Mountain-climbing for dummies
Used to be people stayed put and didn’t venture onto mountains unless they were an especially hardy breed of adventurer—or goatherders or sherpas or Heidi.
But somewhere during the 80s and 90s, perhaps due in part to the growing popularity of indoor rock climbing gyms, more and more daytrippers began venturing unprepared where they should be fearing to tread.
New England has its share of peaks, and although it lacks an Everest it does have one that calls most seductively to the foolish: Mt. Washington. The weather down below can seem benign, and the mountain doesn’t look all that high or dangerous—after all, it’s only 6288 feet, and there’s an auto road, for goodness’ sake. How bad could it be?
Very, very bad. Mt. Washington has:
…notoriously erratic weather. This is partly due to the convergence of several storm tracks, mainly from the South Atlantic, Gulf region and Pacific Northwest. The vertical rise of the Presidential Range, combined with its north-south orientation, makes it a significant barrier to westerly winds…With these factors combined, winds exceeding hurricane force occur an average of 110 days per year. From November to April, these strong winds are likely to occur during two-thirds of the days.
Most amateurs know better than to climb in winter, but it can be very nasty even in spring, summer, and fall. Hikers are advised to take winter clothing even in summer, but this article from the Boston Globe points out that such rules are often honored only in the breach by many of today’s climbers, who seem to have drunk deeply from the self-confidence well without marshaling the knowledge base that might justify such a feeling.
Stupidity abounds on Mt. Washington and other summits along the Presidential range, along with the false security gained by cell phones and GPS systems that don’t always work. And it’s the long-suffering rescuers who pay the price, risking their lives to save the foolhardy as well as the unlucky.
Chris Thayer is one of them; he’s the AMC’s White Mountains director, and he says that although winter hazards are fairly well-known:
There is less publicity about “shoulder seasons,” he says, like the weeks from late August through October, when the inexperienced explore the outdoors in droves. Days that begin balmy can end brutally. “The weather patterns are tricky,” Thayer says. “But you might have a hard-charging group of guys whose goal is the summit, no matter what. And I’ve seen many families where the parents push the kids to make it up in bad weather. Once, I took this incredibly heavy pack from a family. They had a toaster they thought they could plug in at the hut.”
New Hampshire, the famously libertarian state which has become less libertarian over time, has recently passed a law requiring hikers deemed “negligent” to reimburse the state for the not insignificant cost of their rescues. Whether this will discourage frivolous hiking remains to be seen; the penalty for nonpayment is to lose one’s driving, fishing, and/or hunting licenses.
Better than losing one’s life.
It’s a conundrum. I’m not an enthusiast of the nanny state gone mad, where warnings are posted for anything and everything (don’t get on this amusement park ride if you’ve ever had any medical condition at all; don’t let your children pet the animals at the fair because they could catch a disease; in summary, don’t do anything much, and above all please don’t sue us).
But some cautions are realistic and necessary, and the posting of far-fetched ones may have had the effect of encouraging people to think they can blow off all warnings as so much puffery. The White Mountains are not for sissies, but neither are they for fools.
Well, danger signs for things that really are dangerous aren’t really a nanny state. Too many people nowadays live in a totally controlled environment and the idea of actual primitive and violent ecosystems is unthinkable. They think they picture them, but they don’t really. They may spend time in national parks, some of which are truly remote, but they are still tourist attractions chosen for their combination of safety and beauty.
Of the few things I actually like about some of the European mindset is signage for dangerous areas. There are a number of Americans die every year in tourist attractions because when they have a sign that says “DANGER: Cliff Ahead” it means just that. In the US there would be ropes, guards, fences, all sorts of things and even then if you push past all of it you are disappointed. In many European countries that “Danger:Cliff Ahead” is a 1500 foot sheer drop. They know that if something is roped off or there is strong language to truly beware.
We don’t really have the means to identify that something is truly dangerous because we have signs and protections on *everything*. If you see a “caution, extremely hot serious burns may occur” you may literally be looking at a cup of hot chocolate that you can ingest – so how does one now signify when something is actually extremely hot and will cause serious burns? I literally see the same warnings on a coffee cup warmer, my soldering iron, and a MAPP gas blow torch.
