly, I was nervous: the jump of adrenaline in my gut quickened my inhale, the raw exhilaration of presentness soothed my exhale. Then I looked across to where Brigid was inspecting her climb, and maneuvered my right foot to be perpendicular to the mountain, twisted my front body to face the rock, and holding steady with my two hands swung my left leg into a crunchy spot. Sashaying across I reached Brigid’s nodule, where she nimbly climbed, appearing to almost glide up like a spider.
“I just sort of spidered up, using all my limbs! That was awesome!”
“When we get to the top, we have to high-five!”
“Yeah!”
But I wasn’t exactly sure how to get up there. Again the nervous surge reminded me I was not on a soft plane but a hard hill, that I should be careful. My fingers were burning from holding the ice and my palms were red. A vision of a swinging axe connecting to ice offered the same false relief as the sleep-deprived imagining a pillow. Then the puzzle mode kicked back in. The handholds were infrequent and rarely bulbous enough for a secure grip. The ice was not soft. How had she done this?
I breathed for a full minute, just leaning against the rock. There is no rush. Then I decided to trust my strength. I took my left foot six inches above the right and chewed into the ice. I felt around the shaded rock, granite-like but fairly even, and cupped a wide ripple. Expecting to lose grip, I pulled, isolating my steady leg, my left hand on snow, and the muscles straining along my right arm from the cup down my side, and pulled my right leg up another six inches from my left. Amazed at the machinery of the movement, my left hand quickly found another hold across the flatter part of the rock and pulled my torso up with that arm, my right now splayed on the leveling surface of the platform, and my right leg, evening out my hip. When I could lean onto the rock and use the weight of my shoulders and chest to anchor my body and raise my legs, my hands felt like epoxy on the Kinsman Quartz Monzonite. The chance to fall was overtaken. We had found a new route. The summit was less than a hundred feet up. It was still too steep for a high-five.
Using our new spidering skills, we scrambled up the remainder. When we could walk, we crunched up to the fire tower. I wanted the first person we saw to say ‘Wow! Did you just go up the Holt Trail?’ but no one was nearby our route. Our own glory had to suffice. There was enough.
“So, I think it’s safe to say that what we just did was called free climbing. Most people would have wanted ropes and an ice axe and all that for what we just did. That was intense, maybe not very safe.”
“Wow, really? That’s pretty crazy. I was thinking that, when I had to shimmy up to find a new route, whether it was actually safe. I trusted my Microspikes, and I felt strong, wow.”
I wondered about all those cars in the parking lot. Where were all the people? Did we miss them on the Forest trail? Look at this 360 degree view! I expected all the traffic of Camel’s Hump up here. But the wind, it carried the frozen edge of the mountain cover, and it came from all directions. On the first flight of stairs to the tower, a shed blocked the whipping wind enough for a sit. We had sweated through our baselayers, so we put on our spare outerlayers. In exultation we passed around twizzlers and cheese and drank water, grinning with our summit.
A young high school couple appeared, and judging by the Vermont Camo flannel/wool jacket, he at least was a local. He pointed to each peak in the distance and named them. We had been right, about Moosilauke and about Franconia ridge. Nothing else that kept a snowpack like that was close enough. The distant ridge looked like bleached teeth, incisors jutting out of the gumline of tree-covered mountains before it.
Brimming with accomplishment, adrenaline, and the bitter taste of knowing that we were lucky as well as strong, we marched down the mountain. Cathedral forest was beautiful, bright, and well-packed. The trees stood apart for lush spring and summer groundcover, and sunlight spread through spaces left by the fallen leaves of autumn. Serious negotiations receded for easy conversations with the regular recurrence of the yellow blaze. At the Y, approaching the balloon’s string on our hiking map, the unhappy couple appeared. They were not jolly. We smiled and greeted them, reported on the mountains he had requested the identification of and failed to inquire about how they made it down the mountain. Slowly, was the answer we didn’t have to ask for, and probably the only one we could have gotten. In an awkward intersection, Brigid and I took the lead and the unhappy couple agreed on a short break. If this was a date, it was probably the last.
