Publications

AMC Outdoors, May 1997

By Jim Collins

After four years on trail crew, trail master Sam Hoffman finally gave in to curiosity and weighed his pack. It was his last chance to know just how much he’d been lugging all these years. He could be forgiven if he was already feeling sentimental. By tradition, the trail crew would split into two groups for the final week of the summer. One group would include the trail master and third-year crew members only — a last blast for the veterans, of sorts, and one last chance to work together, to say goodbye. The scale tipped just over a hundred pounds. That weight didn’t include the two pick mattocks and the 18-lb. bar he’d carry by hand.

Around Pinkham, everybody called Sam "Jed." Trail crew members make up their own names for fun; seems they don’t care much about the real ones anyway. But they care a lot about strength, and they respect weight. Former Trails Supervisor Dave Salisbury still talks about the rock his crew levered and winched into a staircase one year that weighed a thousand pounds.

Today, his pack finally weighed, Jed stands a quarter-mile above Salisbury’s thousand-pounder on the Lion Head Trail, riding herd over a motley-looking bunch of characters named Jackson, Val, Lady G, and T-Bone. Last week, lower down the trail, they had built 89 rock steps. But they’re above treeline now, and they’re having trouble working the kinks out of a new system designed to move rocks without damaging the alpine vegetation.

They’re supposed to use cables and winches to lift the rock off the ground, then skim it 40 or 50 feet along a zip line supported between two iron tripods. The problem is anchoring and securing the tripods against the weight of the rock. Already, one iron post has bent like a banana.

Val readjusts the webbing that cradles the rock. He wears a crew cut, a scruffy goatee, and filthy brown polyester stretch pants he picked up cheap at the Gorham Community Center. Like the others, he’s broad-shouldered, tanned, lean. T-Bone spits tobacco and cranks the winch. Jackson pulls the rope cautiously, moves the rock about 10 feet along the zip line before one of the tripods strains and tips. T-Bone swears. "Hold it! We need more height," he yells. He backs off the winch. Jackson and Val scramble over, and the three men confer. Brute strength won’t do it here. There is no "ream zone" — no resilient place they could tear up with their rock work — above treeline.

Above the non-work, Lady G rips out a rotting log step with a pick mattock and prepares a hold for the rock replacement now settled back in the scrub. She’ll quietly prepare this hole and set two smaller rock steps while crewmates below her spit and scratch their heads and decide what to try next. She is one of three women on this year’s 15-person crew. Her black T-shirt is stained with sweat, her dark hair pulled back by a faded bandanna. In another world she is Erika Kassop from suburban New Jersey. Here, there is just a little wildness about her. Her tanned arms are lean and dirty. She holds her own on the crew.

T-Bone swears again, this time at a scrub fir sticking up in the path of the zip line. The lack of progress draws Jed down the trail. After more discussion, the crew decides to disengage the rock and completely reset the tripods.

Another try.

They’re moving a good rock, about 400 pounds. If they can get this one, the rest will follow "no problem," says T-Bone. "It will be just like working a quarry."

Jackson pulls the rope cautiously at first, then a little stronger. Jed stands next to Lady G, who has finally stopped to watch the show. Low clouds roll up the mountain like smoke, cutting off the deep, gullied bowl of Tuckerman, cutting off Huntington Ravine. High above them, the summit of Washington closes, opens again, then closes for good. Just a week left. The tripods hold.

—Jim Collins is the acting editor of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. In 1984 he was a volunteer trail crew leader for the AMC and a member of the fall trail crew.