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.

Zealand Valley: New Hampshire's largest ski area!

Last week's stint at Zealand Hut was the most fun yet. I skied in on freshly-laid tracks through one to three feet of fresh snow from Thursday's storm. Matt and some guests had broken trail for me: Matt told me that it had taken him two hours just to get from the hut to the Hale Brook Trailhead, a little more than halfway down (typically, it takes us a little over one hour to ski all the way out to Route 302). I got in late that night, just after 5 PM radio call, but because of the extraordinary conditions, I arrived at the hut at the same time as, or before, most of my guests.

It was a busy weekend, both in terms of guest volumes (I had a full house Saturday night) and in terms of snow removal. But with over 40 inches of snow on the ground, I was in a splendid mood. Three guys from New York City came up for Sunday night and we spent the afternoon doing sick hucks off of local waterfalls, then we enjoyed dinner together over a couple of games of euchre. While we were skiing, one of them took this photo, on a descent I call "Employee Bonus" (so named because I've decided to keep its location a secret).

The author, fully committed on "Employee Bonus"

This week also saw the first ski descents of the season on the caretaker glades, Zealand Falls, the Sugarloaf trail, the birch glades on the east side of Zeacliff, and (one of my favorites) Thoreau Falls. Bretton Woods ski resort, which lies just over the minor ridge at the northern end of the valley, claims to be New Hampshire's largest ski area, but the Zealand Valley could swallow six or seven Bretton Woodses whole. We also get more snow, steeper terrain, no crowds, freshies that last a week or more, and you'll save $52 or $59 by skiing here weekdays or weekends, respectively. As for lifts, I've got a pair of high-speed quads that will take me anywhere I want to go.

What I'm reading now:

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Some French socialist philosophy to revolutionize labor-capital relationships in the Zealand Notch. Debord writes about "the spectacle": the superficial trappings of contemporary capitalism (the spectacle includes mass media, consumer goods, celebrity cults, etc., etc.) as the means and ends of an emasculated consumer society: "it [the spectacle] is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity." It's a kick-ass book to read when you're living the lifestyle of a nineteenth-century housewife six miles from the nearest highway.

This is what you're missing, as you sit there on the internet.

Zealand Falls, before the storm (left) and after (right). Note my ski tracks on the left edge of the snowy photo. The falls make a nice descent that starts right from the Zealand front porch.

Winter, fashionably late

At last, the season's first major winter storm has dumped a respectable cloak of snow over the north country. Mount Washington observatory received nearly a foot, and the mountain valleys and notches seem to have received even more. I skiied yesterday afternoon at Wildcat- had the stomach for only three runs in the blizzard conditions, but they were lovely, with knee-deep powder on every trail. Though we'd only stayed for a little more than an hour, we returned to the car to find it buried in about two inches of new snow.

Skiing in to Zealand in so much good stuff will be tiring, but Matt will have broken the trail for me when he skis out this morning. This stint at Zealand could offer the first downhill backcountry skiing of the season... stay tuned.

Mansicle Hunt

This past weekend, instead of the usual hutchecking tour, I found myself skiing the longer-than-usual Gale River Trail towards South Twin Mountain with huts manager Mike.

A fellow's car had been parked at the Gale River road junction with US 3 for nearly three weeks, and he was presumed lost in the woods. He had set out in late January, during the cold snap that brought lows down into the negative twenties. Unfortunately, he had few people at home who noticed that he was missing- Fish and Game only began to act in mid-February, going solely on the note he'd left on his car.

Last weekend, a number of groups traced his assumed route from Route 3, up Galehead, over the Twinway toward Zealand. Helicopters also flew over the route and canine teams searched near the logging roads in the Gale River Road area. Mike and I skiied from the Beaver Brook parking lot to the closed Gale River Road, then kept on skiing on thin snow until we reached the footbridge. From there we hiked (there was so little snow that I only wore sneakers) to Galehead Hut, where we scouted around for signs of old tracks, then onward to meet Matt (the other Zealand caretaker) on S. Twin.