The Lodge was open. An older gentleman walked with a dog in the front yard of the property; he watched as I talked to myself about snowshoes. The number of cars in the lot on the first day of spring, the rutted road, an AMC Lodge erected smack-dab at the trailhead, indicated a packed trail. As I decided, possibly out loud, on wearing the Microspikes, the man with the dog was glaring into the sunlight, possibly looking away to the mountain or quickly away from me. “Hello!” I called. He gave a greeting with a certain finality about it, and turned. When Brigid returned from the Lodge she saw my choice of traction and agreed. “The trails are probably pretty packed. The Lodge was nice inside, with pretty new windows.”
Brigid had scribbled a quick map of the few trails up to the mountain. “My friends around here say it’s a rite of passage, your first climb up Mt. Cardigan.” The beginning of our approach was a singular trail. Then a Y introduced options. One route, Cathedral Forest, took a meandering 3ish miles to the top. The other trail, Holt, jumped to the top in a surprising 0.8 miles. “We can take our time up Cathedral Forest and then scoot down the Holt Trail. There was a sign inside the lodge that Holt is pretty steep and iced over.” Thinking about the thick spring air through the forest and a rocky top full of tourists, I agreed. The trailhead began an easy sweep along a stream, ascending slightly with the natural rise of the mountain base. We chatted about easy things, friends and family. We met one couple at a stream crossing, smiling from an accomplished summit. I’m liking this state- a date during the day is a hike. We proudly agreed that snowshoes would have been a burden over this icy white road. Then the sign at the Y. Holt Trail is Icy and Steep. “Brigid, if the trail is really steep, I would rather go up it than down. Cuz if you’re gonna fall, it’s better to fall onto the mountainside, than off of it. Then we can go down the nice easy trail. We’ll have plenty of time. But if there’s an icy section, it’s really better to go up.”
“Ok. That makes sense.”
After we turned onto the Holt Trail, the conditions changed suddenly. This route obviously got less traffic. We hiked on softer snow, sometimes postholing a couple feet. Hooray! As usual, the mile we had hiked had awoken the, I don’t know what to call it, reserve power, hardwired habit, woodsy spirit, which makes hiking supremely calming. The mere act of walking in the woods releases the stories of the AT, the memory of power and strength and ability, which my muscles revert to- it’s the corny version of muscle memory. When I’m hiking, my body is happy, simple as that. “I’m so happy!” I told Brigid. It was true. I was happy.
Almost a half mile later, I was wondering when the trail was going to get steep. With not much more than a quarter mile remaining, as far as I could tell, we had most of the elevation to go. The rocky pate of the summit rose above the trees like a balloon held out in front of us. The trees ahead appeared darker, and as the trail rose ever slightly, we could see an abrupt change in pitch. Scrawled in the snow was a message, an arrow pointing ahead to three squiggly lines, stacked atop each other.
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“Didn’t you guys have code and stuff you wrote to each other on the trail?”
“Not really code, nothing more than an arrow. But we didn’t have enough snow.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“It’s probably telling us this is where is gets icy and steep.”
“We’re going to find out.”
And just like that, we were scrambling up a very different trail. The ice stuck like glass leeches to the pitted rock face, pointing their slick foreheads to the heavens. The slope of the mountain had taken on an expeditious grade. The final 0.4 miles of the Holt Trail account for 1,000 feet of elevation gain, but we didn’t know what was coming. The snow seemed to grow out of the ice like a fungus, and hikers before us had settled footholds into the mushy bits. While the trees lasted, the refrozen steps carried us up, as rungs on a ladder.
“I am so glad we’re going up this” was about the least expository statement I uttered. A discussion of footholds over the varying thickness and softness of ice eclipsed the easy conversations during the ambling section of the approach trail. We could pull on the thin conifers growing out of the nooks for extra leverage. Climbing steep terrain is like doing long lunges with acrobat arms: our stride was steady until it wasn’t. The few times I postholed, near the base of a larger tree or in a patch of sunlight, the snow swallowed my entire leg. But that only happened a couple times before I learned better. Then we had a conversation about tree holes and that skier who just died out west. Bring a Buddy was more broadly apt in winter than we had previously considered. I had broken a sweat. Our words were scarce and important. After a couple hundred feet, the trees opened up to the final climb- a sort of forehead. The mountaintop ahead of us was rock patchworked with snow and alpine mosses. We were getting beyond steep- the snow and ice covered the natural rock stairsteps, leaving a smooth silhouette at an angle I would never want to descend. Footholds required handholds for stability.
“I guess we know what those squiggly lines mean now.”
