Back from Houston

I'm back! And ready to start another season of caretaking, this year at Carter Notch Hut between Carter Dome and Wildcat Mountain.

I've decided to start a new blog, with a new name. An apropos quote from Moby Dick now subtitles The Vigorous North, where you may read of the caretaking exploits of both me and my lovely girlfriend this winter. She'll be at Zealand Falls Hut and will also contribute to the new blog, so hardcore Zealand enthusiasts will find entertainment there as well.

It is so good to be back. See you in the mountains, and enjoy!

Season's end

Four inches of rain fell in the Whites this weekend. Washing away most of the snow, it flooded most small streams and made the Zealand Trail impassable. It's difficult to believe that just a few days before, I'd skied down the gullies on Whitewall Mountain's ledges and along the frozen course of the North Fork; on Sunday, these places were undoubtedly raging torrents of water.

I was supposed to stay until Sunday to train the new spring caretakers, but all of the guests for Saturday night had cancelled, and I judged it better to leave on Saturday afternoon instead, when the precipitation was still falling as sleet. One last ski out before the snow washes out and the caretaker washes up.

Thanks for the good times this winter, Zealand. Perhaps I'll be back some day.

Equinox

Around 7:30 on Sunday morning, give or take a few minutes, the Earth’s lines of latitude became exactly parallel to the line described by the center of the Earth and the center of the sun, the light of which shone directly into the depths of certain deep wells near the equator, and spring (supposedly) began.

The last few days in the north country have blessed us with abundant sunshine, but it's still been cold in the mountains: it was generally in the 20s at Carter Hut except during the early afternoon, when the sun might finally warm the place to 35 or so. Meanwhile, in the valleys, there's been t-shirt weather.

I went lift-serviced skiing yesterday with Neil, a former Carter caretaker and currently an employee at the Mt. Washington Observatory. He told me that the abundant solar energy we've been getting these days can warm up the valleys, where the air is relatively still, in the course of a few daytime hours. But just as it takes longer to boil a pot of water than a mug of tea, the sun warms the protected air masses of the valleys much more quickly than it takes to warm the entire atmosphere after a long, cold winter. In the valleys, the sun can melt last night’s ice in a couple of morning hours, but in the mountains, we have more snow to reflect the heat of the sun and more wind to carry it away, and hence more exposure to the still-frigid bulk of the atmosphere. We'll have a couple more weeks of winter yet- time enough to ski Tuck's once or twice, I reckon.

Also, an off-topic bit of miscellaney: while I was out in the backcountry, the Maine legislature passed LD 85, which establishes Moxie as the official beverage of the State of Maine. A fine law if I ever saw one.

Carter Notch

From Wednesday to Sunday this week I switched hut shifts with Tom of Carter Notch: he filled in at Zealand until Friday and hutchecked this weekend, while I spent four lovely days with my old flame, Carter Notch Hut.

Carter was my first home as a caretaker, almost one year ago in the spring of 2004. Carter has a unique atmosphere to it- the hut is nicknamed "Cozy Carter" and with its location at the bottom of a huge glacial cirque, with impressive crags looming over it to the east and to the west, it does have a cozier feeling than Zealand, from the front porch of which you can see for miles. Each place is beautiful in its own manner, but it was good to be back at Carter for a few days.

It was also good to sample some of the skiing that Carter Notch hosts. On Thursday I skied down the Wildcat River Trail southward towards Jackson, and made a few laps in a beautiful birch glade about a mile down from the hut. On Saturday, I skied the Ramparts, an open field of boulders that have rolled down from the glacially-gouged cliffs on the western face of Carter Dome.

When I was working at Carter last spring, there was much less snow, and the Ramparts were a treacherous maze of rocks, krummholz, and undermined corn snow. I'd read in the crew logs how some former caretakers (if you care to let their skiing prowess awe you, and you should, they were Mark Dindorff and Adrianne Gass) had skiied down among these boulders, and I could hardly believe it then. But this weekend, with the snow from a fairly impressive winter burying most of the stubby trees in the bowl, I decided to give it a shot.

When I say I skied down the Ramparts, don't get the impression that I linked tight telemark turns to weave a graceful path among the many obstacles there. I may have linked seven or eight turns the whole way down, and four of these were in a relatively clear meadow near the top of my descent. Mostly, it was a program of long side-hill traverses puctuated with quick jump turns. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and I was able to venture into a part of Carter Notch that is impassable for ten months out of the year. And now, perhaps I will astound future caretakers of Carter Hut when they read my own account in the crew log.

Sunday evening was to be our final caretakers' meeting in North Conway, and I skied all the way from Carter Notch to Pinkham by way of the 19 Mile Brook Trail, the Aqueduct Trail (part of the Great Glen trails network), the Auto Road, and Connie's Way ski trail, a tour of seven miles or so. And what a day it was, with sunshine and temps around 40. I returned to Pinkham tired, sun-kissed, and in the finest of moods.

It was the first day of spring, and I suppose that I was happy to see it. But feet of snow are still on the ground, tree buds are still merely buds, and there are still a few weeks of employment left for this caretaker, and for this weblog.

Pretty fox

Stumpy on the Zealand Trail (just north of the z-bridge):

The Northport E-Team

I just received this comment from Ms. Suzy Travis, one of the instructors of the Northport (NY) "environmental team":

"I just finished reading your entry of Monday, February 21, and thought that my students might be fascinated by stories of school groups that may have recently spent time up at Zealand. You could mention things such as hunting for beaver lodges!"

