Outdoors

Most days, I would like to walk up a mountain

/ Joshua B. Kay / 5 Comments

On the summer day that I hiked it, there were a lot of people at the top of Mt. Chocorua in the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains. I was surprised to see them, because I didn’t hear them from down below, even as I neared the summit. The entire way up the mountain, I had seen a tiny handful of people, yet here were much more than a handful. Most had come up the trail on the other side, and though I knew the mountain was popular, I had no idea that I’d end up among so many people. Groups, some quite large, were sitting all over the boulder-strewn top. A few dogs cavorted among them, showing off their four-wheel-drive agility on the rocks. Despite my surprise and even disappointment at seeing so much humanity so suddenly after such a quiet hike, I also felt the companionability common to hikers. As I reached the top, several nodded and greeted me. I spent a few minutes wandering the mountaintop, making sure to tap my toe on the U.S. Geological Survey summit marker, and eventually settled on a spot facing the Presidential Range to eat my lunch.

Winter-related hazards can await in Tuckerman Ravine, even in late June.

Winter-related hazards can await in Tuckerman Ravine, even in late June.

Mt. Washington’s broad shoulders were visible, though the peak was lost in gray clouds. In a line from Mt. Washington, I thought I could make out Mt. Monroe’s asymmetrical peak and Mt. Eisenhower’s domed pate, and I thought about standing atop each just over a month earlier. The White Mountains of New Hampshire are beautiful and rugged and unpredictable. Though they lack the altitude of the Sierras, Cascades, or Rockies, I sometimes describe them the way I describe certain basketball players: they play taller than their height. They spring from fairly low-lying surroundings, making for plenty of elevation gain. And they sit at a spot where significant weather patterns converge. Dangerously high winds are possible on the ridges and peaks, particularly in the Presidential Range; even when not dangerous, the wind is almost always strong. Clouds can roll in and descend in an instant, taking visibility down to nearly nothing and making you grateful that the high-elevation trails are marked by huge cairns. Those clouds can chill you to the bone, and sudden snowstorms have occurred even in the summer months. Hypothermia is a constant threat. The tree line dips below 4,000 feet. Jutting upward to meet the wind and storms, the mountains help make the weather, and the weather, in turn, remakes the mountains.

Experiencing the Whites is about the weather and so much more. The hikes up to the peaks and ridges run through beautiful forests and along swift streams before bursting above tree line into fields of boulders. On the ridges that run between the peaks, the views on either side stretch out before you in a magnificent quilt of rocks and trees that runs to the next set of mountains. Nestled below the shoulders of Mt. Washington are two vast, steep bowls: Tuckerman Ravine and Huntington Ravine. Curved and oriented perfectly to capture winter storms, Tuckerman develops a tremendous snowpack during the winter, and the trail up the headwall doesn’t open until approximately midsummer. Huntington is steeper, harsher, riven and jagged. The hike up it is considered one of the most challenging in the Whites; hiking down is too difficult and dangerous for most. Roughly between the two ravines runs a trail through the Alpine Garden, a rocky meadow of sedges marked by a variety of alpine flowers, the likes of which I’ve only seen at much higher altitudes in the Sierras, Cascades, and Rockies.

Tuckerman Ravine from the ranger station near its base.

Tuckerman Ravine from the ranger station near its base.

The trails up to the ridges and peaks of the Whites have very few switchbacks. They just go up, which sounds practical enough when I write it here but can feel kind of insane when you’re actually hiking. When I was in high school in Los Angeles, where we were perhaps a little too “blessed” by interesting geological features and events, one of my best friends and I frequently went hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Santa Monicas run right to the sea, and parts of them – even near the city – are remote enough that you can lose yourself in them. That’s all we wanted to do. One of our favorite hikes started on the Chumash Trail, an old Chumash Indian route that shot straight up to a ridge from the coast on a thin ribbon of soil through low brush and prickly pear. No switchbacks. Trails in the Whites are like that, too, but longer and far rockier. On the Chumash, I was always surprised to turn around after just a little while, quads and calves burning, and see that the car already looked tiny far below next to the grey of the Pacific Coast Highway, the yellow sand, and the sparkling ocean. In the Whites, the surprise comes as you suddenly emerge above tree line into the alpine domain, and you turn and take in a view that makes you wonder why you hadn’t done all of this sooner.

