Category: Hiking

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Mt. Jackson

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The snow has been disappearing fast around here for the past four weeks.  Four Saturdays ago I was cross-country skiing in the best snow of the season, and then there were a few inches of perfect glide snow that night and Sunday’s skiing was spectacular.  The following weeks were warm and rainy and by last weekend I was considering planting my peas.

I’m glad I didn’t.  It’s been a cold week, with snow twice, though nothing stuck.  But not up north.  Five of us gathered to hike Mt. Jackson today, and when we got to the trail head and got out of the car, a stinging wind whipped with snow squalls greeted us.  We dressed in our extra layers as quickly as we could and got into the woods, where the week’s snowfalls had left plenty of fresh powder.

Winter.  Again.  Still.  Luckily, there were snowshoers ahead of us, so we didn’t have to break trail.  As we hiked higher, there was more powder, the packed trail sinking deeper with walls of snow on either side, and the clumps on the trees thickened.  Hiking up on snowshoes was hard work.

But it was beautiful — sun periodically breaking through the racing clouds above and drenching the white world in yellow light, trees feathered with snow, fresh powder on every surface, and off to our south occasional glimpses through the trees of Crawford Notch, a deep cut in the mountain, a vast empty space below us as we climbed higher.

Getting tired, and thinking that the next corner would bring us to the top, or the next, or the next, we finally rounded a corner and could see the peak a couple hundred feet above us, a rocky knob above spindly winter and wind worn trees.  “I’ve had enough,” Anne said, and Ellen and June were still behind us, so she headed back to find them.  But Cynthia wanted to bag the peak.  She’s working on hiking all the 4,000 footers in NH, and this was one she didn’t have.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said.  It was wild, fiercely windy and wonderful.  We mistakenly took the trail broken by the young men we’d met on their way down.  “We lost the trail and got a bit bushwacky,” they’d said.  As we crawled and scrambled up the steep summit cone, hoisting ourselves up by spruce trunks sticking above the snowpack, we knew we were in bushwacky land ourselves.  But the summit was right there, we climbed the last bit of rock and saw the trail signs, then the summit cairn and Cynthia hustled over to it.  “Okay, I did it.  Thanks for coming with me,” she said.  “Happy to do it,” I said and we headed back.  It was too cold and windy for a photo, too hard to look into the wind to take in the view, and we wanted to be sure to follow our tracks down before they blew away.

We bagged it.

 

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Haiku XXIX and Thoughts on Doubling Back

Waiting at the gate
Another late departure
Change flights to leave home.

So here I am at the airport, hours earlier than needed because my flight through Philadelphia is late enough there’s a good chance I’d miss my connection to Minneapolis.  So I took a seat on another flight through Chicago, which leaves two hours later than my original flight and gets me to Minneapolis over an hour later than planned.  Which is an hour later than my body time, since I’ll be flying through that invisible line where the clocks jump back an hour.

I keep walking back and forth between my new gate and my original gate to see if the delayed Philadelphia plane is here yet.  Maybe I should stay with my planned itinerary, I’ll get to Minneapolis earlier, I won’t have to wait around here so long?  The plane still isn’t there.  I walk back to my new gate — empty, no one at the gate counter yet to give me new boarding passes.  So back to the original gate, nothing new, turn and walk back down the long tiled corridor of the airport to a cafe and check out the menu, decide to go eat at the grill down past the other gate, walk back, eat, come back to the new gate, walk back to the old, back and forth, leave or stay?  No choice really, there isn’t a plane at either gate.

Yesterday morning David and I spent about an hour working on a poem for a holiday card that explores the idea of doubling back, of duality, of two things happening at once, two poets simultaneously writing the same poem.  Then we packed up and left to meet up with Ruth and Rick for a hike of Mt. Hedgehog.  The afternoon turned sunny and the hike was glorious, a trail dusted with snow rising through hemlocks and hardwoods to ledges that ring the mountain, opening up grand views of Passaconaway and Chocorua rising to the south. 

