New Hampshire's 4,000-Footers in Winter

Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2006

In December 2003, I set alone to climb New Hampshire’s forty-eight 4,000-footers. That’s the story of my winter — or at least the trajectory of it. There are the facts, of course, and the numbers: 22 hikes, 48 mountains, 283.1 total miles. Sometimes in crampons; sometimes in snowshoes; sometimes as a post-holing fool. At times, I encountered dangerous conditions; always, there was the bone-tingling cold. On twenty of my twenty-two hikes, I saw not a soul. On forty-three of the summits I reached, I stood half-stalwart, half-shivering, half-achingly alone. As my wife put it, I was untethered and uncompanioned. I didn’t set out to accomplish anything; I simply freed myself for the mountains.

To go up into the desolate isolation of mountains into what one can only call the mountains’ truest interior is to know the nature of isolation itself — that ineffable, unmappable place where the tree will sometimes fall, and space and time recede. Where knowledge, and the urge for knowledge, falls away. When you add in winter, you are forced to consider what it truly means to be alone. Alone in the mountains in winter, you become something apart, something sheathed. The Latin, insula, from which our “isolation” derives, nicely describes a blanketing of snow across a landscape.

What was lost: weight; feeling in toes and several critical fingers (damage unretractable); any sense of imperiousness or brashness, or of needing to be somewhere fast; and any notion that I could be more than a momentary presence in a landscape unhumanly grand.

What was gained is harder to measure. Perspective: everything in the winter mountains enlarges, intensifies. You learn to see and appreciate all you might have missed in balmier times — shapes, contours, peculiar outcroppings of detritus and rock. Even abstractions become clearer: elevation gain and the nuances of up. The ramifications — you feel it in your legs — of traverse. I learned to fall. l gained the talent of wanting nothing in particular, save an occasional swallow of water or the gift of a morning without wind.

I’d arrive at a trailhead at 4:00 A.M. — nothing around but cold and my ownmost dread of it. Like a man being parent to himself, I would force myself to get a move on. There was always a reluctance to get going: I had almost to throw myself into it. But I was never quite sure I had the strength or the temerity to go forward. In winter mountains, your sense of going is summarily diminished to the commonplace one small step at a time. But small steps become motion, and motion pulls. I was a man determined to push onward without ever knowing where onward might lead.

If I could give reasons — if I could say I did it because — I’m fairly sure no one would be in the slightest way interested or edified. I have always appreciated wild places, and since I was about knee-high have favored solitude over company, thought over action, nature over — no offense — humankind.

But why again and again? Thoreau says curiosity is the highest form of knowledge, and that’s good enough for me. At root I was curious: I wanted to see what things looked like in winter. And I wanted to see if I could do it, if I had in me something of the Spenserian knight errant — a character who takes on travail while another (a warm, hearthside reader, say) observes from safer vantage. Whatever adventure or mishap befell me would be altogether my own. I could leave footprints — runelike — for some other winter walker to find, ponder, and decode. I was going out and up into winter because it seemed the only way to discover what was actually there.

The climbing of mountains never ends, because climbing is continuous: you go up and over, and up and over again. This repetition, driven by the need to climb again, is hard to explain. No true mountaineer heads upward in a spirit of conquest — a heavily laden term burdened by implications of against. Rather, the climbing itself is the main event, and the randomness of climbing is part of its attractiveness.

When I reached my forty-eighth and final winter summit in the Whites, the magnetic Mount Hale, I felt a certain elation of attainment. But I was also overcome by a nagging sense that completion was the least fulfilling thing of all. Two hours later, exhausted and thawing in my slow-warming car, I wanted only to get back up there.

The full text of this story may be found in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of Appalachia.

- Timothy Muskat is a poet and former English professor who lives in Sandwich, New Hampshire, with his wife and their two sons. In 2003-4, after recovering from serious back surgery, he climbed all forty-eight of New Hampshire's 4,000-footers in a single winter - and last winter went out and did it again. He plans to try his luck a third time this winter, because "they're beautiful, they're out there, and they're calling me."