Friday, August 26, 2005
Day Two - the hike begins
Unpredictability is one of the big features of hiking. Things never quite turn out as planned – paths are lost, weather turns bad, ankles are sprained. The trick to survival is to be flexible, and sticking to Plan A is one of the main causes of death in the mountains.
Take, for example, a group of mountaineers who attempted to climb Everest in May 1996. They had all paid about $65,000 to be guided up there and were in view of the summit. So when their guide said the weather was turning and they should go back, they told him to go to hell. By the end of the day, that’s where they’d all gone. Stranded near the summit in freezing conditions, nine of the climbers got hypothermia so badly they lay down and died or simply walked off the mountain in confusion. One of the survivors lost his nose to frostbite. All to get value for money and a cool story for their friends.
It was stories like this that made me a bit wary of climbing Mount Washington. At 6,000 feet, it’s hardly Everest, but it still has its share of stories (all conveniently bound in a book called ‘Not Without Peril’). The hikers in these stories aren’t all stupid or unprepared – some are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Each of them illustrate the fact that, when it comes to hiking, you just never know.
Nina and I discovered this before we’d even set foot on the trail. We were all ready to go – we’d tested the stove (which burned the hair off my right hand when it spurted out flame a little too enthusiastically), packed our bags, and were just about to put our boots on when Nina started frantically searching the car.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh no.” Nina has a habit of panicking for 30 seconds, letting me wait in agonizing suspense before telling me what’s wrong (although I found myself showing the same nerve-frazzling tendency).
“Please tell me my boots are in the car.”
Oh crap. You didn’t leave them at home, I thought. You didn’t –
“I left them at home. They were by the front door and I walked straight past them. I’m so stupid!” she wailed.
After a brief period of reassuring her that she was distinctly not stupid, it was a simple mistake, we could do something else and have just as much fun, etc etc, Nina’s determined streak shone through (it was never hidden for very long).
She decided she’d rather chop off her right arm than drag me all the way to the mountains and not be able to climb them, so she forked out for a new pair of shoes. We were still on plan A.
So it was on that gorgeously sunny Friday afternoon that we found ourselves standing at Pinkham Notch, head of the trail to Mount Washington. On the advice of a local ranger, we would hike halfway up, camp, then hike to the summit the next day (it was already getting late).
We made our way to the visitor centre to buy a compass (last-minute insurance) and came across a model of the Presidential Range. I looked at the path up Mount Washington. It all seemed fairly feasible until the path went up the side of a ravine and to the summit. Here the slope was almost 45 degrees. I breathed in. Clearly I wasn’t the only one taken aback, because the white dotted line indicating the path had been worn away by countless people pointing at it in horror (‘Blimey – we’re climbing that?!’).
But that was for tomorrow. For today, I’d be pleased if we could just get to the campsite. And so we set off, with warnings from Nina that we’d feel like dying after half an hour.
[The warnings weren't just from Nina - see right]
To my surprise, I didn’t feel like dying after half an hour. In fact, I didn’t feel like dying at all. Instead, I felt like I was about to collapse after about fifteen minutes, and carried on feeling like that until we got to the camp. The trail, meanwhile, was not the nice pebbly path sloping gently upwards that I’d been expecting. Instead, it was a large pile of boulders that went on forever.
The pack that had felt so light when I packed it in the motel room was now tugging ruthlessly at my shoulders. It had the weight and behaviour of a small child, one who didn’t feel like a piggyback any more and was playing at kicking my kidneys instead. Throughout the hike, I found my pack would get heavier or lighter according to my mood. If I was feeling positive and energetic, I couldn’t even feel it (I would discover this the next day). If I felt very tired, or we were lost, or the weather was bad, it would feel like I was lugging bowling balls. This was definitely a bowling ball moment.
But there were moments of relief. I saw my first wild chipmunk (they’re almost as common as squirrels over here, so Nina was slightly bemused at the fuss I made), and every now and again we would get a peep of view between the trees. It showed us how high we’d climbed and helped spur me on.
And, to my great relief, we got to camp before sunset (hiking in the dark is something I never, ever want to do). After negotiating a path even more ridiculously rocky than the trail, we found an open-fronted shelter where we could stick our sleeping bags. Two people had already occupied half of it – Pearce, an American guy, and his Spanish girlfriend Elena. They were overwhelmingly friendly and helpful.
After dinner, my first real initiation into camping began. A bear roaming around the camp is definitely something to be avoided, and the best way to do this is to put all your food in a bag and string it up between two trees, far away from the tent or shelter. This is way easier said than done, especially with five days’ worth of food. As Pierce and Nina sat in the shelter peeing themselves laughing, Elena and I (both complete novices) tried to lob a rock wrapped with string over a very high branch, so we could tie the bag with one end and haul it into the tree. It was dark and we were crap shots, so it took about half an hour. But, eventually, we did it! And it turned out Elena was a sailor so we had the knots thing down. The camp was safe, thanks to us : )
So with our earplugs firmly wedged in our ears (when you’re in the woods, cracking twigs and rustling leaves can keep you up all night), and with the stars freckling the late night sky, we settled down to our first night in the wild. Tomorrow, we would conquer a mountain.
