It’s Cold Out There
My Account of a Hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire
By Jimmy Cook
[Note that this was originally written in early 2008, but has been
updated slightly as of 2/28/12.]
February 20, 2005. I awake to the sound of my campmates rustling about. I don’t want to get out of my sleeping bag. I’m incredibly cozy in my new zero-degree mummy, having spent my first winter overnight snuggling my two bottles of hot water and wrapped in a fleece sleeping bag liner. It still stands as the most comfortable night’s sleep I’ve had on the trail, but that doesn’t matter because it’s cold out there and I don’t want to get up.
We hiked in the previous day along Zealand Road and up past Zealand Falls Hut, where we stopped to warm up and refill our stomachs. The views from Zeacliff were amazing. “Breathtaking” isn’t a word I like to use, but in this case it seems appropriate. We made the summit of Zealand quite uneventfully, and decided to continue along the trail toward Guyot summit rather than Guyot shelter. We make camp somewhere along the saddle between Zealand and Guyot, stomping out tent platforms and digging a bench for a makeshift kitchen. We layer up and eat chili, and Nathaniel and I are on hot water bottle duty. We fill Boyd’s and Brennan’s bottles and stay up as long as it takes to fill the last four for the two of us.
I cannot for the life of me remember a single specific thing Nathaniel and I talked about that night, but I’ll never forget the conversation: the cold, deep quiet; the bright white snow seeming to glow in the darkness; the rhythm established by the life-sustaining process of melting snow and then heating it as long as our patience will allow before dumping most of the hot water and then starting over with a little hot water and a lot of cold snow; the fact that all of these things would be somehow different if my best friend weren’t there to share them with me. Under similar circumstances we usually talked about theoretical physics mixed with environmental concerns, with a dash of drinking stories and an inevitable “whose idea was this?”. It was usually the idea of the person who asked, making the question both rhetorical and ironic in a way that only idiotic best friends find amusing. We sat and talked and heated snow for hours. Or so it seemed. It probably only took one hour, but when it’s that cold outside, time becomes meaningless.
I do eventually get up, after dressing as much as possible inside the warmth of the sleeping bag. I lace my boots; I step out into the cold. The thermometer registers -10°F. Two minutes ago I was at 80°F at least. A 90°F drop in temperature in the matter of minutes never hurt anybody, right? The chain that attaches the thermometer to my pack has broken. I can only assume it’s due to the cold. Stupid nil ductility transition temperature.
God it’s cold. The rumor was that a local dogsled race had been canceled for the weekend due to the cold. There’s something not entirely right about this. If they won’t come out here, what are we doing here? But we knew it would be like this. We had all the right gear and had survived the night, so the rest should be a cake walk. We load some hot beverages into our bellies and hit the trail.
In no time we are on top of Guyot. It’s still very cold (colder than at camp?), and the wind is howling across the completely exposed, desolately frozen summit. Later research by Nathaniel puts his estimate of wind chill at -76°F, which is in the “great danger” region of the wind chill charts. With snowshoes on, it is difficult to walk because the wind catches the shoe like a sail every time a foot is lifted to take a step. We lose the trail and wander around a little before picking it up again. Somehow Boyd is missing a layer of facial coverage and is doing all this with an exposed nose and mouth. In a rare moment of weakness, Nathaniel asks me for help. His goggles have fogged up and he can only see where to go if he follows close behind. We’ve got to get off this mountain.
Before too long we are breaking trail in the trees on the way to South Twin. There are several feet of snow below our feet, and the blazes (trail markers painted onto tree trunks) are just above the elevated “ground” level. Not that it matters. We’re on the Appalachian Trail, and the blazes are white. Those that are not buried below snow level are covered with wind-blown snow or just blend right in to the sea of white in which we’re swimming. Whoever thought white paint would be a good idea had obviously never hiked in the snow. We soon lose the trail and end up wandering around the woods, staying to the right of the ridge line and hoping to cross the trail. We zig-zag along the eastern slope in the general direction of South Twin. It’s amazing how useless a map and compass can be when you can’t see any landmarks and the contours are shown in 100-foot intervals. Finally, Brennan finds the trail and saves the day.
I break trail for the final push up the summit. It is grueling work. The powder is waist deep and the trail is narrow. We’re bounded on both sides by spruce traps. The going is slow, but it’s worth the effort. Another crystal clear day, and the view from South Twin is amazing. The beautiful solitude is broken by the presence of other hikers, of which we’ve seen none over the course of the previous twenty-four hours, but they’ve earned the view too. We take some photos, as we always do. One of my all-time favorite pictures was taken up there. It shows Franconia Ridge in the background, covered with snow, and the snow-and-ice-plastered treetops in the foreground. A winter wonderland.
The descent is uneventful as usual. We alternate between comfortably warm while moving to bitterly cold while resting. We take long strides on the downgrades, allowing the flotation of our snowshoes to help us “ski” as much as possible. Nathaniel is moving fast, as he always does when moving downhill. It makes up for the fact that he’s slow on the uphill. I make a comment to Boyd that Nathaniel will hurt himself one day, moving as fast as he does when gravity is doing all the work. I don’t actually believe it, because he’s young and invincible, just like I am. The last couple of miles are along a road, flat and relatively hard-packed. Snowmobiles buzz past us at times, and soon enough we’re in the car on the way home.
I drive. We talk. We listen to music. A typical end to a typical hike, though colder than what we’re accustomed to. At Nathaniel’s place we eat pizza and taste his latest homebrew. We goof around on his new iMac and play games. We go to sleep relatively early because we all have to work in the morning, and Brennan and I have to drive two more hours just to get home to Connecticut.
In many ways, this really was just another typical hike. As always, it was a good time with good friends. Two more summits checked off the list. Afterwards we went back to our normal lives, putting the weekend warriors in us away for a while. But in many ways this was not just another typical hike. It was the first deep winter outing for some of us, and we came through it intact and confident and looking forward to future adventures in the cold (though maybe not quite as cold as this weekend).
I chose to write about this particular hike not because it was the last on my list of 4,000-footers in the White Mountains (it was #19 of 48), but in many ways it was the last one that mattered because it was the last one that I hiked with Nathaniel. As I was about to walk out the door to go to work on the morning of Tuesday March 1, 2005, the phone rang. It was Nathaniel’s fiancée Jen. There was an accident. Nathaniel was dead. A skiing accident. He hit a tree.
Much of what went through my head, and some of what came out of my mouth, over the next few days should never be repeated. What followed were some of the hardest days of my life. It’s seven years later, and I still think about him almost every single day of my life. The adventures we had, though most people would probably call them misadventures. The conversations we had, especially the one I can’t really remember but will never forget. The road trips. The soccer games. The late nights of drinking and playing video games to “prepare” for hiking the next day. The hiking. The camping. The mountains.
The mountains! It would be nine months before I returned to the Whites: Mount Tecumseh with Boyd. And almost two years after that, September of 2007, I would finish the list of 48. I started the list with Nathaniel, but I had to finish it without him. Brennan and Boyd were there on that final mountain, which was fitting. Rusty, who is a friend of Nathaniel’s and mine from college, was there too. With one obvious exception, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to finish. Nathaniel was always with me in spirit, but it’s not quite the same.
It will never be the same.
Zeacliff – February 19, 2005
From Left: Nathaniel Keith, Boyd Smith, Brennan Downes, Jimmy Cook
