a storm for every season

Thunder rumbled in the distance, echoing the buzz in my head from lack of sleep—a groggy brain trying to wrap itself around a slew of details, as well as the anticipation of what was to come on this, the longest day of the year. There is an alien feel to being awake at 3:30 a.m. It’s too late to still be awake, and today, way too early to get up. The eerie buzzing of fluorescent lights was the only brightness outside Hiker’s Paradise hotel in Gorham, N.H., in the deepest dead of night.

We were getting a head start on the 4:55 a.m. sunrise in the hopes that our hike would be finished by the time the sun set more than 15 hours later, at 8:39 p.m. At the Appalachia Trailhead, on the side of Route 2 in Randolph, utter darkness wrapped around us like a wet blanket. Once the car lights were turned off, the oppressive feel of thick clouds blocked any chance of light from the night sky. As we started up the Valley Way Trail, our headlamps illuminating small islands of earth several steps ahead, faint flashes of lightning occasionally lit the sky. A storm seemed to dance above our heads, more than 4,000 vertical feet up and only three miles to the south, among the mountain peaks.

My friend Joe Layton had driven up the previous day to join me from New Jersey for this summer adventure. We had gone to college together, and our joint discovery of Mt. Washington had happened some 15 years earlier during the annual Rutgers Ski Team pilgrimages to hike and ski Tuckerman Ravine as a springtime farewell to each season. Our goal for the day was to get to the southern end of the Presidential Range in Crawford Notch, some 20 miles away and on the opposite side of nearly a dozen mountain peaks. By the time the sky began to brighten, sweat was streaming off our bodies and mixing with the rain that poured down harder and harder. A full-blown summer storm had emerged on top of us, with bright flashes of lightning followed by the sharp staccato of thunder.

Safe inside a thick jumble of trees, we ascended through a saran wrap oven, 100 percent humidity sticking to us like glue. My stomach turned as I thought about the danger above. We were rapidly approaching the tree line, just below the top of a ridge that was being pummeled by lightning. We had planned to spend almost the entire day atop an utterly exposed ridgeline that hikers refer to as “home of the world’s worst weather.” So, it was with great relief that we watched the storm roll off to the east of the range, leaving us in an eerie purple glow as we reached Madison Hut, in the shadow of Mounts Adams and Madison, for the second time in four months.

crystal hills

The White Mountains cast their long shadow over the northeast before there was even a concept of New England. Known by the native Abenaki people as Agiococook (Home of the Great Spirit), Mt. Washington was visible to the first European explorers to approach the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine in sailing ships in the early 1600s. Spanning some 80 miles in a straight line from the Seacoast, the Presidential Mountains, which remain snowcapped for much of the year, have been an alluring beacon in the wilderness for centuries. Dubbed “The Cristall Hill” by early explorer Christopher Levett, Mt. Washington was renamed in 1792 for the victorious general and then sitting president.

Towering above the surrounding region, Mt. Washington stands 6,288 feet above sea level, making it the highest peak in the northeastern United States—just 400 feet shy of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest peak east of the Rocky Mountains. Geologically, the Presidentials are the remnants of what was once the highest mountain range on earth, the Acadian Mountains, which formed 400 million years ago when the modern day African continental plate crashed into the North American plate, forming a Himalayan-sized range of peaks. A pool of molten magma collected at the base of the mountains, cooling into granite and forming the dense mass that makes up the modern day peaks of the Presidentials. One hundred million years of constant wind and water erosion, combined with the gradual shift of Africa away from North America, eventually brought those granite mounds to the surface, raising New Hampshire’s roofline roughly a mile to its current position. Four subsequent ice ages over the past 400,000 years covered all of New England under a mile of ice, and the scouring action of the shifting ice left the mountaintops in their current condition after the last ice age retreated 15,000 years ago.

mountaineering

The first documented ascent of Mt. Washington occurred 365 years ago this month. Darby Field, an English immigrant who found his way to the newly founded Puritan colony in Exeter, headed north by canoe on the Saco River. From limited accounts muddled in the distant history of this wilderness, he walked rather uneventfully to Mt. Washington’s peak with two native guides. He is, in all probability, the first man to summit Mt. Washington. The Abenaki considered the peaks home of the great spirits and did not dare to climb them. Darby Field’s ascent marked the beginning of a long timeline of European domination of the land.

When Field arrived at the foot of the mountains in September 1642, he found a small Abenaki village. The native population had changed dramatically in the generation since the English arrived. In the late 1500s, there were purportedly 150,000 indigenous people in New England. From 1616 to 1618, the population was decimated, possibly from an imported plague that killed 90 percent of the native inhabitants.