So, why should they take those warnings as literal – they have probably never seen one that actually was true.
Mt. Washington (which I have climbed twice in summer, and as far as Tuckerman Ravine in winter) is truly a mountain to be feared, or at least given considerable respect, benign as it appears.
Three of my climbing friends when I was at Yale in the late 1960’s died on a winter ascent of Huntington Ravine.
Jamie Irons
strcpy: I have noticed the exact same thing about Europe. I remember years ago seeing children playing near sheer drops that would surely have been roped off here. I don’t know whether it’s still true, though—it doesn’t seem to fit the welfare state economic situation of Europe, does it?
Jamie Irons: How very sad that you lost your friends. I knew someone who almost died there a decade or so ago, but was saved only by a combination of luck and the truly heroic efforts of the rescuers. He was an experienced climber but set out alone and didn’t let people know where he was going, and then when hypothermia set in got more and more confused and made bad decisions.
neo,
I made my first attempt at Mt. Washington in mid-July of 1980, with my youngest brother, a younger sister and her husband, and his youngest brother. We came prepared, since we were planning on finding somewhere after our descent to camp for the night. It was a cloudy day, but nothing stormy. We took the Hungtington Ravine Trail and when we got about 2/3 the way up it was snowing quite heavily. We were at the first hut, sitting inside resting and taking stock of the situation. My brother-in-law’s youngest brother was having a hard time. So, we decided to descend and we found a place not that far from the bottom to camp for the night. It was a wet one. But we made a correct decision, based on conditions. It’s really just being intelligent and respecting nature.
My second attempt at Mt. Washington was in August of 1983 and that same youngest brother of mine and I hit it perfectly. There was a dome of high pressure sitting over New England. We took the Tuckerman Ravine Trail and had a grand day. At the summit it was colder, but not a cloud in the sky and the vistas were impressive. A tad windy, but not bad.
After my honeymoon in September of 1988 the wife and I drove the auto road up there, since she had never been up to Mt. Washington. Cloudy up top and very windy.
Other summits I’ve done: Mt. Chocorua, Mt. Lafayette, Mt. Lincoln. You must always, always be prepared for bad conditions to appear suddenly.
neo,
I’ve also done a few 14K foot peaks in Colorado when I lived out in the San Juans. Those were impressive, and one night my buddies and I camped above 13K feet. Just a beautiful night. We cooked steaks and home fries on the griddle, with beer as well. Heard a cougar scream that night. Very cool indeed. But we had taken jeep trails up a ways and parked our jeeps, doing the rest of the climb on foot. We lived at about 9K feet above sea level, and our climb usually was about 3K+ feet.
Anyway, those were the days when there were no cell phones and GPS. You learned how to read the weather and act accordingly. In some ways the reliance on technology makes us more stupid.
You may appreciate Nelson Rocks Preserve’s warning sign. I would not mind seeing it broadly adopted by other such parks.
I agree with others who have commented that people have no appreciation for what “wild” actually means, though. We who live out in semi-rural New Mexico see it all the time with new folks who complain that elk are eating their fruit trees and how do they get rid of them, or who freak out when they see a coyote in the neighborhood. And this is suburbia– it’s just a small enough and remote enough suburb that rubbing elbows with the natives is inevitable.
Add to that the way that outdoor sports have been glamorized on TV, with shows like “We drop a TV host in the wilderness with nothing but an infinite credit limit and an entourage of dozens and see if he survives”, and it makes the outdoors look rather manageable for other would-be weekend warriors when the worst that happens is seeing a snake thirty yards away.
LabRat,
Living on the southern rim of Central New Hampshire, there are still areas that are quite rural, but there is also creeping suburbanization. So, you have to drive an hour north in order to really get away from it all. Meanwhile, around here I see the specimens of homo urbanus moving in or passing through.
Homo urbanus is a strange creature indeed. Seems oblivious to the elements, yet extremely vulnerable to them.