It was uneventful, but the nature of the trip was still somewhat macabre. The running joke was that we were probably looking for a frozen "mansicle", although the weather that day was beautiful: sunny and mild, as it had been for most of the previous week The guy for whom we were searching allegedly had a penchant for bushwhacking, and though we were looking for off-trail tracks, it was unlikely we would see any three weeks later. After the intense involvement of so many people last weekend, Fish and Game has decided to call off the search.

During my stint next week, I'll probably creep myself out a few times as I imagine a frozen body somewhere in the vicinity of the hut (which was, according to his note, one of his destinations). But after the fruitless search, I prefer to think of a diffent scenario. After all, if someone wanted intentionally to disappear without a trace, this guy found a pretty good way to do it: park your car at the edge of a wilderness, leave an ambiguous note, and leave with nothing but what you've got on your back. He could be frozen. But it's not impossible that he could be lying on a beach in the Virgin Islands, a completely new man. Time will tell.

Stumpy the fox

Ever since the cold snap of three weeks ago, the Zealand Valley has hosted a second permanent resident to keep the caretakers' company: Stumpy, the three-legged red fox (vulpes fulva).

In the past couple of summers, Stumpy has denned in the vicinity of Mizpah Springs Hut, where the hut crew identified and named him. Foxes typically stay within a two-mile radius of their dens, but they will often wander further away, particularly in the winter. (so says the Peterson Mammals field guide). Stumpy's sojurn from Mizpah to Zealand, across Crawford Notch and Route 302, was approximately 8 miles.

Stumpy, like most foxes, is most active at night and early in the morning. Unlike most foxes, he is very accustomed to being around people- a characteristic that is not to his advantage. I suspect that some high school students we had at the hut last weekend might have been feeding him before I returned to the hut for the evening. Feeding wild animals is contrary to basic backcountry ethics for the good reason that it dulls the animal's necessary survival instincts. Besides that, it's a rather contrived way to "interact" with wild nature.

Nevertheless, I'm happy to have Stumpy around: I'd heard almost no mice around the hut this past week, and I suspect that our newly resident predator might deserve some thanks.

Stumpy's tracks, on the Zealand Trail. Note how the prints are grouped in triplets.

An able-bodied fox's tracks, for comparison. As a fox trots along, its hind feet generally land in the prints left behind by the front feet, so that it leaves behind a fairly straight row of evenly-spaced tracks. Cats, wild and otherwise, leave prints like this as well.

What I'm reading now:
The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine's Wildlands by Neil Rolde
Maine's northern forest is the largest uninhabited woodland in the lower 48 states, a remarkably expansive blank spot on the map full of rivers, lakes, mountains, and wildlife. It is also a privately-owned wildland, one that provides the raw materials for Maine's vital forest products industry. In the past ten years, forestry regulations, globalization, and increasing pressure for second-home development have combined to threaten the viability of the forestry industry, and with it, the de facto conservation of the northern forest.

Rolde presents the recent political and economic issues in the context of a very broad geologic and anthropologic history. The context may be too broad, as a narrative thread is sometimes hard to piece out from the scattershot of facts presented. But Rolde is also a former state legislator, and his presentation of recent history at least is certainly worth reading.

Not one damn dime

I'd received, while I was in the woods, an e-mail message forwarded, supposedly, from Bill Moyers. I just read it over: it advocated a one-day boycott of all goods on inauguration day as a way to stick it to all the multinationals that are habitually screwing us over. Now, a few months ago there was a somewhat similar e-mail going around that advocated a one-day boycott of gasoline in protest of high prices at the pump. Economists made the point that such a boycott would be pointless: people would simply buy more gas on the day before or after, and the oil companies would suffer no pain at all. Unless people made a legitimate, long-term boycott of gasoline and switched to public or human-powered transit instead- but the e-mail message didn't advocate anything so radical as that. This was my response:

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is probably a hoax, as it has nothing to do with Bill Moyers. In and of itself, however, the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of the source doesn't necessarily diminish the worthiness of the idea.