Centuries later, I was standing high in those same mountains at dawn on the summer solstice. A cool, dry breeze blew across the top of the ridge in the storm’s wake. Joe and I went inside the Appalachian Mountain Club Madison Hut to strip off our soaked clothing and change into drier gear.

Four months earlier, I sat huddled against the entrance to the same building with a different group of cohorts during the coldest week of the year. Ice and rime covered the building and a penetrating wind pierced our gear and whipped snow through the air. Even with the heat generated by the furnace of my core during the hard slog up the mountain, with more than 50 pounds of gear on my back, it was exceedingly difficult to force myself to strip off my rapidly-freezing base layer and cover my bare chest with dry clothes. My hands lost mobility and became useless blocks of ice.

As we sat huddled against the cold in that desolate landscape, we discussed our options, none of which sounded promising. Steve Jacques, whom I had known for about a year, was a coworker in Portsmouth. The winter trip was his idea. He planned the traverse with his friends Todd Ringleberg and Tim Lamphere, and I was invited to join them. This was not their first winter hike. They had climbed Mt. Katahdin together the previous winter.

The four of us sat waiting, our trip screeching to a halt. Steve was having problems. For some reason, he was getting shooting pains up his arm to his shoulder, and felt a constant pain in his wrist during the hike up to Madison Hut. Before we headed out on the trip, we had discussed how we were going to handle a situation like this, and we had decided that we would stick together as a team. If Steve couldn’t or wouldn’t go on, we would all turn back.

A successful winter Presidential traverse is logistically difficult to execute. There are a number of variables to deal with. The snow pack, depending on how well it is compacted, can ease your path or slow your progress. You need crampons or snowshoes, or, most likely, both. The only reliable weather prediction is that conditions will change, and they are likely to change drastically during the two or three days it takes to get across the range of eight peaks named for U.S. presidents, from the first president (Washington) to the 34th (Eisenhower). In addition to all the external factors, you must also deal with group dynamics and varying abilities within your team. It’s not just a matter of training and avoiding injury during the hike. If someone doesn’t eat properly, drink enough or stay warm, it can put the entire group into a sticky situation with quickly narrowing options.

We had discussed escape plans for various sections of the route. One car was parked at the start, on the north end near Gorham, and another at the top of Crawford Notch, on the south end. Anywhere along the hike, from Madison to Adams to Jefferson, we could turn around and head back to the start. Beyond Jefferson, we would try to continue to the finish point. But, depending on where and when we had to abandon ship, we might have been forced to descend off the ridge to the east, through the Great Gulf Wilderness, on a long slog to Route 16—20 miles from either car.

Sitting in the shadow of Madison and Adams at 8 a.m. on the first day of our winter attempt, Steve decided that it would be too risky to ignore his arm pain and continue the hike. He wanted us to go on, but our number one rule was that safety came first, and if anyone needed to turn around, we all would. Tim and I decided that if the trip was over, we should at least run up to the peak of Adams. We left our packs with Todd and Steve, who began boiling water for powdered hot apple cider.

When I had started researching the winter trip, I found a number of articles about the Presidential traverse. The biggest thing they all had in common was that the trips invariably fell apart in the first 24 hours. Someone would get hurt or not have the proper clothing to stay warm. The group would meet whiteout conditions or there would be five feet of fresh snow to plow through. Everyone’s stoves would freeze and it would be impossible to cook food. In the end, though, we knew we could try it again some other time.

The view from the top of Adams on that crystalline morning was spectacular. Across the valley to the east was Wildcat Ski Area, its trails cutting through the wooded flanks of the Carter Moriah Range. Beyond Wildcat and Carter Dome were peak after peak rolling off into Maine, and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean, some 80 miles to the southeast. To the south stood snowcapped Mt. Jefferson and the ridge that formed Mt. Clay and led up to Washington’s white cone, above the green pines of the Great Gulf. Washington’s peak looked so close, its cap of ice and old snow sparkling in the sunlight, framed by the deep blue sky of a cold, crisp winter morning.

By the time we returned to the rest of the group, Steve had decided to continue the trip. It was 11 a.m., and we still had six hours of daylight—plenty of time to get to Edmands or Sphinx Col, our two top choices for a campsite that night.
over the peaks

The first recorded summit of Mt. Washington from the northern side occurred in the 1850s. Thomas Starr King wrote about the three-day trip in his pioneering 1860 book of American nature writing, “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry.” There was no trail, and the group of four followed a stream into a ravine and fought their way up through a gorge to the ridge, traversing Adams, Jefferson and Clay on the way to Washington. By that time, the southern route up to Washington had been well established, even over-hiked.