We’d planned the hike for the narrow band of afternoon light, so we’d finish in time for an early dinner.  But we planned it too tight and ended up still on the trail when it got dark.  I pulled out my headlamp and David got out his flashlight, neither shedding much light due to low batteries.  The trail at first was easy enough to follow, but then the wide open strip lit with snow dust crossed a brook and we couldn’t tell if the trail turned with the brook or crossed it.  I started hunting for blazes, walking up and down the different possible directions, finally finding a blaze.  We continued on a wet, sunken trail bed but then had doubts.  Were we following a brook, or on a badly eroded trail?  Again, I went back and found a blaze on a tree and a culvert sticking through the gravel.  We continued on.  I stepped in a deep puddle and water poured into my boot.  I plowed through water and wet ground, then came to a narrow swatch and couldn’t find any footprints.  I turned around and looked for the last blaze, found one and turned again, lost confidence and went back.  Doubling back, going forward, doubling back, going forward, David and Rick and Ruth letting me lead.  I pushed through the blackness of low shrubs at the narrow swatch and swung my head down.  Footprints in the gravel in front of me.  “This is it,” I said and kept going.  Soon I came to a foot bridge and signs.  We got out of the woods, laughing and relieved, all agreeing that was enough dark hiking to make an adventure we didn’t need to repeat. 

Last night we got to our cars and a dinner in front of a roaring fire in a pub.  Tonight I hope I get to Minneapolis.

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Katahdin

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Almost a week has passed and my body is still tired.  We had thought, and read trail descriptions that supported our thinking, that climbing Mt. Katahdin on the Hunt Trail, which is the end of the Appalachian Trail, would be a reasonable hike.  Not so. 

We started up the trail at 8:00 last Sunday morning, leap frogging with crowds of hikers, some thru-hikers finishing the AT, some families, some people who were cockily underdressed for the cold and wind.  We’d spent the night camping at 30 degrees, got up to make coffee in the cold and ate breakfast in the running car, seat heaters humming.

It was a beautiful trail, passing the roar and thrash of Katahdin Falls, then breaking out into sun on a long slope of granite ridge, fringed with blueberries bushes gone red.  We could see a jumbled pile of granite blocks peaking into the sky above us, but it would be hours before we got to the top of it and realized there was still another mile and a half to go to Baxter Peak, the summit of Katahdin.

Still hiking up through the birch and spruce forest, hikers started to pass us going down.  “Did you get to the summit?” I asked them all, even though it was still early in the day.  “No, it’s harsh up there, way too windy above tree line, we turned around,” was the essence of everyone’s answer.  Even given all that feedback, we were not prepared for what we encountered above tree line.

Almost immediately, we were hauling ourselves up and over rock ledges, using the iron bars and hooks hammered into the granite in particularly tough spots, while bracing ourselves against toppling winds.  Blinding sun in his eyes, wind whipping every backpack strap into his face and hanging off a climbing bar, David said, “I think I want to turn around.  This is too much.”  Just then a hiker came back down from in front of us, retrieving the poles he’d left behind thinking a friend was going to bring them up.  “It’s not as bad around the next corner,” he said, “it’s more sheltered.”  So David hoisted himself over the lip of ledge and we kept going. 

After a half mile of scrambling and bouldering, we reached an overlook behind a face of rock blocking the wind, where groups of hikers were sitting in the sun eating and looking out over miles and miles of Maine forest and lakes and mountains.  We stopped too, looking up over and over at the steep pitch of jumbled rock slabs we’d seen from the open ledge miles below.

“Let’s do it,” David finally said, and we hoisted our packs back on, our poles collapsed and stuffed in my pack.  Poles were only in the way crawling on all fours across the open rocks, calculating each hand and foot hold, keeping low out of the wind.  When we got to the top of the pitch, we could see Baxter Peak over a mile in the distance, across the flat table lands of the Katahdin Ridge.  The peak was bathed in white — frost and ice and snow — and dotted with the small figures of AT hikers, finally at the summit, taking in the glory of their accomplishment.