Take, for example, a group of mountaineers who attempted to climb Everest in May 1996. They had all paid about $65,000 to be guided up there and were in view of the summit. So when their guide said the weather was turning and they should go back, they told him to go to hell. By the end of the day, that’s where they’d all gone. Stranded near the summit in freezing conditions, nine of the climbers got hypothermia so badly they lay down and died or simply walked off the mountain in confusion. One of the survivors lost his nose to frostbite. All to get value for money and a cool story for their friends.
It was stories like this that made me a bit wary of climbing Mount Washington. At 6,000 feet, it’s hardly Everest, but it still has its share of stories (all conveniently bound in a book called ‘Not Without Peril’). The hikers in these stories aren’t all stupid or unprepared – some are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Each of them illustrate the fact that, when it comes to hiking, you just never know.
Nina and I discovered this before we’d even set foot on the trail. We were all ready to go – we’d tested the stove (which burned the hair off my right hand when it spurted out flame a little too enthusiastically), packed our bags, and were just about to put our boots on when Nina started frantically searching the car.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh no.” Nina has a habit of panicking for 30 seconds, letting me wait in agonizing suspense before telling me what’s wrong (although I found myself showing the same nerve-frazzling tendency).
“Please tell me my boots are in the car.”
Oh crap. You didn’t leave them at home, I thought. You didn’t –
“I left them at home. They were by the front door and I walked straight past them. I’m so stupid!” she wailed.
After a brief period of reassuring her that she was distinctly not stupid, it was a simple mistake, we could do something else and have just as much fun, etc etc, Nina’s determined streak shone through (it was never hidden for very long).
She decided she’d rather chop off her right arm than drag me all the way to the mountains and not be able to climb them, so she forked out for a new pair of shoes. We were still on plan A.
So it was on that gorgeously sunny Friday afternoon that we found ourselves standing at Pinkham Notch, head of the trail to Mount Washington. On the advice of a local ranger, we would hike halfway up, camp, then hike to the summit the next day (it was already getting late).We made our way to the visitor centre to buy a compass (last-minute insurance) and came across a model of the Presidential Range. I looked at the path up Mount Washington. It all seemed fairly feasible until the path went up the side of a ravine and to the summit. Here the slope was almost 45 degrees. I breathed in. Clearly I wasn’t the only one taken aback, because the white dotted line indicating the path had been worn away by countless people pointing at it in horror (‘Blimey – we’re climbing that?!’).
But that was for tomorrow. For today, I’d be pleased if we could just get to the campsite. And so we set off, with warnings from Nina that we’d feel like dying after half an hour.[The warnings weren't just from Nina - see right]
To my surprise, I didn’t feel like dying after half an hour. In fact, I didn’t feel like dying at all. Instead, I felt like I was about to collapse after about fifteen minutes, and carried on feeling like that until we got to the camp. The trail, meanwhile, was not the nice pebbly path sloping gently upwards that I’d been expecting. Instead, it was a large pile of boulders that went on forever.
The pack that had felt so light when I packed it in the motel room was now tugging ruthlessly at my shoulders. It had the weight and behaviour of a small child, one who didn’t feel like a piggyback any more and was playing at kicking my kidneys instead. Throughout the hike, I found my pack would get heavier or lighter according to my mood. If I was feeling positive and energetic, I couldn’t even feel it (I would discover this the next day). If I felt very tired, or we were lost, or the weather was bad, it would feel like I was lugging bowling balls. This was definitely a bowling ball moment.
But there were moments of relief. I saw my first wild chipmunk (they’re almost as common as squirrels over here, so Nina was slightly bemused at the fuss I made), and every now and again we would get a peep of view between the trees. It showed us how high we’d climbed and helped spur me on.And, to my great relief, we got to camp before sunset (hiking in the dark is something I never, ever want to do). After negotiating a path even more ridiculously rocky than the trail, we found an open-fronted shelter where we could stick our sleeping bags. Two people had already occupied half of it – Pearce, an American guy, and his Spanish girlfriend Elena. They were overwhelmingly friendly and helpful.
After dinner, my first real initiation into camping began. A bear roaming around the camp is definitely something to be avoided, and the best way to do this is to put all your food in a bag and string it up between two trees, far away from the tent or shelter. This is way easier said than done, especially with five days’ worth of food. As Pierce and Nina sat in the shelter peeing themselves laughing, Elena and I (both complete novices) tried to lob a rock wrapped with string over a very high branch, so we could tie the bag with one end and haul it into the tree. It was dark and we were crap shots, so it took about half an hour. But, eventually, we did it! And it turned out Elena was a sailor so we had the knots thing down. The camp was safe, thanks to us : )
So with our earplugs firmly wedged in our ears (when you’re in the woods, cracking twigs and rustling leaves can keep you up all night), and with the stars freckling the late night sky, we settled down to our first night in the wild. Tomorrow, we would conquer a mountain.