Abel Crawford and his son Ethan moved to what would become Crawford Notch, at the southern foot of the Presidentials, in the early 1800s. The notch was already becoming the main thoroughfare between the upper valley of the Connecticut River and civilization to the south along the northern New England Seacoast. New Hampshire built a turnpike through Crawford Notch in 1803, and a constant stream of travelers began to grow. In 1819, the Crawfords cut a trail and created the Crawford Path, which became the first official hiking trail in the United States. They spent most of the rest of their lives guiding travelers and tourists up the mountains. After the Civil War, with the Industrial Revolution in full steam, a trend of urbanization swept across the nation. Cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia became increasingly hot, crowded and stinky. Americans were also becoming more affluent, and more people were leaving the cities during the heat of summer for places like Cape May, New Jersey, and Bar Harbor, Maine. Numerous train lines had been constructed north to the White Mountains, and an increasing stream of tourists were showing up at the base of the Presidentials to enjoy the quiet and grand beauty of the mountains.

In 1921, a century after the Crawfords cut their seminal trail, Brenton MacKay, a former U.S. Forest Service examiner and Harvard graduate from Massachusetts, wrote an article that proposed the creation of the Appalachian Trail. Sixteen years later, a trail stretching from Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina to Mt. Washington became a reality. The Crawford Path was part of the original trail to the peak of Washington, and the Gulfside Trail, which extends north to Mount Madison, became part of the trail as it expanded north into Maine.

On the morning of our winter voyage, back on track and hiking along the same route as Thomas Starr King (around the peak of Adams and along the Gulfside Trail into Edmands Col on the shoulder of Jefferson), we were quickly trudging south along the ridge. It had been a lean snow year, and, with crampons and ski poles, we crunched easily along the glazed ice and dry Styrofoam-like surface. We crossed the Monticello Lawn on the east side of Jefferson and turned off the trail and down into Sphinx Col, with the sun still high in the winter sky. Steve, with his change of heart, wanted to go farther, but we all knew this would be the last sheltered spot until we crossed Clay and Washington, and we were in for some bad weather overnight.

home of the world’s worst weather

In the days leading up to our trip, the long-range forecast had been calling for a real doozy of a storm. As the days went by, meteorologists in Boston got noticeably more excited. A classic Nor’easter was brewing, with a huge low front lumbering up the coast and a mass of arctic air sitting squarely over New England. By the time we began our hike, New York City was under a heavy blanket of snow and Boston was dead in the sites of the storm.

The last report we heard before leaving put the storm largely to the south and east of us, but you can never be sure how things will turn out on a mountain range that boasts itself to be the “home of the world’s worst weather.” The moniker stems from April 12, 1934, when the Mt. Washington observatory recorded the highest directly measured land wind speed on earth, 231 miles per hour. We were walking into a similar system. Even if it failed to hit us with quantities of snow, the storm would definitely pack a wallop of wind.

In a two-man tent with Steve, I did not know when I drifted off to sleep soon after dark that I was in for a long night. The warmest sleeping bag I owned was rated to -5 degrees and had served me well over the years. I knew it would be cold, so I had put on every stitch of clothing I packed, including jacket and bibs, before going to bed. I had boiled water to fill a Nalgene bottle, which I stuffed between my feet inside my bag, and I pleasantly drifted off to sleep. As night fell, the temperature dropped to -15 degrees, slowly sucking the heat from my body.

I awoke at 2 a.m., my water bottle long since cooled. The moist condensation on the tent walls was frozen solid. It crunched as I moved around inside my bag, trying to get warm and comfortable. The dark night passed by in prolonged seconds as I spent the next four hours shivering uncontrollably, waiting for the sky to lighten and hoping that the morning sun would bring me back to life.

Dawn brought the stirrings of a telltale northeasterly wind that would become our constant companion for the rest of the trip. A slow, methodical breakdown of camp in the cold morning air got us on the trail at 9 a.m. It was the weekend before Presidents’ Day, which probably would have been a more appropriate time to traverse the Presidentials. But it was also the morning of a president’s birthday—Abraham Lincoln—who is immortalized by a peak 25 miles to the west, above Franconia Notch.

A mere 50 feet into our hike, we realized the true value of our campsite. Strong winds began whipping us from behind as soon as we got above the protective landscape that had served as our shelter for the night. Our general direction for the day would be south by southwest, which meant that the wind direction would be fortuitously blowing at our backs for most of the day—a rare circumstance for Mt. Washington. We strapped on crampons and traded ski poles for mountaineering axes, which provide better traction on the sheer ice that covered most of Washington’s shoulders.