Most days, I would like to walk up a mountain. That feeling started for me in Yosemite National Park and the Mammoth Lakes region of the Sierras, and it continued in the Santa Monicas and Lassen Volcanic National Park and the Cascades and the Rockies. The Whites have found a place in my heart, too, even though my experience of them is limited to just a couple of trips. I plan to take many more over the years, including this summer.

It is rare for a day to go by without me thinking about how nice it would be to be heading upward.

Closing 2012 in the Georgia mountains

/ Joshua B. Kay / Leave a comment

My in-laws’ roof is pounded tin, painted rust-colored, rippled and folded where the panels connect. The rain of the north Georgia mountains swooshes and swats on it, tapping a rhythm that backs the wind’s high drone around the peaks and eaves of the roof. A storm sounds like popping corn – first pops tentative and irregular, then the squall of pops so rapid that it gets hard to distinguish among them, then slowing again, rap… rap rap… rap… rap… into silence.

Over the triple-peaked mountain visible across their property – stand on the wrap-around porch and look down the slope of the lawn, past the split rail fence and gravel drive, across the pond, then beyond the neighbor’s orchards and the expanse of land after the town road to the mountain, whose very base is just about visible in the winter – the changing clouds tell the story of the verdure of this slice of the country as they bring wetness in all its forms. Giant black thunder-heads in the summer, the high, light gray of a steady spring rain, the dark enveloping gray of a winter storm, the humps of the peaks disappearing one by one in the lowering mist, the world obscured.

Cocks crow nearby. Cattle bellow over at another farm. A coyote once peeked in slyly through the low windows of the former back porch converted into an art studio where my mother-in-law paints. The dog can’t be let out alone at night. Life is everywhere.

Image

Just after Christmas, an old friend of my wife came up from Atlanta to see us, and we took a walk on a path that my father-in-law cut. He has created shrines along that path, little places of memory and reflection placed every so often to remind him of people and moments past and present. His children and grandchildren are in those places. Friends abound. Rocks and plants are placed just so, and there are several bird houses. My in-laws are great lovers of bird houses. Everywhere there is life. Small birds flit from branch to branch, twittering. A hawk or falcon – the glare of the sun and my eyesight conspire to rob me of any chance of identification – banks over the orchard. Farther away, several turkey vultures circle, keen observers of impending death. I turn away from them, back to the explosion of life nearer at hand. Soft, furry moss spreads over hummocks of reddish earth. Some sort of clubmoss with little trident-shaped sprouts bobs and nods in Seussian style, with contrasting dark vinca nestled underneath and all around. Grasses sprout in tufts. Trees are everywhere, and rhododendrons provide pockets of shade.

Where there is so much life, there must be water, and indeed a creek winds through, flowing and trickling down the hillside and underneath wooden bridges greened slick by moss. Scaly, grey-green nets of lichen give texture to tree trunks and stones. The air smells wet and like old plants leaving life behind and new ones gaining strength. Wet stone throws off mineral scents and I wonder if that’s what wine lovers are referring to when they use the term “mineral” in their tasting notes. If you looked at the creek water under a microscope, you would see a whole living, respiring world that is no less busy and alive and simultaneously symbiotic and competitive than the visible one all along the path. Everywhere are birth and death and the in-between thing that we hang on to as long as we can.

I walk the path along the creek, the water burbling softly. Here and there, the water disappears for a few meters below ground, then springs back into the open to sing and shimmer again. It has carved a small canyon for itself, and the path follows the ridge above. Past the wooden bridge that connects the path on this side with the portion on the other, and past one more shrine – this one has the look of a small labyrinth in stones, and the way some are sinking into the soft earth makes it look ancient and mysterious – the path terminates at an ordinary wire fence. The property line, abrupt and angular. The creek bed winds beyond, but the wild woods quickly peter out. There is a house with a regular lawn, then a few buildings and the old highway leading into town. I stand at the fence and follow the small gash of the creek bed with my eyes. I can’t see where it runs past the buildings. The land rises on the other side of the highway, and I guess that somewhere up there is the origin of the creek. I want to see it, the spot where water perhaps flows right out of the earth itself and starts something that goes on to nourish so much life down below.

ImageI go back to the bridge and cross it to the path on the other side. More moss and trees, more memorials, more birdhouses. Some copper and tin figurines, variously tarnished bright green and rust red. I come out of the woods, and the vultures are gone from the sky. I think that if I were to walk into the orchard or a bit beyond, I would find them at their meal.