We decided to hike a bit further, already knowing we wouldn’t reach the peak, but not wanting to leave that expanse of open alpine land yet.  We reached the junction of the Abol and Thoreau Springs trail after walking on ice for half a mile.  This was as far as Thoreau got trying to summit Katahdin, and he’d gotten lost in the fog and sprained his ankle falling out of a tree, which he’d climbed to get a view.

There was no fog for us, just the hard clarity of a wind whipped day, carpets of yellow and orange trees below us, wave after wave of green spruce, and the frosted summit of Baxter Peak ahead.

We turned back, already plotting our return.

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Manifesting

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“You’re a manifester,” a colleague said to me one day, meaning I’m someone who moves ideas into action and reality.  She’s also manifester, which is why she seemed to recognize it in me.

Yesterday, my birthday, I manifested an idea of Eric’s.  Seven years ago, the summer I was turning 50, Eric and I did a lot of hiking together.  I was trying to finish all 48 of the mountains over 4,000 feet in New Hampshire, which gains you entrance into the 4,000 Footer Club.  It also makes you a peakbagger.  Eric was happy to peakbag with me as I closed in on the last few mountains on my list, most of them requiring long, arduous hikes.  We grew closer than ever that summer, even after 28 years together, spending days and days on long trails, talking, walking, just being with each other.  

Due to a very rainy summer, I didn’t finish the list before my birthday.  But that October, on a fine day, with blue skies and yellow birches dotting the hillsides of spruce, we did a 17 mile hike on the Zealand, Twinway and Bondcliff trails to Mt. Bond and West Bond, my last peak, then back out the way we’d come.  On the hike, we met two groups of people hiking the entire Bond ridge, end to end, which also includes Bondcliff (I’d already done that peak, hiking in from the Kancamangus Highway to the south).  A 19 mile hike, the Bonds traverse provides unparalleled views of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, crossing the wildest part of the state, on a rocky, open ridge.  But it also presents a challenge in having a car ready to collapse into at the end of the hike.  Spotting a car at the trailhead where you finish, then driving around to the trail where you want to start, is over 50 miles and takes over an hour.

“We need to find some friends who want to do the traverse with us,” Eric said that day.  “We’ll start from different ends, pass each other keys when we meet on the trail as we hike, then drive each others cars to a meeting place and have dinner when we’re done.”  We both loved the idea, and started talking to hiking buddies about it, but never made it happen before Eric got sick and died.  We hadn’t realized we had such a tight deadline.  The summer after Eric died, Anne, on of those hiking buddies, made a pact with me that we would do the Bonds traverse as Eric described, in his memory.

So yesterday we started off from the Zealand trailhead to the north, David and Betsy and Cathy and me.  Anne, Ellen and Cynthia started from the Kancamangus Highway to the south.  This only happened after months of planning, and an already aborted hiking date, due to weather.  Being my birthday, Anne was carrying mini-brownie cupcakes, and I had a candle and matches so we could have a mini-party on the trail.  Marsie, my psychic friend, who shares my birthday, told me to watch for magic, since I was manifesting Eric’s spirit on earth.

Early in the hike, Betsy took a short side trail to go to the true peak of Zealand Mountain.  Cathy and David and I waited on the main trail.  Two men, came up the trail from the direction we were heading.  They didn’t really look like hikers — they had no pack, were carrying one bottle of water, and didn’t look particularly fit.

“Do you know Eric?” one of them asked me. 

Taken aback, I simply answered, “There’s no one named Eric with us.” 

“Well there’s an Eric that way on the trail,” the man said, pointing back.  “He told us to look for a group of people hiking together and let them know he’s not going to make it, he’s headed back to the Galehead hut.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“We stayed at the Galehead hut last night.”  At this point, it was about 9:00 a.m., and the Galehead hut was a three-hour hike away.

“Where are your packs?”

