This year, in our fourth annual Annual Essay Contest, sponsored in partnership with Appalachia - a journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club, we have chosen two winning essay contestants. The contest is judged by a committee of Waterman Fund present and former board members and Chris Woodside, editor of Appalachia. The committee enjoyed both these entries so much, that we decided to see if the two women were amenable to splitting the prize. To our good fortune, they were. Here, then, are the two winning essays, which examine philosophical questions about wildness. You'll also find the essays in the December issue of Appalachia.

On Being Lost

Colby College, in Maine, sits atop a broad hill that slopes down into woods on all sides, like a castle moated by a tangled knot of trees. In my four years at this school, I've spent a great deal of time getting lost in these woods, whose size - only a few square miles, really - suggests that for most of us, getting lost would be difficult if not impossible. Luckily, I'm willing to put in the effort. There's a magic in being lost, and when I set off for an hour's or an afternoon's expedition, I try to cross the boundary into the unfamiliar. I try to find an instability of place.

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The Warp and Weft

I write this from my house in Jackson, feet propped on the windowsill while the Ellis River rushes below. From here, the sound of the water is like distant laughter. The confluence of the Ellis and Wildcat Brook borders my yard. Most days, the presence of the water is as ordinary as the garage. But other times - better times - the weight of the rivers’ course leaves me breathless. These rivers first burst open with snowmelt longer years ago than I can ever know and will continue to do so long after I am gone, the water eternally rising and falling with the rains and seasons.

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Hunting the Woolly Adelgid

I have been tramping in the woods near Mount Agamenticus in southern Maine for a couple of hours looking for signs of a tiny aphid-like insect that kills hemlock trees, and I am starting to feel hungry and cold. I should have brought more snacks. I'm feeling a bit uncertain about the scientific aspect of the survey I have volunteered to do. I'm supposed to plot data on a sheet, following the compass points spelled out in the instructions-but I think I can figure it out: Start with the first hemlock tree, examine two branches of new foliage, walk 25 paces, find another tree, check it. Check the sheet for the next cardinal point, use the compass to orient myself, and walk another 25 paces in that direction. My goal is to check 100 hemlock trees in this random but directed fashion.

I have come here today to survey my adopted tree stand for signs of the woolly adelgid because I love hemlocks, the way their lacy branches spread out and make the woods into a cathedral. In the winter, I love seeing the patches of packed down snow beneath a hemlock's sheltering branches-evidence that deer are keeping themselves cozy and warm. And I love these woods, and the opportunity to experience them in a different way-to get out into the forest with my compass and follow the directions for the survey, wandering in terrain I might not otherwise explore. I like having a purpose to direct my wandering, to take me into patches of the forest where I might not go otherwise. I like feeling as if I am taking care of these trees.

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A Ritual Descent

"There was a lot of excitement up on the mountain yesterday. The summit broke their record temperature for the day with a high of 56 [degrees] F (13 C), thousands of people flocked to Tuckerman Ravine, three human triggered avalanches occurred in the Bowl, people endured countless spectacular falls and several people were injured requiring lots of volunteers to evacuate their fellow mountain travelers. It was a classic day in Tuckerman Ravine."

-- U.S. Forest Service, Avalanche Advisory for Tuckerman and Huntington Ravines, Mount Washington, New Hampshire, April 26, 2009

Halfway up the side of Tuckerman Ravine, on the eastern slope of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, I'm crouched in the lee of a cliff, sweating and shivering. My location, at the thin neck of an hourglass-shaped run named the Chute, affords a vertical view of the headwall. Blinding spring snow covers most of the broad cirque, interrupted only by dark cliffs and bands of ice, a waterfall bursting out from the snowpack and plunging into a crevasse near a center headwall run called The Lip, and the ant-like columns of skiers and snowboarders ascending the gullies. The exertion of booting up the steep face of the ravine soaks my face with sweat mingled with sunscreen, which seeps into my eyes. I shiver, not from the temperature drop in this shady spot, but from a gathering sense of danger. Tucks is rife with skiing accidents today, and I'm about to witness another.