“don’t know whether it’s still true,”
I know at least some parts still are. In my last place of employment we had two Germans that complained constantly about everything being walled off. They made fun of us “Why can you just put up a sign telling you that it’s there – aren’t you guys smart enough to know “danger, hot” means it’s hot and don’t touch?”.
I told them yes, we are just as smart. However our lawyers are also fairly smart and figured out how to select juries that they could convince to give stupid people lots of money.
You know – coffee is hot, don’t carry it between your legs. If you do and get burned well, no money for you. The lawyers in question knew very well not to take someone like me on that jury, they knew very well to take the ones who still defend it (McDonalds knew their coffee was hot and could burn you!” – yep so did I, that’s what “hot” means). I feel sorry for the woman who got burned but I generally choose a better storage area of things that burn me than between my legs. It’s not like she didn’t know the coffee was hot (having drunk coffee before she was fully aware of that and was letting it cool some). Now had the cup been designed to be squeezed between your legs or McDonalds suggested doing so then there would have been a case, but wasn’t so. If they had commercialed it as not hot then there was a case too. But it was commercialed as piping hot and placed in a container made to go into a cup holder.
In Europe one doesn’t need a sign to tell them coffee is hot – in the US we have to not only have the sign but are no longer allowed to have it hot as the sign wasn’t “enough”. Now when you get a beverage that is supposed to be hot and it say “Caution: HOT!” is it really? Who knows? It may be that or it may just be warm.
But then they want to turn around and manage all sorts of crazy things too, just in different areas. I prefer our system over all, but why we couldn’t take that part of “personal responsibility” with it too.
Tangentially, I wonder about people with families who decide to climb peaks such as K2 or Everest. There is a very significant chance of death, yet it seems to them a reasonable risk. How they come to that conclusion is beyond me. I think pursuits such as that (for essentially recreational purposes) are for the young who haven’t yet had children, and those who’ve already raised their children to adulthood.
You see similar problems at places like Denali (Mt. McKinley), Mt. Whitney and often see terrain rather than weather related incidents in the mountains just East of Los Angeles (the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos). but a 30 minute drive from urban areas, there is some very rugged terrain, and helicopter rescues are not uncommon as people get stuck falling down steep slopes and cliffs.
My husband and I, when young and decidedly foolish, camped halfway up Mt. Washington one warm and mild Memorial Day weekend, planning to finish the climb the next morning. We were shocked when we awoke the next morning to below-freezing temperatures, howling winds, and close to a foot of heavy, wet snow that half-collapsed our tent and soaked through everything we had with us (no winter camping gear, of course.) At least we were smart enough to climb DOWN rather than UP, gloveless, coatless, and bootless, shivering all the way. I remember we ran the last stretch to help warm ourselves until we got to the car and gratefully cranked up the heat. We were lucky. We were really dumb. I don’t mess with mountains any more.
mrs whatsit,
You WERE indeed very lucky. At least when we went up that July day we had gloves and warmer clothing. Plus, our tents withstood the freezing rain. We were lucky that we camped well below the snow fall line. Our only problem was that in camping well off the trail in Huntington Ravine it was hard to find a patch of land suitable to put tents on. We actually had to build up some spots with tree branches. It was kind of lumpy sleeping but at least we were dry inside our tents.
But this is what can happen even in the dead middle of the summer season. Anywhere in the high country. I’ve seen snow in the upper elevations in Colorado in the summer (only a few times).
What our experiences demonstrate clearly is that AT ANY TIME OF THE YEAR you go up into the high country you have to expect that the odds are that nature is going to throw you some curves. The people who get into trouble do not know or understand this. They come up there unprepared for any kind of emergency or inclement weather. And today don’t think your cell phone, your GPS, or your Blackberry is going to get you out of a jam. Things can happen very quickly and defeat your tech tools.
You have to accept nature on its own terms and prepare to endure it, if you must. Definitely respect the mountains and the weather. The beauty is amazing, despite the snow, ice, and rain. But the most important thing besides being equipped with warm clothing IS THAT YOU MUST STAY DRY. If you cannot stay dry, get down the mountain. Once you are wet and then cold YOU ARE IN BIG TROUBLE. Get off that mountain and do not regret doing so. There is absolutely no shame or even defeat for having done so. If you injure a limb while climbing, do not go further. Get down the mountain. If you are feeling disoriented, get down the mountain. You will never regret the conservative course of action, because you will still be alive and able to do it again.
strcpy, some good stuff…
Though I think you missed the real problem, by describing more of the symptom, though you started out soooo close.
