A Ritual Descent
By Jeremy Loeb
"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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2009 Essay Contest Honorable Mention
The Northeast's True Hundred Mile Wilderness?
By Rick Ouimet
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? Â 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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2008 Essay Contest Winner
Climate Change at the Top: Investigating New England's Treeline
By Kimberley S. K. Beal
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. Continue Reading Essay
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