“Yeah, future reference: squiggly lines on top of each other mean slick ice.”
“Must be.”
We learned quickly- avoiding the sunny spots and big trees after my adventures in leg-swallowing snow, watching for exposed rock where the snow and ice couldn’t stick, using the established footholds until, sadly, we spotted deep handprints dotting the edges of thigh-deep postholes. The route was compromised. So we zigzagged across to shade, then back to bare rock. About fifty feet up two figures were scooting down the sunned ice. We had left the trees and they were among the sparse alpine shrubbery. I wondered whether they were having any fun. The climb ahead struck me as needing some ropes and anchors. The warning bell of ‘we might want to turn around now’ rung dully in my hyperactive brain and ceased. My brain in the middle of a climb wants to solve puzzles: safety was a priority, sure, but the challenge was surmountable. We stayed to the side of their line of descent. I thought, gosh they could get some serious momentum going down that way. When the two, who were a man and a woman, likely on a disastrous date, reached their first tree higher than his head, they ceased to scoot, sat down, and tried to smile.
“Oh, okay” I shouted politely, weighing whether to explain that mountain etiquette gives the right of way to hikers going down. They sat precariously in the sliver of shade, holding the sapling, squinting up at us. Looking the dude over I saw cheap softshell pants and a thin windshirt darkened with moisture, traction no better than Get-a-Grip studs on his sneakers, and fancy sunglasses. The lady was looking into the distance but not at any mountains through her fancy tortoise-lensed sunglasses. Maybe she was traumatized from the terrible adventure, but at least she had on a hardshell jacket and thicker pants. Brigid whispered to me as we dug our toes into grainy stairs, approaching them, “they don’t look local” and when I attempted to describe the trail they were descending into, there was little response. Instead, the guy asked “is that Lake Winnipesaukee?” I looked at Brigid.
“Umm, I think that that’s Newfound Lake. Because the two are both southeast from here, right? Newfound is first and farther, past those hills, you can see Winnipesaukee.”
“Uh, yeah okay, and is that ski mountain over there Whaleback?”
“Well, that’s way southwest, and this one is pretty close and more south, it’s probably Ragged Mountain. Yeah I was thinking it was Ragged Mountain before, it’s pretty close by.”
He lowered his arms, thinking, and raised to point again “Oh, so what about that big mountain right there, is that Mt. Jackson?” I followed his point, which found a lonely mountain speckled with snow like powdered sugar, rising high above the other peaks in the range.
“Oh, well, the presidential range is farther away, and it has a tree covered summit.”
“Could it be Mt. Cube?” Probably not, but it was worth a shot.
“Mt. Cube is farther west,” Brigid corrected.
“Oh, you’re right, when I saw it a few months ago it was pretty substantially covered in snow. I bet it’s Moosilauke. And look at that white range way out there, do you think that’s Mt. Washington?” I asked.
“No, it’s too close to be Washington,”
“Of course, there’s nothing on top, silly me,”
“But it actually might be the Franconia Ridge.”
“Beautiful, look at that.”
The couple seemed to be respectively seething or disinterested in our corrective geography lesson. So we wished them safety and caution, and kept making our stairway to Cardigan.
Within another fifty feet, handholds were necessary again. I would grab edges of refrozen ice lifting off the rock, or pockmarked grooves in the softer ice or palm the curving rock. Then we left the blazed trail. It followed a hump of ice smooth as metal, shaded by its precipitous pitch, where without real crampons and an axe, we would be walking on water. So we stepped laterally into the shade, looking for another route. Brigid took ten extra steps while I attempted to scurry up a nodule with an icy base and sunny top. My first slip pulled my right leg down a few feet on glassy ice to remind me to be careful. Steadying for a moment, I lifted a foot to a flatter node, tested some ice for a right hand grip, and pulled up on an edge. I wished I had an axe just then. My left foot was next. Alpine moss covered the node I chose for it, concealing the reliability of my foot placement. With a crunch I scrabbled the gnarl with the teeth of my Microspikes, and called to Brigid-
“I’m afraid of hurting the Fragile Alpine Zone Species!”
“Our elevation isn’t high enough for the protected species, you’re ok!”
But I wasn’t. Surveying this slippery base, I determined that climbing the nodule would be closer to bouldering and therefore unattemptable.
“Uh, Brig, this way isn’t gonna work. How’s yours?”