A few days before, Mount Washington had caught a storm system that brought rain to the valley and over a full foot of snow at the summit. Winds at over 100 miles per hour churned through the ravine, loading gullies with snow and returning the mountain to full-on winter conditions. The blizzard departed as quickly as it had come, and this weekend beckons skiers with bluebird skies and balmy weather. By Saturday, the rangers have downgraded the avalanche forecast to "low" for all but the headwall, which they rate as "moderate."

I did not begin today anticipating avalanches, but from my perch, I have witnessed two major skier-initiated slab avalanches that rumbled down the headwall with deadly earnest. The second avalanche caught my breath, as a river of snow engulfed the snowboarder who set off the slide. He struggled to stay atop the churning rapids as they swept him 500 vertical feet, where he arrived at the floor of the ravine alive, unburied, pumping his fists in the air triumphantly to the roar of the crowd.

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The Northeast's True Hundred Mile Wilderness?

When it comes to wilderness, does federal designation matter?

Devoted New England backpackers, my wife and I first entertained this question after learning that the United States Congress had added the Wild River drainage to the White Mountain National Forest's five existing wilderness areas. Unfurling and connecting our trail-worn New Hampshire maps on the floor of our one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, a powerful possibility grabbed hold of our imagination: Could we fashion a one-hundred mile hike, on established trails whenever possible, through the Whites' official wildernesses? If so, how would it compare to a trek on Maine's famed but not officially designated Hundred Mile Wilderness, at the same time of the year and in a comparable amount of time? Not only did we have our next journey, but also a compelling face-off for the Northeast's true wilderness experience.

Wilderness is as hard to define, though, as it is to find. What is the goal? No people? No roads? No human intervention? Appropriately, we turned to the Guy and Laura Waterman vision of wilderness. That is, could we find solitude in a beloved region that attracts millions of annual visitors? Could we find inaccessibility with major state and national highways truncating these six wilderness areas?  Could we find difficulty amid painstakingly maintained stone steps and trail ladders? Could we find the spirit of wildness in the face of manipulation?

Armed with these questions, we walked into the wild.

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Climate Change at the Top: Investigating New England's Treeline

I am standing alone on a car-sized granite boulder, trying to see through the fog that walls off my view a dozen yards away.  I feel isolated in a circumscribed world of white cloud and muted grey rock. Condensed water hangs in beads on a low bilberry bush. The wind is buffeting me so hard that I worry about twisting an ankle as I maneuver through this boulder-field, high above the valley. How long would it take someone to find me if I couldn't walk? Plenty of people will climb Katahdin today, but I am off-trail and not near a popular route. Despite its being August, I lose heat quickly and my hands are already creaky with cold. I hold a computer printout of a photograph, which flaps furiously and tries to get a free ride on a gust. I smooth the vital paper against my green pants and look again at the features of Witherle Ravine. There it all was in 1959: the ravine, the fir waves, and the cliffs. When I look up again the clouds have begun to dissipate and I can see farther down-slope. Suddenly I'm blessing the wind as it blows clear my line of sight. Shafts of sun hit the trees and rocks as the whole world reveals itself in sky blue and forest green.  For a moment I take in the miraculous sight, and then it's back to work. With a little rock scrambling I am standing in the same spot where the original photographer took this picture nearly fifty years ago. While cloud-shadows flow across the topography like leaves in a stream, I hold my breath, raise my own camera, and take the same picture.

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• Nov. 2008: Dark Night on Whitewall
  Will Kemeza
• Oct. 2008: Looking Up
  Sandy Stott
• Sep. 2008: Fay's quandary revisited
  Nat Scrimshaw
• Aug. 2008: Meditation on Winter Caretaking
  Sally Manikian
• July 2008: A Pocket of the Mountains
  N. Blauss
• June 2008: The Evolution of a Trail Worker
  Matt Moore
• May 2008: A Cup of Mountain Tea
  Jeremy Loeb