I agree with Travis, which is what her students called her. In fact, I think that all the audience of this weblog might be entertained and inspired by the exploits of the Northport High School seniors that arrived at Zealand two weeks ago.

They were sixteen souls in all, fourteen students and two teachers, and they arrived with substantial moans and groans on a beautiful, warm afternoon, the day after Valentine's Day. I was out skiing down the western side of the notch and back up the Ethan Pond trail as they arrived, and their celebratory whoops echoed through the valley.

As I climbed back the final pitch to the hut, I passed and introduced myself to Travis and the two students who were together bringing up the rear. One of them, the smallest guy of the group, straggled due to a disproportionate pack weight on his back, the result of being too often late for class (I think it was an extra ounce carried for every minute late, and this guy had many, many ounces).

Some of them, a very audible minority, complained a lot that first night. As I sat at the desk or read upstairs in the crew room, I wrote down some of their remarks for posterity. One young woman suffered from a too-tight waist belt on her pack: "I think I need a hip transplant," she announced. And later, by way of explanation, "Well, my hips stick out like there's no tomorrow." The next morning, after a night of rest, there were fewer complaints, but I did hear one of them remark, "My back is brutal." The students elocuted these and many other colorful phrases in a Long Island accent with which I was much enamored.

One of the instructors informed me that two of the women complaining the loudest, the pair who had been exasperating me with their seeming enthusiasm for dainty-girl stereotypes, had actually arrived at the hut long before anyone else, and were in fact the strongest hikers of the group. Thus was I reminded of the once-familiar means by which high school students boast with bitterness, drawing attention to their feats in such a way that won't alienate their peers. At least, that's what I hope they were doing, because frankly, they deserved to boast a little.

They cooked enormous meals, which I helped to eat, though not enough to keep them from packing ridiculous quantities down from the hut in garbage bags. It was warm enough on the second day that they could comfortably remain in the hut without freezing, and that's what most of them did. They wrote in their journals and in the guest log, gossiped, smoked cigarettes on the porch (if only cigarette ads would feature actual teenage smokers, replete with all their insecurities, the death-sticks would lose all of their glamour). As Travis recalls in her comment, I took a group of them down to Zealand Pond to show them the abandoned beaver lodge there. Later that evening, after a dinner of chicken cordon bleu, I taught them how to play "Mafia," a big hit, pardon the pun, which we played twice. The Long Island accent, which I've mentioned, made the Zealand dining room feel like Satriale's butcher shop from The Sopranos. The copious amounts of meat that we were eating might have also contributed to that feeling.

The same guy who carried the most weight and brought up the rear on the hike in gave massages to all of the women of the group in the course of their two-night stay. By all reports, he was an excellent masseur, although the young women did not repay him with the attention such a Casanova deserves, or at least hopes for. In this respect, he reminded me of how I was as a high-school senior, a small guy who's not as successful with women as he'd like to be. If he's reading this, he should take solace in the fact that it will get better after high school, which is a morass of unwelcome, assigned identities. This has been my experience, anyhow.

They left me some of the best comment cards I've received in my entire huts career, like this one:

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?
"Zealand ROCKS! Hutkeeper C Neal (so cute)."

Other similar comments flattered me in the pages of the guest log. Why couldn't there have been girls with such good taste at Bonny Eagle High School? But there were; I just didn't have the "damn-I'm-sexy" sense of myself that comes so easily to unwashed, unshaven backwoods caretakers.

This group also left me with a tip that was more generous than a public school ought to be, and I appreciate it tremendously. More than that, though, I got the sense that this was a truly formative experience for these students. Their complaints about the hike in quieted, then became complaints about the departing hike out, which I chose to interpret as something of a reluctance to leave. I told them that they should come back, and I hope that some of them will. Even if they don't, I can hope that the experience will improve their lifelong relationship with the natural environment.

Three days of backcountry self-reliance is more than most so-called "adults" can bear. There's no doubt that these students left Zealand with more maturity and self-confidence than they'd had when they arrived. To have witnessed that may have been the most satisfying experience of my winter.

Stumpy and friend

Last week brought several days of light, dry snowfall, perfect for backcountry skiing and for tracking. It's also vacation week, which means a steady stream of guests for the upcoming stint.

I skied in Friday afternoon in a snow squall that brought a fresh eighth of an inch to the valley. As I approached the first of the beaver ponds near the z-bridge, I saw two red foxes running toward me on the trail. I stopped and took off my pack for a picture, but when they were twenty yards away they noticed me and stopped. The fox behind went into the woods to the west of the trail, but the fox in front only paused and continued towards me, more slowly now. It was then that I identified it as Stumpy, the three-legged fox that's been denning near Zealand Hut.

Red foxes generally mate in January or February, so I surmise that Stumpy has found a special friend. This might explain why the two of them were too distracted to notice me as they were bounding down the ski trail towards me. I did manage to take a number of photos of Stumpy. I'll post these here by next weekend.

On Saturday I found a number of tracks: dozens of snow-tunnels left behind by voles, a few more fox tracks, and some moose prints and scat near the bottom of Zealand Notch by the Whitewall ledges. I also attempted a ski-descent from Zeacliff down the western side of the U-shaped valley that forms Zealand Notch. Unfortunately, the spruce and fir understory of the birch forest was thick enough that it was nearly impossible to link turns, and I mostly side-stepped and side-hilled my way down.

Today I'm in the valley (hence this post) for a meeting with the other caretakers and our supervisors. This is more of a social event than anything, since a chance to talk with other people our own age rarely presents itself at the hut. I'll return to Zealand on Monday afternoon, which is when a major snowstorm may also arrive in the neighborhood. Let's hope so.