“I think I got it, come on back this way.”
I paused. From here I had to pivot my right body left, where I had a tentative foothold on my front leg and a right handhold, so that to step forward would cross my legs and turn my hip into the rock. Briefly, I was nervous: the jump of adrenaline in my gut quickened my inhale, the raw exhilaration of presentness soothed my exhale. Then I looked across to where Brigid was inspecting her climb, and maneuvered my right foot to be perpendicular to the mountain, twisted my front body to face the rock, and holding steady with my two hands swung my left leg into a crunchy spot. Sashaying across I reached Brigid’s nodule, where she nimbly climbed, appearing to almost glide up like a spider.
“I just sort of spidered up, using all my limbs! That was awesome!”
“When we get to the top, we have to high-five!”
“Yeah!”
But I wasn’t exactly sure how to get up there. Again the nervous surge reminded me I was not on a soft plane but a hard hill, that I should be careful. My fingers were burning from holding the ice and my palms were red. A vision of a swinging axe connecting to ice offered the same false relief as the sleep-deprived imagining a pillow. Then the puzzle mode kicked back in. The handholds were infrequent and rarely bulbous enough for a secure grip. The ice was not soft. How had she done this?
I breathed for a full minute, just leaning against the rock. There is no rush. Then I decided to trust my strength. I took my left foot six inches above the right and chewed into the ice. I felt around the shaded rock, granite-like but fairly even, and cupped a wide ripple. Expecting to lose grip, I pulled, isolating my steady leg, my left hand on snow, and the muscles straining along my right arm from the cup down my side, and pulled my right leg up another six inches from my left. Amazed at the machinery of the movement, my left hand quickly found another hold across the flatter part of the rock and pulled my torso up with that arm, my right now splayed on the leveling surface of the platform, and my right leg, evening out my hip. When I could lean onto the rock and use the weight of my shoulders and chest to anchor my body and raise my legs, my hands felt like epoxy on the Kinsman Quartz Monzonite. The chance to fall was overtaken. We had found a new route. The summit was less than a hundred feet up. It was still too steep for a high-five.
Using our new spidering skills, we scrambled up the remainder. When we could walk, we crunched up to the fire tower. I wanted the first person we saw to say ‘Wow! Did you just go up the Holt Trail?’ but no one was nearby our route. Our own glory had to suffice. There was enough.
“So, I think it’s safe to say that what we just did was called free climbing. Most people would have wanted ropes and an ice axe and all that for what we just did. That was intense, maybe not very safe.”
“Wow, really? That’s pretty crazy. I was thinking that, when I had to shimmy up to find a new route, whether it was actually safe. I trusted my Microspikes, and I felt strong, wow.”
I wondered about all those cars in the parking lot. Where were all the people? Did we miss them on the Forest trail? Look at this 360 degree view! I expected all the traffic of Camel’s Hump up here. But the wind, it carried the frozen edge of the mountain cover, and it came from all directions. On the first flight of stairs to the tower, a shed blocked the whipping wind enough for a sit. We had sweated through our baselayers, so we put on our spare outerlayers. In exultation we passed around twizzlers and cheese and drank water, grinning with our summit.
A young high school couple appeared, and judging by the Vermont Camo flannel/wool jacket, he at least was a local. He pointed to each peak in the distance and named them. We had been right, about Moosilauke and about Franconia ridge. Nothing else that kept a snowpack like that was close enough. The distant ridge looked like bleached teeth, incisors jutting out of the gumline of tree-covered mountains before it.
Brimming with accomplishment, adrenaline, and the bitter taste of knowing that we were lucky as well as strong, we marched down the mountain. Cathedral forest was beautiful, bright, and well-packed. The trees stood apart for lush spring and summer groundcover, and sunlight spread through spaces left by the fallen leaves of autumn. Serious negotiations receded for easy conversations with the regular recurrence of the yellow blaze. At the Y, approaching the balloon’s string on our hiking map, the unhappy couple appeared. They were not jolly. We smiled and greeted them, reported on the mountains he had requested the identification of and failed to inquire about how they made it down the mountain. Slowly, was the answer we didn’t have to ask for, and probably the only one we could have gotten. In an awkward intersection, Brigid and I took the lead and the unhappy couple agreed on a short break. If this was a date, it was probably the last.
posted by Sara Haxby at
10:40 PM