“Too many people nowadays live in a totally controlled environment and the idea of actual primitive and violent ecosystems is unthinkable.”
It’s more than that. Without a culture that is grounded in reality, and family to transmit it through generations, they have lost touch with reality in a profound way we all think is normal, or don’t really notice.
I am not talking about thought process disorders leading to losing touch. I mean no longer having a large set of common knowledge, of real world knowledge that allows them to function competently. People whose knowledge pool is so small about the real world that they literally cant function.
They can’t figure out truth from fiction. They don’t know history. They confound characters in movies, and books with real world historical figures, and visa versa. The list can go on, and on, like not knowing how to rear children, or how to function as a couple, etc. They are trapped in a mental prison in which leaves them stuck not knowing what to do to change their circumstances, when there are options all around them (though all of them look like work). This may have been ok when our life expectancies were shorter, but it will lead to profound problems as these new helpless generations get older.
They have constructed reality models (schema?) from what they see in movies, and games, never actually going out and doing things. The leftist doctrines of a utopian mother nature if you are nice to her, the noble savage, etc… all are doctrines that lead to a profound feeling of respect for something they know little about. Nature.
They really behave as if reality is not real. That everywhere is as safe as home, that thoughts can influence reality without actions, that crystals can store historical energy and vibrations, that the globe is warming up (when its entering a long cooling phase), and a lot more. A total inability to assess where they are, what’s around them, what that means, and how to act.
Like when on a photo safari in lion country, keep your tent closed
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991216/ai_n14265324
There is a denial that has its roots in not willing to accept that their model or knowledge is wrong (as if they are the knowledge, and if it changes then they change). Then their willingness to prove whoever is telling them something different wrong, they end up in really bad situations with some really bad outcomes. They literally oppose good advice, ignore it, or diffuse it, and go about their merry contrary way (sometimes to horrible ends).
The lack of basic knowledge and how to apply it boggles the mind.
I remember a few years ago, a Northeaster was barreling down the east coast and they advised everyone to drive only if necessary and stay put if we don’t have to go out. And yet a few of these idiots decided to hike Mt Washington. Sure enough they got lost in the blizzard. There were several helicopters trying to locate and rescue these guys. I wondered: Here I am heeding to the weather man’s advice and staying home – to make sure no one else needs to suffer because of me. And these idiots do the opposite and now we are wasting our tax payer dollars to rescue them. Isn’t ‘adventure’ part of that hike, getting lost as well? Why do we have to find these idiots. And shouldn’t the government stick the total cost of their rescue.
“It’s more than that. Without a culture that is grounded in reality, and family to transmit it through generations, they have lost touch with reality in a profound way we all think is normal, or don’t really notice.”
In my general view it is directly caused by living in said environment. If (and usually when) they are forced to see reality things collapse.
To a large extent I also see Obama as the perfect expression of this. His solution is that he is there and all will be right and why *shouldn’t* he think that? At every juncture in his life simply being him *has* worked.
Even if you move into more rural areas it is still largely true. If something bad happens there is always some technological wand to wave and you are saved. In a large city you only have to walk indoors and everything is as right in the world as you want it to be. When your really really bad weather is something that makes your daily commute and extra 30 minutes and wear and extra shirt it is incomprehensible that weather is capable of killing you that fast.
I think that what you describe is the furthering along of it and plays a large role, however if we didn’t have the amount of control over our environment that we do I don’t think it would have occurred – it’s not until you have that level of control that what you describe doesn’t end up with near instant removal from the planet (and even then I think it will end with eventual removal). Indeed I look to areas of the country/world that doesn’t have that level of control and they haven’t gone down that path – not until they gain enough control of their environment that they do not have to deal much with unpleasantness do they start doing what you describe..
