Hikers Take Wrong Trail Descending Mount Cabot
December 22, 2005, a Thursday, was the first day of calendar winter, and as usual many winter hikers were out bagging the first winter peak of the season.
I was on a hike up Mount Cabot from Jefferson, and on the way down my group met a group of hikers, including an experienced hiker I know through online hiking bulletin boards, who goes by the trail name MtnMagic. His group had climbed the Bunnel Notch Trail from the Berlin Fish Hatchery. One of their trip reports, posted online, described an encounter after 9 p.m. between the Bunnel parking lot and the fish hatchery, when they met two men in their early 20s looking at a map with a headlamp. He asked them where they were headed, and they said to their car. The vehicle turned out to be on the Arthur Little Road, at the foot of the Mount Cabot Trail. The hiker drove them to their car.
I corresponded by email with MtnMagic to learn why they ended so far from their car. They had climbed the Mount Cabot Trail the previous day and, failing to locate an old warden’s cabin guidebooks describe, spent the night in bivy bags on the ridge. They went to the summit on Thursday and, for some reason, headed down the Kilkenny Ridge Trail to Unknown Pond. They then took the Unknown Pond Trail to York Pond Road. They were breaking trail in about 2 feet of snow all day. By the time they met MtnMagic’s group, it was 6:40 p.m. and they were about a mile east of the Bunnel Notch Trail parking area. They were under the impression that hitching to Berlin, several miles to the east, would place them closer to their car, which was several miles to the west. It was 23 degrees and getting colder.
Comment: It is hard to piece together the decision-making process that got them into this potentially very serious situation. The basic cause of their problems is clear: in winter there is little margin for the problems that arise when hikers do not know where they are going. Had MtnMagic not driven them to their car they would probably have spent a second cold night outdoors. In short, they were lucky.
There is no excuse for spending a night shivering in a bivy bag when you are close to a well-known cabin. The White Mountain Guide (Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 1998) mentions the old fire warden’s cabin, though it does not mention that it has several bunk beds and a wood stove. Stephen Smith and Mike Dickerman’s book, The 4000-Footers of the White Mountains (Bondcliff Books, 2001), points out that the cabin is open to the public for overnights. Of course, when planning to sleep outdoors in winter, it helps to have an adequately warm sleeping bag to avoid hypothermia or worse. The trail they had come up was broken. They must have known, breaking trail on the way down, that they were not returning the way they had come. Perhaps they took the Kilkenny Ridge Trail to climb The Bulge The Horn, two New England Hundred Highest peaks along this route. If that was what they intended, it would still have been much easier to go back to the top of Cabot on the now-broken trail and then down to their car, than to continue to Unknown Pond and York Pond Road through unbroken terrain. That they had no idea where they were at the bottom suggests that that was not their plan. I can only surmise that they wanted to explore the trail straight ahead, a bad idea in winter.
Done intelligently, winter hiking is a reasonably safe and very enjoyable experience. Done without adequate knowledge, it could kill you.
A full listing of Accident Reports may be found in the Winter/Spring 2007 issue of Appalachia.
- Mohamed Ellozy, "Accidents" Editor
