Mountain Everything - by Chris McCarvill

Giant clouds swept across the sharp summits and dove down the steep angles of the ravine like waterfalls of sky. I stood on a rough timber deck outside the cabin at the bottom of Tuckerman Ravine holding onto a freezing metal railing so as not to get swept away with the clouds. I marvelled at how steep the mountains shot straight up from here, like being at the base of a giant cathedral. The jagged gray rocks and mysterious twisted green trees climbing almost endlessly into the sky put my ten year old imagination into overdrive. This wasn’t just a kingdom, this was an entire world! I knew that once I started ascending into the steeps, there would be fantastical creatures who would help you unlock ancient geographic secrets, deep tunnels to explore fraught with evil, slimy, bat winged apparitions, and on the other side, clear pools the color of sky ringed with several beckoning nubile, singing wood nymphs, their long shiny hair and lazy wrists bending to stir the water like willow branches.

Hey, gimme a break, I was ten.

My introduction to real mountain climbing was with my father, my uncle and cousins. My dad and uncle, being identical twins, had similar sensibilities about bringing their children out into the great outdoors. Having mountain climbed since they were kids, they had amassed a collection of slides...yes, as in slide projector...of the various trips they had taken over the years and had created a slideshow for us kids to check out and ask questions about. There was also a detailed list of the types of food to bring, since everyone needed to carry their own food and supplies, food needed to be light, and usually that meant powdered milk, dehydrated stew, etc. My dad and uncle also gave us a list of the training we would need to do to be able to even handle the whole adventure. Every morning, I would get up with my father and exercise. Step ups, sit ups, push ups. All this created quite a windup to the actual excursion in my mind. This combined with my dad letting me read his Lord of the Rings books made it so I could only imagine what kind of adventures would be waiting for us all once we actually got there.

After a solid month of training, the morning of our adventure arrived. It was tradition with my dad and uncle to wake up at around 4:30 am, get everything loaded and hit the road for the six hour drive by five in the morning or so. So, in pre dawn of a summer morning, the entire fellowship headed north, stopping for breakfast at an old trucker breakfast place somewhere in Massachusetts, another traditional part of the trip. Everyone was ordered to eat as much as possible, as this was to be our final “real” meal for the next four days.

As we drew nearer to the White Mountains, on the kankamanous highway, I could see the world changing. The horizon line was no longer flat, like it had been for my whole life in southern Connecticut. There were huge green and gray mountains looming in the distance, the “kank” winding it’s way through switchbacks and steep passes with really incredible views. The trees were bigger here, more pine trees. The air was colder, clearer, and pine scented. We were closer to the sky here.

We weighed our packs at Pinkham Notch’s ancient spring scale, mine being maybe 15 pounds, an old army issue wood frame pack with cotton straps. I’ll remember that thing for the rest of my life. My dad and uncle would shoulder the extra food and weight for us kids. From here we could see the steep summits of the tallest mountains up above the trees, knowing that we would be up there in the next days, looking down probably to this very spot.

Before I knew it, we were off and to the green world of the first trail. We would reach crystal cascades, a roaring waterfall and I already felt as if I’d walked miles. We hiked an old fireroad, built in the 30’s. We stopped and filled our canteens right out of the river. We didn’t worry about impurities in the water back then.

It was six miles of gradually ascending boulder-laden trail to the cabin at the base of Tuckerman ravine. To my 10 year old legs, I thought it was a total nightmare, but dad kept reassuring me that it would be a lot different tomorrow. It was truly amazing to reach the headwall of Tuckerman for the first time. Tuckerman is a vertical glacial bowl with an 800 foot steep cliff face that skiiers from all over the world come up to challenge. Even in August, there was still twelve feet of snow in the gullies of the headwall. We would be climbing it tomorrow.

We reserved a lean-to, which is a three-walled structure with a roof, where we could sleep, set up our little stoves, and prepare for the “real” part of our adventure. It was unusual having one wall exposed like that. Couldn’t the talking black bears come and take people back to their torchlight caves at night?

There were very few people around. It fascinated me to see these other hikers with specific technical gear for snow climbing, brightly colored and dangerous looking foot spikes and bladed tomahawks and carabineers. Usually these people looked edgy and limber, smiling adrenaline junkies, and then there would be the solid, quiet people who were slowly hiking the appalachian trail which started in Florida and ended in Maine. Their legs looked like giant tree trunks, their eyes like placid pools.Their steps were slow, deliberate and unyielding. Adventure was everywhere, that’s why we were all here, right?

The next morning, the clouds and mist obscured the summits, and I wandered off on my own to look at the steep spires all around whenever the clouds would break. It looked like rock towers were shifting through the sky. After an “interesting” breakfast of cereal, which you ate out of the little box it came in, opened with a sharp hunting knife, powdered milk poured right in... we packed up everything and set out to conquer Tuckerman.

Soon the sun had burned off the mist and some of the clouds, but as we ascended, clouds would sometimes avalanche over the lip of Tuckerman, gain a ton of speed over the twelve feet of snow on the headwall and come charging into our little fellowship, dropping the temperature at least thirty degrees in seconds. It would just as quickly pass through us, leaving us refreshed, and iced.

The trees began to recede, and the vertical rock pillars became dominant. We continued up the side of the headwall next to that huge iceberg. Thirty degree winds would come blowing across the snow, and in the direct summer heat, it was always welcomed. There were organic, fractal forms of blue-white ice over the wet granite blackness of the rocks. The trail got steeper than stairs. Sometimes it would be straight up. Soon we would be above the treeline, where there isn’t enough oxygen for trees to grow. Here’s where the views are, and the pure, unbroken force of mother nature.

We’d risen above the snow into a gray, craggy world which I was sure was inhabited by the nastiest of trolls. All broken rock, lichen, I imagined their scrawly bodies with skin make out of the same stuff that we traveled on. There were still verticals to climb, and lots of sprawling views between the sheets of clouds now racing around us, through us, like a school of stingrays. We could watch them dive over the lip and down Tuckerman. I’d never been on foot and above the clouds before.

Many people die from exposure up here, as we were reminded by several wooden signs, with deeply engraved letters, as paint wouldn’t even survive the snow, sleet and over 200 mph winds. On our day, it was just windy and cloudy, but the air was so clean it was like drinking the purest water. We made our way up to the Summit of Mount Washington, which is accessible via the Cog Railway or by a regular road for cars. There’s a visitor center on the summit, and is a tourist destination, but it was really cool to have made the journey on foot, and interesting to see the way the tourists looked at our weatherbeaten fellowship with what might have been a little envy.

Yes, there were times on the trip where I couldn’t handle my pack, times I was beyond exhausted. My uncle would hike at what seemed to be a million miles an hour, my dad was patient and kept my kid pace. No, I didn’t meet up with any dragons, or wood nymphs. I had seen their dwelling places, their structures disguised as rock formations, an intricate tangle of tree roots, or under the cover of crystal waterfalls. But mountain adventures to this day keep me looking out of the corner of my eye, and wether it’s my new favorite, mountain biking, or skiing, snowboarding, or simply exploring, I'll always feel that pull to look up to the mountains for the out of the ordinary.

I wonder if my dad knows what he passed on to me. I wonder what I’ll be passing on to my son, as when he’s 10, it will be his turn too.