Skiing Down East

May 8, 1983, the Red Sox had the best record in the American League and Jim Rice was on a pace to hit 39 home runs. It was about that time I'd arranged to meet my brother-in-law at the Glen House for a day of skiing. Most Vermonters will travel east to ski Mt. Washington in April. Scott makes the trip every May.

 

Scott, far right. Tuckerman headwall. May 1981

                                                    Anne Getchell photo

A beautiful girl driving a Jaguar dropped him off, we rode the back of a pick-up to 5-Mile where we got a tow to 6-Mile from a bull-dozer working the cragway drift. We had a blast in the Great Gulf that day, having no idea the Sox would take a slide in June that made the Great Gulf look like a bunny hill. They finished the season next to last in the AL East.



Twenty-eight years later, May 8, 2011, the Red Sox are clawing their way out of the cellar. 6:30, Sunday morning, Scott answered my wake-up call in a Bartlett motel and met me at the Glen forty-five minutes later. He was eastbound to a job on Monhegan Island and along with his tools, he had a pile of World Cup race skis under a tarp in the back of his 1-ton. The skis were barter in a lumber deal he'd just made with Body Miller's uncle over in Franconia. Scott is a building-mover and has accumulated an impressive inventory of salvaged lumber and pedigree skis. He wore his customary steel-toed workboots, chore jacket, cotton hoodie and rigged his pack for a day on the mountain: skis, boots, a pocket full of raisens, and a little water would do.

Scott, summit cone. Mt. Washington 2011

At dawn the summit temperature was 30, north winds, and clear. Low pressure was moving up the coast and the NWS was calling for increasing clouds and showers by afternoon. By 8:30 we dropped our ride at Cutoff and began our hike under a little patch of blue. There were black clouds high over the Androscoggin Valley dropping shafts of rain not quite reaching the ground.

Nelson Guildersleeve's essay, "Mt. Washington Skiing in 1967 - The Year of All Winter and No Spring"  describes Great Gulf as "a magnificent and infrequently skied area." A federal wilderness area, the Great Gulf is still magnificant, and it has become very popular. The ski runs, formerly known as gullies 1 through 4, now have clever, figurative names: Turkey Chute, Spacewalk, Airplane, and Pipeline. If the weather cleared, we'd head there. Beyond there and ignored for years are two more runs, Hallway and Activator.

When we checked in at the base, the road manager shared a story about a hiker rescued from hypothermia on the mountain two days prior. Once down, the fellow disappeared without explanation. Now the authorities were trying to reckon with an abandoned tent found yesterday on the Cow Pasture tundra. When we got there, the mystery tent was still flapping in the breeze, filled with snow. If not the hypothermic guy's tent, might it belong to someone else in trouble?

An invesigation of the 7-mile Field scuttled a plan for those early turns, so we ambled on above Cow Pasture by the Great Gulf. The GG headwall was showing a boot ladder in Airplane Gully and some old turns on lower Activator, Pipeline, and Hallway, but no skiers today. The day's weather outlook would eventually put the kaibosh on going over there.

Skiing the East Fields

The "Easties" are the most reliable snowfields on the summit cone, the upshot of a snow-transport system powered by prevailing northwest winds. It's the same dynamic that loads the Tuckerman Ravine headwall, transfroming that cliff face into something many consider the ultimte run on the mountain, if not the entire Appalachian chain. Unlike the Tuck headwall, the East Fields are friendly-steep at about 30 degrees for 650 vertical feet.




Sugar-coated danishtla which
rolled down the East Field.

There are quite a few faux-Eskimo words for snow that have achieved mythical status. The irreverent lexicon goes something like this: tla (regular snow), pactla (packed snow), buftla (groomed snow)...ad infinitum. Today the East had a mix of shmutsiktlana, a Yiddish-Inuit poly-synthesis for dirty snow, and suctla, pockets of fresh, grab'n go snow. 

Scott obligingly put in the boot ladder which more than paid for his ride half-way up the mountain. Our  falline descents from the top rung of the climb ended midway along the Alpine Garden. We had the place to ourselves for the entire day.

The Alpine garden is a mile-high plateau and a small portion of what was an extensive mezozoic era tableland called the Presidential Upland. By mid-June, it is thirty acres of colorful tundra covered in thick carpets of tiny alpine flowers. Tarry here, you might find a cranberry snack (they're best after a good freeze), amethyst crystals, or the first maritime fossil to prove the Presidential Upland was once the mudflat of an ancient inland sea.   

boot toes, East Field, Alpine Garden, Wildcat, Maine

Swinging down the falline, lane changing left and left again leads to the Northeast Snowfield. This line will funnel into a long tongue of snow that pokes through parallel lobes of rock scraps. It pitches gently and narrows as it reaches for the rim of Huntington Ravine, never quite getting there. It's a good connection to the bottom of the Seven Mile Snowfield. We exited this way, walked 500' to the base of 7 Mile Field, climbed it, skied it, and climbed it again to Cow pasture for the road down.
 
Five-o-clock, we were walking pavement. The morning's virga hanging over the Andro Valley was long gone, and the outline of Saddleback, Sugarloaf, and Abraham was low on the horizon. We were just done skid-shuffling a few hundred feet of snow through the cutoff, cheating the dreaded posthole, when around a corner and 200' east of the path was an ancient wall. It was crusty with lichen, plainly laid up a long time ago. Was it evidence of another abandoned struggle with the weather? We were likely near the old bridal path used by Dr. Ball in 1855 when he became hopelessly lost, spending two nights out under his umbrella in an October snowstorm. I'll get back to the wall this summer. Ten more minutes, we picked up our ride; happy, tired, not a storm in sight.

slate-colored junco. Happy Mother's Day Mom.