In re: false warnings. Not involving a “nature” instance, but my experiences driving came moderately to the edge once on the interstate southbound from Chattanooga into Georgia. There’s this fairly sharp curve in the interstate that says “55mph”, and when they say 55, they mean 55. Contrast this with roads in Florida (where I’ve done most of my driving, note), where I don’t believe I’ve EVER seen a curve that I could not handle in a Yugo at 15mph over the “posted” speed.
There wasn’t anything close to an accident, but I was definitely gritting my teeth as I tried to maintain control and slow down to a proper speed.
It taught me a lesson, and I definitely learned it.
===
That said, when confronting nature, anyone who doesn’t grasp that BEARS EAT PEOPLE TOO, pretty much deserves what happens to them. That “pretty cat” is called a Mountain LION for a reason.
The more we protect people from the harshness of reality, the more problems we have with The Marching Morons…
Too Much Tiger Food.
Not Enough Tigers.
It took us 3 tries to get up and over Huntington, which carries all due warnings in the guide book, but not on the trail itself. Lawyers:0. The Environmentalists: 1, maybe.
Anyway, #3 was a beautiful late Sept day, on top as well as down at the bottom. The trail itself puts enough on your plate without the weather joining in. I had climbed it before back in the 80s and the scariest part wasn’t the notorious slab you have to scramble up; above it there was a spot where you had to slip around a projecting rock with nothing between you and the abyss. You kind of had to hold the rock like a dance partner and swing yourself around it–along with your day pack crammed with mittens, hats, sweaters, foul weather gear, etc, etc, etc. Anyway on this later trip I had so carried on about this tricky place to my wife, that she took the rest of Huntington in stride. She was totally focused on the Really Bad Part. As it turned out, at some point over the years they had rerouted the trail around it, so we never had to deal with it.
Still, the message is plenty plain. You’re there only at the mountains’ sufferance. Maybe they’re in a good mood that day; maybe they aren’t. For office workers who feel they have a right that their stipulated two weeks be perfect that can be hard to accept.
I went to a boarding school in vermont in the 60s and hiking in the white mountains was a common school activity. I went on one trip to the summit of Mt Adams in winter and although it was cold, visibility and wind were not problems. We also had an experienced trip leader. This past June I climbed Adams by myself (not recommended, but I had no companions on my trip). The summit was overcast but I could follow the cairns on the way to the top and I also possessed an AMC guidebook and map. Saw a fox which was trailing another group on the way up. I cannot imagine spending any time on those rocks in bad weather. I was snug as the proverbial bug in a rug.
As soon as I read this post I wondered how long it was going to take to blame Obama for people getting lost on mountains.
The answer? 15 comments.
The answer? 15 comments.
In reality, Obama was mentioned twice. And one of them was by kamper.
This is the true answer, as opposed to the intellectually lazy made up one.
strcpy,
excellent… sometimes i think that others dont get me… thanks.
i think another way to put it (and as a first put it short):
since reality was consistent its laws created an anchor for our minds. we are extremely adaptable, because the consistency of reality is our anchor. when we can control our environment, we unhitch the anchor, and what can be controlled no longer is an anchor, the lack causes us to drift away from a solid model of the world we use to operate in it.
i dont necessarily tie it to modernity though, isolation and lack of experience (too much book), can also cause it. anything that doesnt constantly reinforce and maintain the model accurately serves to loosten the anchors.
so isolation or lack of experience cna do it (an incomplete model), control of the environment (laws dont seem like laws, skewed model), mental damage (tbi, damaged model), too much passive fantasy (imagination made real, skewed model).
the last one is the one i think that most might not get. but i will try to be short (something i am very bad at).
the anchor to reality concept implies and is confirmed in darwin that whereever there is a fixes law, evolution exploits it. it never develops a counter process that would neutralize this if it was broken. we are fated to trust our inputs almost implicitly.
in a reality that is consistent like that, nite cant last 24/7, communication is only short distance, food is scarce, and most important EVERYTHING IS REAL.
in our modern era, nite is perpetual, communication has few limits (cant talk back in time), food is plentiful (if your in the US and not certain other places), and the landscape is dotted with fake things and a window into a totally unreal world (tv, films, media).
