Jan 2013: The Great White Hike

The waterbottle beside my bunkbed was frozen solid. The temperature in our unheated cabin — nestled between Wildcat Mountain and Carter Dome, two of the top 20 tallest peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire — was in the teens while outside it hovered around 0-degrees Celsius, and lower still with the wind chill. But I wanted to be the cold. For about six years I’d been trying to get up to Mount Washington in the wintertime with my former editor and longtime buddy Steve Fagin.

Finally, after a three-hour train ride east from NYC to CT and a four-hour drive north to NH, we had set out from Pinkham Notch for a four-mile trek up Carter Notch on a Sunday afternoon. The snow was packed down hard along Nineteen Mile Brook Trail, winding beside a mountain river. Occasionally a pole or boot would sink three feet into snow, but Steve said global warming has made the conditions mild compared to past years of mega-snow and totally frozen rivers. The only sound was the crunching under our boots.

Steve, a Page 1 editor and op-ed writer for The Day newspaper in Connecticut, also blogged about our trip and is pictured above balancing over one of the trail’s narrow bridges. (Click here for Part II of Steve’s story for The Day.) The open water would have been absolutely frigid to fall into.

After traversing a steep ascent and then a sharp dip to a pond in the shadow of Wildcat Mountain, we came to the Carter Notch Hut along the Appalachian Trail. A caretaker named Chad welcomed us inside his sparsely furnished abode, where a wood stove by rule only burns from 4pm-9pm. He offered us bunks in a nearby cabin lacking heat, much less electricity or lighting.

The below photos show me in front of the ice pond below Wildcat, and then Steve and Phil walking gingerly over it the final several hundred feet to the hut.

Unfortunately, the Carter Notch hut had already been ransacked by a troop of Boy Scouts also taking advantage of the long MLK weekend. The kids played cards and downed cup after up of over-sweetened fake hot chocolate while their Scout Leaders cooked a huge sirloin for dinner, followed the next morning by bacon and eggs. So gross. Meat for dinner, meat for breakfast, and all shoveled into the airy mouths of a bunch of ungrateful Scouts seemingly without any awareness of the impossibility of killing a cow or a pig in such frigid conditions. Side note: Why do Boy Scouts always seem to be the least mature kids, lacking social cues or social graces? Are they Boy Scouts because they lack the sense to function outside the club?

As Steve wrote in his blog:

I have nothing against Scouting but wish they’d travel in smaller packs and earned badges for something useful, such as silent contemplation. One youngster in particular maintained an endless soliloquy covering his entire childhood and adolescence, oblivious to all those around him, including one hapless leader who slumped over and buried his head in his hands.

Would it have killed him to tell the kid to try holding his breath for 30 seconds? But I quibble.

Meanwhile, we ate instant bean soup. In the below left photo, Steve and Phil and I are seated inside the caretaker’s hut, and then outside our cabin below Wildcat Mountain.

I woke Monday morning after perhaps my best sleep in months, which was odd considering the freezing temperature, but perhaps perfectly logical since we’d hit the sack at 9:30pm when the caretaker closed his hut and there was no other way to stay warm than to bury ourselves fully clothed in our heavily insulated sleeping bags. I slept 11 hours, after months of 5-hour sleeps amid anxious nights and long workdays and early mornings. It’s an argument in itself for living like a hermit, or a Luddite, or perhaps just according to the natural clock. Without electricity or mind-numbing late-night distractions such as TV or movies or Internet, our minds settle down and our bodies rest up.

After a bowl of instant oatmeal and a bite of my mother’s to-die-for fruit cake (which is more like a hearty granola bread than your traditional notion of over-sweetened fruit cake), we headed up Wildcat Mountain (elevation 4,400 feet) for the following photos:

It took about 90 minutes to summit Wildcat, but only 30 minutes to slide our way back down the steep trail. It was practically skiing on boots. Steve simply sat and slid for large sections, as I bit my lip worrying that he’d slide right off the side of the mountain.

Back at the hut we ate a quick lunch on PB&J sandwiches — in the cold, as the wood stove would not be stoked until 4pm — and headed back out to summit Carter Dome, the ninth highest peak in the White Mountains, at 4,830 feet.

The initial ascent was brutally steep. Steve grunted the entire way up, to the point that I wondered several times if he’d stumbled off the side of the cliff (although I can only hope that I might grunt up the Whites that tenaciously at the age of 63).

The summit wasn’t much of a view, and Steve wasn’t interested in continuing on, so Phil and I forged ahead and broke trail to Height Mountain (elevation 4,685 feet), which offered awesome views across Pinkham Notch to the Presidential Range, with Washington standing tall between Monroe (far left) and Jefferson, with Adams to the right.

Phil and I trekked another four miles, completing our loop back to the Carter Notch Hut just as dusk settled over the valley at 5pm and the moon brightened over a frigid evening. It was perfectly lonely. The hut was empty aside from us. We changed into dry shirts and huddled around the wood stove. Chad stoked the logs. No boyish Scouts to distract our meandering thoughts and enjoyable tangents. We ate instant couscous and bean soup, with a dessert of my mother’s awesome 17-fruit compote cookies, which even Steve (who has disavowed all forms of sweets, from chocolate to ice cream to blueberry pies) admitted tasted like a fig newton on steroids.

Tuesday morning we woke around 8am, quickly packed, unthawed our fingers around mugs of instant coffee, devoured bowls of instant oatmeal, and trekked into the sub-zero temperatures and 30-50-mph winds for the four-mile trek back to Pinkham Notch, the four-hour drive back to CT, and then my three-hour train ride back to NYC. My mind was already planning a next trip back to the White Mountains.

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