by Babz Clough
Longlisted in the 2024 PureTravel Writing Competition
The bare trees sway in the light breeze that make fantastical shadows on the recent snow, still mostly pristine along the well-packed trail to Zealand Hut in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This is the perfect winter weather for a short hike into the AMC hut. The temperature hovers just at the freezing point, enough to keep the snowpack firm but not so bitter that my tears freeze on my cheeks. With an intermittent light breeze and the blazing sun in a cloudless sky, Marina and I couldn’t ask for more. It was only a couple of hours into the hut, where we could drop our packs, have a quick lunch, and take some short hikes out to the falls and higher elevations before the short winter days forced us back to shelter.
Since Marina had moved out west to the high desert of New Mexico, we hadn’t been able to hike together, so her visit east is an opportunity to do an overnight trip up a relatively easy mountain. And the weather is cooperating, not always a given in the tempestuous New England climate and especially in the White Mountains where storms sweep in and out with great rapidity.
There are only a few of us in the hut that night, not unusual for winter camping. The cold keeps away all but the hardiest hikers and there are limited services in the winter, so we have to pack in and pack out all our own supplies. Not a problem for a simple overnight trip but heavy enough. With dark closing in early, we drop our packs on the bunks, and snowshoe out to Zealand Falls, monochromatic white and gray ripples and stalactites hanging over the boulder edges, as if a cold wind had whipped through, freezing it in motion. A soft silvery mist drops over the surrounding mountains as the sun falls behind the hills.
About 3 AM, I walk out on the deck that connects the sleeping areas of the hut to the composting toilets, the night quiet but with a faint murmuring in the background. Probably just the wind in the trees. For the middle of the night in January, the air is surprisingly mild and soft, lacking the cold bite of winter we had experienced during our hike in the previous day. I’m in my wool socks and hut shoes, but I almost don’t need them as I pause on the deck for a few minutes, a world of stars and dark shapes surrounding me. I hear that soft roaring again, but in the moonless night, I can’t figure out where it’s coming from. Not a breath of wind stirs around me. I shrug knowing that at 3 AM, there’s no chance I’m going to go exploring.
We’re up with the rising sun the next morning, ready to get in a few short hikes before we head back down that afternoon to our cars. I step outside with my coffee and realize what the roaring noise was that puzzled me in the dark night – overnight the temperature had jumped from the freezing 30s to the mid-50s. That soft roaring noise I had heard in the middle of the night wasn’t wind; it was the Zealand Falls letting loose in an unexpected thaw and a winter’s worth of ice and snow was racing down the mountain.
‘If you’re planning on getting out of here, go now,’ the hut master tells us. ‘As this melt continues, there will be flooding all along the trail, especially in the lower grounds, and you need to go now or stay here for another day until the worst is over.’
Marina and I decide to go – neither of us is prepared for a two-night stay and she has a flight out the next day. We leave our excess food with the hut master, toss everything else into our packs and slide down the steep bit of the trail that links us to the longer trail below. Yesterday, when we’d climbed up to the hut, we had to use our microspikes to get our footing on the slide, as it’s called. Today, the slide is already turning to slush. We shoulder our packs, and start making our way down a trail that only 24 hours earlier was frozen solid, the snowpack a few feet deep and tramped down. Now, if we stay right in the very center of the trail, where hundreds of feet have packed it down solid, the warm run off from the night hasn’t yet had a chance to wash it away. We make good time, but the air is warming, too warm so we layer off, tie it on top of our packs and keep moving, but suddenly Marina misses a step, a few inches too far to the left, and she post-holes up to her hip. I balance carefully, grabbing her pack, while she struggles to pull her foot free from the slush that’s now running underneath the packed trail. I see momentary panic in her face, water seeping into her boot, but we’re experienced winter hikers.
‘We’ve got this honey,’ I say, ‘hold my pole. I’ll hold up your pack.’ I’m afraid if her boot fills with the snowmelt, it’ll be that much heavier and then we’ll be dealing with potential frostbite as well as flooding and we’ve got a few more miles of trail to go. Even as the water is flooding down, we know we just need to make it to the old quarry road, but it’s the melting trails that are the danger.
Then comes the real problem.
What had been small rivulets of run-off the day before are now wide rushing streams of melted, barreling down off the top of the mountain. These small rivulets are now wide and ballooning puddles, shallow but treacherous, because there’s ice under the rushing water. Sometimes the ice is visible, not yet melted, not something I want to slip on with a heavy pack and a few more miles of downhill ahead of me. If we try to ford in our boots and snowshoes, there’s always the potential of falling in and risking hypothermia as well as soaking our packs. At the first pond, one that hadn’t been there during our ascent the previous day, we create a meshy bridge, grabbing broken tree branches and small branches from the surrounding woods so that we can create a little bit more ‘shore line’ that will get us about half way across a puddle that is now nearly ten-feet across and eight or ten inches deep of rushing water. With my snowshoes and pack off, I dash madly across the shifting mat of branches and twigs, but I just kept moving, taking a long leap onto the mostly still solid snow on the other side. If I paused, I’d be knee deep in freezing run off.
‘Toss the packs over,’ I tell Marina and with all her strength from recent workouts, she unerringly tossed those packs to my feet. Wet packs are annoying but wet bodies are the greater danger. As Marina gets ready to step out on our makeshift pad, I say.
‘Once you get on it, just don’t stop. If you feel it shifting under your feet, keep moving. I’ll grab your hand and pull you. You’ve got this.’
‘Oh my god, oh my god, I thought I was going in,’ she gasps as I grab her hand and yank her onto the bank with me, both of us falling backward into a snow pile.
‘We’re good. Pretty unnerving when the ‘floor’ moves, right?’ I say.
With our snowshoes off, we slip on microspikes, and pick up the pace as the water continues to pour off the mountain, the temperature now up into the high fifties. There is water everywhere. Over the next couple of hours we create variations of our tree and twig mattrs or we follow a creek up one side or down, looking for a narrowing where we can cross without risk of falling in or searching out rock bridges that aren’t covered in ice and are still fordable. As we get closer to the quarry road, we are less worried and more confident in our ability to navigate the ever-widening mini-ponds and rushing creeks as the weather continues to warm. Each mile we descend, the runoff gets heavier, the sun high in the sky and as warm as a spring day.
As the old road comes into view, Marina gives me a big hug, saying ‘We’ve got this.’ And we do. It’s still another hour or two to the car, but we stop, put on some dry socks, get some fruit and nuts and coffee into us. The dirt road we’ll follow down to the parking area is a mud-track instead of a gravel road, with small streams flowing along the sides but the worst of the melt is behind us. There’s an exodus of other hikers and campers coming off the mountains, and almost no one heading up into the hills. Winter hiking is not for the faint of heart or the unprepared and Marina and I were neither. Yet even with the most meticulous preparation, extra food and water, plenty of dry clothes, mother nature always reminds us of who is in charge when we head out into the woods in the winter.
Reaching the car, we stripped down, put on dry clothes that we’d stowed in the trunk, and headed to the nearest diner for a big breakfast and a chance to rehash our descent, as all good hikers do.