you can almost see that it clips the anchors if our culture doesnt maintain the connections.
for instance, non culture there is no bad time to go to bed, but in past culture, early to bed and early to rise (and others before franklin in other ways), was more the norm, and we synched up our living.
so just turning on the lights doesnt cut the anchor away, it takes loss of tradition and custom and reverence, what is culture, to do it too.
after all, not all city people are this way, and as you point out some country people are this way.
the TV though is a classical cursed benifit…
we have no mechanisms to actually tag and category input to our brains by the concepts of real, or not real.
without anchors, we incorporate what we see through the window into the world (not another world), into our model of the world.
how do we tag the crazed killer as unreal? not by an abstract tag, but by shifting our schema, and saying acts that are really bad must not be real.
we dont believe the evil that men (or women) can do is because for us that is what a fictoinal character does. we dont believe churchill is real, because real dynamic men like that only exist today in the movies, not in metrosexualized society. they think sherlock holmes is real because real police ended up becoming more like sherlock holmes, making it a science.
so TV is more subtle in the damage it does. its not that we become desensitized and necessarily copy things, its that we incorporate the unreality as our reality models, and that skews our schema.
the more anchors a person has cut, the more effect it can have.
to refer to a real study (but not for this purpose) i would call up the study on people who gave cpr to saved a love one. its not that recent, i cant remember the details, but i do remember the salient point.
people learned cpr for whatever reason, at the time of the incident they did what they could and the subject died, the people suffered depression from this and they were exploring reasons. the people of the study were not emt or such, they were average people.
in a way, they selected people who learned a skill by book. they like most, are vastly separated from the reality imaginative things that can happen to the human body (unlike an emt, some doctors, etc).
these people precisely had no reality anchor. and i know that since the study discovered that the ones that were most depressed thought it should have worked. they had used the television unconsciously to guage effectiveness of cpr. on tv cpr was 90% plus effective, in real life, its like 15% (dont quote this amount).
so those who thought it worked like on tv, hammered themselves harder for failing, while those who didnt think so, or knew the real numbers, were less likely to be so depressed.
the study never went into the details i am bringing up, just some numbers and questoins, and all i saw was one of these summary articles in a journal…
when we dont learn, or experience, where do we get our information?
the tv, and the common knowlege, and without a culture that is merit based and stable enough to weed out bad information, we disconnect and we take in the fake stuff as if its real, since we have no real way to determine the difference.
video games i would guess would cause worse disconnects, as ones brain builds alternative circuits to be proficient in an artificial world.
its not so bad if its balanced with real life, real experience. its bad if its dominant, so the model we use is stunted.
just because we live in a controlled environment doesnt mean we have to disconnect.
at least i dont think so as there are a spectrum of people who are not disconnected and those that are. the ones that are not tend to be doers, and go out in the real world (and take in informatoin from real sources about real things). the disconnected are more tuned into the non culture, the media culture, tv, movies, music, whos artificually important, and who do we listen to to tell us what causes we should support (which we decide by how plausible their argument sounds to the uneducated).
if we had a culture like we had that was familialy transmitted (the weeding out of bad information), these masses that live by common knowlege and tv and such, would be anchored.
notice what they do when reinventing old shows for now? they pervert them. batman, spiderman, willy wonka… they are perverse versions compared to the older ones.
older people may not think its that great, but they have more information and alternaitves (anchors) that mitgate the effect it could have. young do not get to see the other versoin with its alternative values first, and come from a more grounded culture. they build their culture from these new perverse versoins, and like them more because they think in a way that they are getting the teachings of the old culture.
so there is an intentional directoin towards this condition. in fact a nanny state, or socialist state, does that with the values for health, wealth, cost of living… it disconnects us on another level (where capitalism is more grounded in reality and real principals).
is it any wonder that someone llike obama can get so far so fast with such a socialist ideal?
thanks for the comments strcpy!!!
I have recently aquired my 4000 footer badge (climbing all 48 4000 footers in NH) and Yes, I have seen horrible weather in all months of the year, sleet in August etc.