What is problematic, however, is the fact that a one-day boycott of all goods will have little meaningful impact on the retail economy, evil corporations, and their political brokers. Even if this campaign had succeeded in getting a substantial number of people to avoid participating in the economy for one day, peoples' purchases would have merely shifted to the day before or after the "boycott," such that there would be virtually no real effect on retailers. This weekend's blizzard did a much more effective job of getting people to avoid the shopping malls for a day, but because people stocked up and replenished their consumer goods before and afterwards, the net effect is basically a wash.

The idea of the campaign is appealing as a way to strike against the corporations that profit from a constant state of fear, war, and social division. As a one-day deal, however, it's absolutely worthless. If, on the other hand, a few people made a concerted effort to live every day in the sprit of Not One Damn Dime Day, to make conscious efforts to live within smaller means, to pursue local economic relationships instead of abstract multinational ones, then there would be a substantial effect on the big-box retailers, energy corporations, defense contractors, and all the others that reap wealth and power at the expense of workers and the environment.

I've been told (but rarely seen it demonstrated) that war is a time for sacrifice. 1,200 young Americans have sacrificed their lives in this business, but no one, among all of the "support our troops" pablum, is calling for a serious, long-term sacrifice of the suburban American lifestyle. It's a lifestyle that elicits terrorism and balkanization as societies struggle to maintain their identities in the face of an emasculating global capitalist culture. It's a lifestyle that is willing to murder in order to sustain itself.

If you think that this is a war for oil, then you're buying it with every trip to the pump. And if it's a war against terrorism, you're buying it with every Coca-Cola you drink.

I am not Bill Moyers, but feel free to share this with as many people as possible nonetheless.

-Christian McNeil

And, if anyone is reading this who is familiar with the "Not One Damn Dime Day" campaign, I hope that you will share this message, or at least the idea of its content.

The woodstove isn't warm. Neither is winter. Get over it.

A quick post on my way to a week off in the subtropics. I skied out of the Zealand valley this morning in -20 degree sunshine. A beautiful morning, even if it was snot-freezing cold. I weathered fairly well my last week up there, following the MLK holiday weekend. The hut was full with guests on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, but for the last three nights of my stint, as temps dropped below zero, I saw not one other human soul (about other souls seen, more later).

Over the weekend, it was my pleasure to host the excellent people who constitute the AMC's young members group from Connecticut. Also in attendance were a few (not as many as they'd hoped) of the good people of the Maine chapter, which, as my AMC mailings still get sent to my parents' mailbox in Maine, is my chapter as well. I'm not the most gregarious guy, but there really was a good time in the hut while these people were around.

Unfortunately, as temps dived into negative numbers, this was also a weekend for one of the more difficult aspects of caretaking: woodstove diplomacy.

Now, our woodstove operates primarily by means of the placebo effect, for there's little real good it can do to warm a large, drafty building on a mountainside in the winter. With only two or three trees that were allowed to use annually for firewood, we have to ration what fuel we have to burning just a few logs a night, in the evening only. On nights like Sunday, when the hut was full of 98 degree bodies and the steam of their heated dinners, the caretaker will use less wood to conserve for colder nights. Indeed, the hut's indoor temperature was balmy enough for people to strip down to a single layer, which is unheard of, for winter camping. Still, the stove never gets as warm as some people would like it to be, and bearing complaints is diffucult, especially when there's little that I can reasonably do about it. Cutting more trees certainly isn't an option, and by the time guests have arrived at the hut, it's too late to tell them to pack more warm clothing.

Ironically, the best way to deal with daytime temps that struggle to reach double digits on the positive end of the Fahrenheit scale is to get out of the hut and climb to the top of an even colder mountaintop. Last week I climbed Mts. Hale and Zealand in efforts to stoke my internal furnace, and on these expeditions I was reliably warmer than I was on days when I elected to spend as much time as I could reading in my warm down sleeping bag.

