The Feathered Hat
Active member
My dad wasn't a hiker. I learned hiking and backpacking with my buddies when we were teens. Dad was born and raised in North Dakota, so perhaps his lack of interest in hiking was cultural and thus understandable. Once when we were visiting Dad's hometown when I was a kid, I found a poster which consisted of a flat, straight line across the middle of gray paper, broken only by a fence line. The punchline caption: "Ski North Dakota," which perfectly summed up North Dakota's ironic variety of elevations.
But Dad seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in my mountain experiences. It wasn't until many years later, when I had children of my own, that I fully understood what it meant to Dad, and my mother too, when they dropped me and two friends off at Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park so we could begin, on our own, a 100-mile, two-week backpack down the spine of the High Sierra -- we were boys, just 16 years old, yet somehow we had given our parents confidence that we knew what we were doing in the wilderness.
There was a day, too, in June of 2007 when Dad, now old and carrying worn-out hips and the tiredness of eight decades, and I rode the tram together to the top of Cannon Mountain, and while he poked around the tramhouse and took in the beautiful view across Franconia Notch and waited for the tram back down, I walked down the Kinsman Ridge Trail. When we were back together at the bottom we sat together on the bench outside the doors to the tram building, and he noted the new dirt and scuffing on my boots and my sweat-streaked face. Once again I thought I heard, like a flatted seventh, that mysterious note of slight disapproval that sons always hear in the voices of their fathers. On that day Dad seemed both near and far away, as older people often do, and indeed it was the last day I saw him alive. The next evening he died of a heart attack -- almost perfectly, if there can be such a thing: He had just made himself a bowl of fresh strawberries, adding sugar and a little salt, which is the North Dakota way, and had sat down in his favorite chair to finish watching a Red Sox game on TV. By the time my stepmother came downstairs, after hearing a noise, Dad was gone.
Being from North Dakota and being Norwegian, Dad's emotional range was, well, finite. We had our arguments, as sons and fathers must; we pretty much stopped talking about politics entirely during the Vietnam War. But after he died and we were moving his things from the house, my brother-in-law and I noticed how heavy one of the bottom desk drawers in Dad's big desk was, and it turned out that it was stuffed with magazines -- Dad had kept every copy of every issue of The Economist in which an article of mine had appeared. And so in this way, so often just a little too late, sons learn of the admiration of their fathers.
I was remembering these things, on yesterday's bright, beautiful Memorial Day (and remembering much about my late mother too, who died back in 1979), as my dog Tuckerman and I made our way up the Skookumchuck Trail toward the summit of Mt. Lafayette. This trail, more than any other in the Whites that I know well, completely transforms itself from season to season, especially in the lower couple of miles where the route passes through a dense hardwood/broadleaf forest. The last time I climbed the Skook there was still plenty of snow, yet now I walked by landmarks that, engulfed by spring's green brilliance and a billion bursting leaves, I hardly recognized. One season sails into the next and the next and the next, the cycle of four gathering within the ring of a year like points on the compass. The longboat of life, a Viking ship heading into the misty west, moves across the waves and swells of each season on the long journey into a remarkable unknown, directed only by the compass at hand.
Though there were three cars in the lot at the Skook trailhead, Tuck and I didn't meet anyone until we had reached the end of the Skook where it meets the Garfield Ridge Trail, and then we joined the usual crowd crawling along Lafayette's rocky shoulder. A stiff, cold wind made the going a bit of a challenge, though not for Tuck: a dog, especially a Lab-esque hound like Tuckerman, is rather more aerodynamically designed for wind than upright humans, who are as buffeted and wind-whipped as stop signs in a storm. As I bent into each snapping gust, Tuckerman bounded over the ridge's boulders and stones like Gollum ambling up the steep backstairs into Mordor. Even soft-faced dogs can summon that flatted blues note as needed: Tuckerman would glance back at me every so often, his eyes stating the obvious. Why just two legs when four are so much better?
We found a handful of negligible patches of snow, maybe six in all, every one easily walked across save one, which is an icy patch at the bottom of a short, steep rocky pitch at about 4,100 feet elevation. These will surely all be gone within days. Much more frequent, especially in the lower miles, were traps of mud, a couple of them deep enough to be boot-suckers. A cloud of mosquitoes greeted us at the trailhead, but those were the last we encountered. We weren't bothered at all by black flies.
We were six hours on the trail, including rests, lunch, stops for photos and stops for a couple of trailside visits with other wind-chilled hikers. We returned home in time for the closing innings of a ballgame on the tube and a cold beer while the sun still shone on the back deck, where Cindy had been planting the summer's garden in planters. The forecast called for frost, so we gathered the protective covers and boxes -- winter never completely leaves the mountains. One season sails into the next, but no season, and no one, is ever entirely gone.
Photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99682097@N00/sets/72157618790213348/
Steve B
The Feathered Hat
[email protected]
______________________________________
Tuckerman's report for dogs:
Excellent boulders for climbing.
Lots of water for drinking down low, not so much up high. Be prepared.