We opted to go around the west side of Clay and Washington and head directly to Lake of the Clouds, setting off at an easy trudge with the wind at our backs. We hunched down on hands and knees to cross under the cog railroad tracks that head straight up Washington’s west face from Marshfield Station. The wind blew with a ravaging consistency on the backs of our left shoulders, reaching 80 mph and somehow finding a way to penetrate to my face, blistering my cheek with frostbite just below my goggles.

summiting

A Presidential traverse doesn’t necessarily require any summiting (aside from Mt. Franklin, which is directly on the route). But my personal goal was to summit all eight peaks between my winter and summer trips, so every peak that we skipped on this trip meant one more that I’d have to climb next time.

On the summer trip, Joe Layton and I didn’t even pause at Sphinx Col. We hiked straight over the top of Jefferson, then up the face of Clay and onto the north shoulder of Washington. This entire stretch is above tree line, and the hike up Mt. Clay (a narrow, winding dirt and granite path up and over the boulder-strewn ridge) was surreal in the thick, soupy fog that engulfed the peaks.

I had never been over Mt. Clay before. Camping and skiing in Tuckerman Ravine once or twice every year, there had never been much reason to go to the summit of Washington. It seemed fitting to finally make it to the peak on this second Presidential traverse, although the midday gloom of fog took a little bit away from the experience. Everything else would be downhill, an easy jog amid the spectacular beauty of the Southern Presidential Ridge. Dark peaks roll off to the horizon, a squiggly brown line descending the narrow ridgeline of Franklin, Eisenhower and Pierce, as far as the eye can see.

The fog at the summit of Mt. Washington was actually produced by low clouds moving over the peak, and the skies cleared for us as soon as we descended from the summit cone to the southwest, down the Crawford Path to Lake of the Clouds. The AMC hut at the lake is the highest and most popular of the eight huts in the White Mountains. At 5,050 feet, it is well above tree line and has bunks to accommodate 90 hikers from June 1 to Sept. 15, in the relative luxury of full-service breakfast and dinner at $89 to $98 a night.

An idyllic setting in calm weather, well removed from any sign of civilization, the situation couldn’t have contrasted more sharply with the conditions I had experienced at the same location in February. By the time Steve, Todd, Tim and I had reached the boarded ghost of a hut, the real force of the Nor’easter had arrived.

Thick clouds blocked out the sun. Snowflakes became projectiles in the hurricane-force winds. Footing on the ice, rime and boulders became tenuous in the wind and limited visibility.

We decided to stay off Mt. Monroe and follow the Crawford Path on the peak’s eastern shoulder. For the first time, we were directly exposed to the full force of the gale. The northeasterly wind, racing up and over Tuckerman Ravine, traveled over Boot Spur and conspired to blow us off the high mountains. Powerful gusts lifted us off the ground with every step as we leaned heavily into the wind. The clouds had come down to meet us, and visibility dropped precipitously. The whole world narrowed into a blanket of white snow, a bare canvas through which to navigate. Rock cairns marking the trail disappeared in the haze. Todd’s footprints, one step in front of mine, disappeared completely from view as his bright plastic boots stepped ahead. We were walking over deep, wind-loaded snow, the wind driving us downhill toward Desolation Pond on an increasingly steep slope. We realized we had been blown off the trail, and it was only through a concerted effort to regroup, change direction and hike uphill against the wind that we got back on the right path. Another 50 steps or so and we were out of the wind’s brunt, sheltered by the peak we had circumnavigated.

coming home

In April 1863, the Alpine Club of Williamstown, Mass., became the first hiking club in the United States. Although it only existed for two years, it was a landmark institution that laid the groundwork for the AMC 13 years later and helped create a shift in accessibility to pristine mountain places. In August 1863, five women and three men from the club completed a 12-day “walking tour” of the White Mountains. Starting in Crawford Notch, they hiked to the top of Mt. Washington and then continued north over roughly the same route Thomas Starr King had taken a decade earlier, except in reverse. They covered Clay, Jefferson and finally Madison before returning to the valley at Dolly Copp’s inn, north of Pinkham Notch, thus completing the first recorded traverse of the Presidentials.

Hiking across the Presidential Range is never easy, but it is eternally rewarding. Each new season offers distinct beauty and amazement. Summer brings a brief respite from the clutches of winter that envelop the aptly named White Mountains for most of the year. However, danger from impending weather conditions is always just around the corner, even on the most benign day of the year.

Even with the danger, the experience of being in the mountains is one that cannot be replicated in the heart of society. Still, emerging back into civilization at the parking lot on Mt. Clinton Road in Crawford Notch, I was relieved to find a vehicle waiting for me—a sun-baked car following my summer hike, a snow-encrusted truck after my winter trek. From the utter desolation of a barren, snow-swept landscape to the warmth and freedom of t-shirts and shorts, I was glad to have experienced it all. And I was glad to finally rest my weary bones after each exhausting Presidential traverse.