I shoved off this morning from the hut right after the 8 AM radio call and was back for this brief stop at Pinkham Notch by 10 am. Next it's on to the Portland "International Jetport", and then to the Houston "George Bush Intercontinental Airport" by the evening (the name of the Houston airport is more pompous by a hair, but Portland's has more pretension, given that it serves mostly small commuter planes from a single homey terminal, and none of its flights are international). There I'll take a trip to the oily beaches of the gulf coast and live it up in my Hawaiian shirt. Yippie kai-yea, git along, yee-haw.

What I'm reading now:

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
I've actually been reading this concomitantly with other books for a while now. Reisner is too partisan to be considered a serious historical arbiter of the facts, but he does present some fascinating and well-researched stories of water exploitation in the American west. It's a long book, but that's because there are so many stories of stunning ineptitude, corruption, and destruction, and Reisner tells them all with an outraged storyteller's flair.

Another day on the job

Today Jon Kennedy, intrepid caretaker of Lonesome Lake Hut, and I fulfilled our biweekly hutchecking duty in fine style. As a condition of the Appalachian Mountain Club's special-use-permit with the Forest Service, teams of two people must hike to Lakes of the Clouds and Madison Huts every weekend during the winter to make sure that no one is violating forest protection regulations- namely, the regulation that there is no camping within a quarter-mile of any hut, nor above treeline when there is less than two feet of snow on the ground.

On Saturday at Madison, we arrived just as a group of five or so well-outfitted fellows were setting up their tent right outside of the hut's shuttered kitchen. Madison Hut is located in the col between Mounts Madison and Adams, and it is less than a hundred yards away from treeline. Why anyone would prefer to camp above treeline beside a locked and shuttered building, rather than in the shelter of fir trees, is baffling to me, but we encountered several groups that planned to do exactly that in a gathering snow storm.

The protagonists on Lion's Head, Mt. Washington.

Today, though, the weather cleared out and gave way to the rare and spectacular phenomenon of a clear, calm day on Agiocochook. Rather than take a long drive and a short hike to Lakes of the Clouds Hut via the 2.5 mile Ammy, we hiked right from our days-off doorstep at Pinkham Notch up over Lion's Head, then across the alpine southern shoulder of Washington to the hut on the south-western slope of the mountain. The Lion's Head winter route is a fun trail to climb, particularly because it doesn't dink around with switchbacks and climbs nearly a thousand vertical feet in a single, nearly straight shot on the northern rim of Tuckerman's Ravine. We got stuck behind a group of eight that stretched above us in a train the head of which we could not see, but it was a fun climb nonetheless, and reached Lion's Head near the end of the morning.

Above the lip of Tuckerman's Ravine, Mt. Washington.

From there we skirted above the Alpine Garden Trail in order to avoid the icy edge of the ravine and in order to climb gradually towards the northern junction of Tuckerman's Crossover, a trail that leads from the western lip of the ravine to the hut. Tuck's Crossover traverses the high plateau on Agiocochook's southern flank, a spectacular alpine tableland. Big cairns for the Lawn Cutoff and Davis Path string across the plain in mile-long paths that converge near Boott Spur. While we hiked across, cumulus clouds filled in the valleys just beneath us, such that the edges of the alpine lawn dropped off into a carpet of undercast.

As a welcome change from the previous day, we found no signs of illegal camping at Lakes of the Clouds Hut, and only one group of day-trippers passed by while we were there. Lakes has an emergency shelter available to winter climbers who are desperate: it's an unwelcoming basement room nicknamed "the dungeon." As with Madison, Lakes is not particularly far from the shelter of treeline, so it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting to stay there in anything but the most hopeless whiteout. On this day, though, we had nothing but sunshine and relatively balmy (about -5 degrees C) temps. We ate a liesurely trail lunch on the drifted snow on the hut's eastern side and bathed in the high sunshine before we returned to Pinkham via the Camel and Boott Spur Trails.

A beautiful day, a beautiful hike. And I earned 8 hours' worth of wages.

What I'm reading now:
Watership Down by Richard Adams.