Being somewhat prudent, it took me about 7 tries over 15 years (taking a break to raise little ones) to finally summit “The Rockpile”
All the whites are a bit deceptive, heck, it’s only 5-7 miles to the road from most summits. The rangers get calls on cell phones “I can hear the road, But—“
Back in the late 1970s my wife, her sister and I planned a hike of Mt. Washington from Pinkham Notch to the peak and back as an overnighter. (We were to stay at the AMC’s Lake of the Clouds hut.)
We arrived on July 2nd stayed at Pinkham and planned to do a day hike to “warm up” and get the lay of the land. We headed to Tuckerman Ravine to be stopped by a trail guide/guard who was strongly suggesting no one hike to the top on that day (July 4) because it was windy and snowing with a wind chill of 15 degrees above tree line. One charachter ahead of us was giving the young man lip of the “you can’t stop me” variety when a state trooper came around the little outpost tent and unsnapped his holster and said something to the effect, “No, but I can and I’d rather carry you out from here than somewhere above.” Mr. Tough guy turned around.
We three loved it! We explained we were just looking to warm up and followed a trail out onto one of the spurs where the wind forced us to go down on hands and waddle on all fours until we go off the ridge.
My wife injured her knee on the rocks but my sister-in-law and I climbed the next day in glorious sunshine with almost no wind. From the peak we could see Canada.
The next morning we could barely see our hand in front of our face! Instead of taking the trail down we had planned to take we climbed from rock cairn to rock cairn (one ould go ahead to spot the next before the other left the sight of the last) to the peak where we caught the only cog railroad train that ran that morning donw the mountain.
Did you know they stop the trains in fog? I didn’t.
I would climb it and the surrounding mountains several more times in the ’70s and early ’80s. My wife’s knee never let her do more than one more attempt. (Wildcat Ridge the next year and thank goodness for the ski lift as that’s how she got down. I had to climb it twice because of that!) Every hike was a challenge but none had the weather of that July 4th trip.
Mt. Wahington is one of those mystical places in this land of ours. Beautiful but deadly at the same time.
It’s not just mountains that bring out the stupid/arrogant – I spent a year and a half in the West Indies with the Navy back around 1980, and we had a couple of people who made a point of going surfing when hurricanes approached. Bigger waves, you know?
Weather on Mount Washington can change in the blink of an eye, or a few miles of distance.
Yesterday there was heavy wet snow and very strong winds at Pinkham Notch with barely a hint of winter a few miles down the road in Jackson.
I remember a few years ago I hiked up to the Lake of the Clouds hut in 80+ weather in August, went to sleep in the hut and woke to find 3″ of snow.
As far as calling Obama socialist, I don’t really get the point. Bailing out banks and the automobile manufacturers is something Bush started, and but he and Obama did it to save our economy from disaster, not because either one of them wanted to control either banks or auto companies.
As for national health, I don’t like going into country stores here in NH and seeing large glass bottles where some guy who lost his job, and couldn’t afford a $1400 a month cobra payment is trying to raise $100,000 in quarters to save his daughter’s life because she has leukemia.
I think to myself “If that girl with leukemia was in Denmark, Israel or Singapore she would get treatment, are Danish, Israeli and Singaporean children worth more than American children?”
In most countries women get between 3 months and 2 years paid maternity leave. In 2010, we will be just about the only nation left that doesn’t require or pay for maternity leave.
We can argue over what level of safety net we want, or should have. But… arguing that a nation that will let a 5 year old with a brain tumor just die, that will fire a woman who gave birth two weeks ago for not coming to work or pumping breast milk at work, and has a minimum wage below the poverty line, is a “going socialist” is laughable.
As far as surfing during a hurricane, you know, there’s a reason for the expression “head for the hills.”
My advice to anyone surfing in Hawaii (or someplace in the ring of fire like Bali) is… If you suddenly see the water rushing backwards like never before, run. Run as fast as you can. And if you lack the energy to run, get in a building and go up, as far up as you can.
Scott in NH: it’s not Obama/Reid/Pelosi/care or nothing. Most people in this country are in favor of health care reform that makes sense. Try this on for size.