“We left them back on the trail,” the other man said.  “We’re just here to grab the Zealand peak, then we’re heading back to Galehead and Garfield.”  Then they disappeared up the side trail to Zealand.

We never saw their packs as we continued on the trail, and we never saw them again.  But we all knew someone named Eric.

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The Short View

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Yesterday I paid attention to the short view.  There were single toadstools along the side of the trail, red, yellow, umber, small pops of fungus from the green moss.  A toad jumped into the leaf debris on the side of the trail and stopped, under a pine bough, his mottled tan hide hiding him.  There was an occassional flower, creeping alpine plants hugging the lichen coated granite blocks on the summit.  The ridge walk from Mt. Hight to the Carter Dome Trail was cut into the moss and pine needled ground as if chiseled out with square spades.

But I drank in the long view too, especially of the Royce-Bald Range to the east of the Carter-Moriah Ridge.  Smaller mountains in a relatively wild area, they are seldom seen from White Mountain peaks, hiding behind the higher Carters.  Looking off to the east and south, I could see the Baldface Circle, the mountains of Jackson, the fields near the Eagle Mountain House where we spent the night.

Two days in a row of hiking, almost 19 miles, over 6,000 feet of elevation work, my legs are tired this morning, but my feet have stopped screaming.  I need new boots.  I need to plant beets and swiss chard today, getting the fall crop in.  Get the seeds in, reap the vegetables as the days grow shorter and cooler.  The short view and the long view, when we see what is right in front of us, what arises in the distance is just another view.

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Ridge Walk

Blue White Mountains

The man and I walked Crawford Path along the Presidential Ridge in the White Mountains yesterday.  It was a glorious day — clear, dry, windy, with enough sunshine to fill a week. 

“The man?”  My daughter used to refer to her then boyfriend, then fiance, now husband as “the boy” in her blog Are You Really Interested.  The man’s son’s girlfriend is blogging from her stint on an organic B&B farm in France right now (What We Feel Most) and calls her guy “the boy.”  I asked my daughter what that’s about.  “I think it’s a 20s-something thing.”  I’m in my 50s, the man is in his 60s, so “boy” seems ridiculous.  So does “the man.”  He’s David. 

David and I are up in the mountains for two days hiking.  We’d planned to summit Monroe, then Eisenhower, giving us a chance to walk across the open Presidential Ridge, a rocky, scrambly, view-infused walk.  We changed plans at the last minute and went up Edmand’s Path, thinking we’d only get to the top of Eisenhower, maybe walk a bit towards Monroe if we had the time and energy.

But when we got to the ridge, we decided just to walk Crawford Path.  We had half a thought of making it to the summit of Monroe, but we never got there.  We trekked north, buffeted by the crazy winds sweeping up the gulfs to the west, over the ridge, winds which have made the Presidentials notorious for hiking deaths in every month of the year.  There were grey-green lichen washed rocks, scrub spruce, alpine plants, an ant, a caterpillar, a butterfly, Mount Monroe a 5,000 foot triangle of granite blocks in our faces, the Mt. Washington observatory and buildings rising over 6,000 feet behind. 

When we turned south to hike back to Edmand’s Path, all the White Mountains to the south and east and west were layered in mountain blue before us.  Wave after wave of peaks cut the sky, hard blue and whipped clear.  I could easily pick out the mountains, having hiked many of them in my completed quest to join the 4,000 footer club.  A jut of rock to the immediate south was Chocorua, which we’d just hiked on Sunday.

Walking out on Edmand’s Path we walked into forever.  Feet screaming, legs aching and pulling back against the gravity that feels like it will roll you down the ridge, every dip and turn in the trail just showed more trail.  Sunlight through the spruce, then pine, than hardwoods highlighted the rocks and roots ready to trip us.  Step after step got us closer, but we could only think about how far it seemed.   “This trail sure is taking its sweet time coming to an end,” David said.  And then it did.  We crossed the bridges I remembered from the beginning of the hike and then I saw the flash of metal, cars, through the trees.  Forever was over.