Mud!
Wind! My ears flapped like flags.
Old moose poop. Turkey poop. Patches of snow to roll in!
***.* Three-and-a-half sniffs (out of four). Tuck-Dog says check it out.
But Dad seemed to take a vicarious pleasure in my mountain experiences. It wasn't until many years later, when I had children of my own, that I fully understood what it meant to Dad, and my mother too, when they dropped me and two friends off at Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park so we could begin, on our own, a 100-mile, two-week backpack down the spine of the High Sierra -- we were boys, just 16 years old, yet somehow we had given our parents confidence that we knew what we were doing in the wilderness.
There was a day, too, in June of 2007 when Dad, now old and carrying worn-out hips and the tiredness of eight decades, and I rode the tram together to the top of Cannon Mountain, and while he poked around the tramhouse and took in the beautiful view across Franconia Notch and waited for the tram back down, I walked down the Kinsman Ridge Trail. When we were back together at the bottom we sat together on the bench outside the doors to the tram building, and he noted the new dirt and scuffing on my boots and my sweat-streaked face. Once again I thought I heard, like a flatted seventh, that mysterious note of slight disapproval that sons always hear in the voices of their fathers. On that day Dad seemed both near and far away, as older people often do, and indeed it was the last day I saw him alive. The next evening he died of a heart attack -- almost perfectly, if there can be such a thing: He had just made himself a bowl of fresh strawberries, adding sugar and a little salt, which is the North Dakota way, and had sat down in his favorite chair to finish watching a Red Sox game on TV. By the time my stepmother came downstairs, after hearing a noise, Dad was gone.
Being from North Dakota and being Norwegian, Dad's emotional range was, well, finite. We had our arguments, as sons and fathers must; we pretty much stopped talking about politics entirely during the Vietnam War. But after he died and we were moving his things from the house, my brother-in-law and I noticed how heavy one of the bottom desk drawers in Dad's big desk was, and it turned out that it was stuffed with magazines -- Dad had kept every copy of every issue of The Economist in which an article of mine had appeared. And so in this way, so often just a little too late, sons learn of the admiration of their fathers.
I was remembering these things, on yesterday's bright, beautiful Memorial Day (and remembering much about my late mother too, who died back in 1979), as my dog Tuckerman and I made our way up the Skookumchuck Trail toward the summit of Mt. Lafayette. This trail, more than any other in the Whites that I know well, completely transforms itself from season to season, especially in the lower couple of miles where the route passes through a dense hardwood/broadleaf forest. The last time I climbed the Skook there was still plenty of snow, yet now I walked by landmarks that, engulfed by spring's green brilliance and a billion bursting leaves, I hardly recognized. One season sails into the next and the next and the next, the cycle of four gathering within the ring of a year like points on the compass. The longboat of life, a Viking ship heading into the misty west, moves across the waves and swells of each season on the long journey into a remarkable unknown, directed only by the compass at hand.
Though there were three cars in the lot at the Skook trailhead, Tuck and I didn't meet anyone until we had reached the end of the Skook where it meets the Garfield Ridge Trail, and then we joined the usual crowd crawling along Lafayette's rocky shoulder. A stiff, cold wind made the going a bit of a challenge, though not for Tuck: a dog, especially a Lab-esque hound like Tuckerman, is rather more aerodynamically designed for wind than upright humans, who are as buffeted and wind-whipped as stop signs in a storm. As I bent into each snapping gust, Tuckerman bounded over the ridge's boulders and stones like Gollum ambling up the steep backstairs into Mordor. Even soft-faced dogs can summon that flatted blues note as needed: Tuckerman would glance back at me every so often, his eyes stating the obvious. Why just two legs when four are so much better?
We found a handful of negligible patches of snow, maybe six in all, every one easily walked across save one, which is an icy patch at the bottom of a short, steep rocky pitch at about 4,100 feet elevation. These will surely all be gone within days. Much more frequent, especially in the lower miles, were traps of mud, a couple of them deep enough to be boot-suckers. A cloud of mosquitoes greeted us at the trailhead, but those were the last we encountered. We weren't bothered at all by black flies.
We were six hours on the trail, including rests, lunch, stops for photos and stops for a couple of trailside visits with other wind-chilled hikers. We returned home in time for the closing innings of a ballgame on the tube and a cold beer while the sun still shone on the back deck, where Cindy had been planting the summer's garden in planters. The forecast called for frost, so we gathered the protective covers and boxes -- winter never completely leaves the mountains. One season sails into the next, but no season, and no one, is ever entirely gone.
Photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99682097@N00/sets/72157618790213348/
Steve B
The Feathered Hat
[email protected]
______________________________________
Tuckerman's report for dogs:
Excellent boulders for climbing.
Lots of water for drinking down low, not so much up high. Be prepared.
Mud!
Wind! My ears flapped like flags.
Old moose poop. Turkey poop. Patches of snow to roll in!
***.* Three-and-a-half sniffs (out of four). Tuck-Dog says check it out.
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