Waumbek
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By Mike Dickerman, today's Littleton NH Courier. (Me, I'm making lemonade--getting all those outdoor winter chroes done that I didn't get around to earlier and enjoying walking on the deserted skimobile trails now. Tomorrow's snow should start to change the picture here.)
"Lack of snow putting a damper on winter sports activity
By Mike Dickerman
One quick glance out my living room window reveals to me and the rest of the world what everyone living here in the White Mountains assuredly knows already. The start of the winter outdoor sports season has been anything but spectacular.
With more rain, sleet and freezing rain falling of late than snow from the heavens above, it’s been difficult, if not impossible to get excited about the season. Though I know significant amounts of snow have fallen in the mountains and higher terrain of the area, I also know the snow cover is thinner than it should be this time of year. With no new snow to speak of in the last couple of weeks–only freezing rain and several days of above freezing temperatures–I have to believe that most hiking trails worthy of a winter climb are, by now, either woefully thin with snow cover or so hard-packed and ice-laden that a walk on them will be more troublesome than pleasurable.
To me, winter hiking is all about slapping on the snowshoes and trekking slowly, methodically up a mountain path barely discernible owing to the six or eight inches of new snow that have fallen overnight. It’s about ambling one slow step at a time through a foot of new fallen powder, or lazily tromping through a high elevation forest of evergreens completely coated in a thick layers of snow and rime ice.
The start of this winter reminds me of the winter of 1988-89, when I was hot to trot on climbing the White Mountain 4000-Footers in winter and cared not a hoot whether there was snow or not on the trails. Two hikes in particular still stand out in my mind from that relatively snowless winter. One was a traverse of the Carter Range by way of the Nineteen-Mile Brook, Carter Dome, Carter-Moriah, and Imp Trails. For the first couple of miles on this hike, it wasn’t snow we were walking on, but an eight-inch thick river of ice that had formed along the trail following a warmer-than-usual late January thaw. Without the aid of in-step crampons, we never would have made it even a half mile up the trail due to the extremely slippery and dangerous conditions along Nineteen-Mile Brook. It wasn’t until we reached the junction of the Carter-Moriah Trail at Zeta Pass that conditions were even close to pleasant. And that’s only because the trail over South and Middle Carter had yet to be broken out.
The other memorable trek of that winter season was one that Steve Smith and I had taken up to Mount Adams and Madison in the Northern Presidentials. Due to the lack of snow we had barebooted our way up the Valley Way Trail, but just before we reached Madison Spring Hut in the col between the two peaks, the trail suddenly turned into one large riverbed of solid ice. It required all our wherewithal (not to mention crampons) to make this last tenth-of-a-mile walk to the hut as the ice had to have been close to three feet thick. Somewhere in my archives I have a photograph of a trail sign along this stretch of the trail. I kid you not when I say the ice covered the signpost right up to the base of the signboard itself.
For every snowsports lover’s sake, let’s hope Mother Nature gets all this freezing rain and what not out of her system before too much more of the winter has elapsed. Seeing bare ground in my backyard on New Year’s Day just isn’t right and isn’t what White Mountain winters are all about. Give me snow–lots of snow–and everyone’s winter will be just that much brighter as we start the New Year.
Lack of snow curtailing snowmobiling, too
Besides putting a major crimp in snowshoers’ winter activities, the lack of snow has more or less sidelined snowmobile activity throughout much of the White Mountains region, including the Bretton Woods-Crawford Notch area, where an ongoing trail controversy has been making lots of headlines of late.
Shortly before Christmas, a Merrimack County Superior Court judge ruled against the Appalachian Mountain Club, which was seeking to stop the state of New Hampshire from opening up a new snowmobile route within just a few hundred feet of AMC’s new Highland Center at Crawford Notch. Under Judge Edward Fitzgerald’s ruling, the N.H. Trails Bureau will be allowed to open up a new trail along a 4.2-mile stretch of the former Maine Central Railroad grade between Fabyan’s Station (Bretton Woods) and the top of Crawford Notch. From the railroad grade, snowmobilers will then be allowed to cross Route 302 near the Gateway to the Notch and proceed a short distance west alongside the highway to the Mount Clinton Road. This road will serve as a connecting route with the Jefferson Notch Road and the Cog Railway Base Road.
As I recounted in this space last month, the state says it needs to open up the new route because a recently constructed snowmobile trail running along the Base Road from Fabyan’s to Jefferson Notch Road is not expected to be able to handle the huge amount of snowmobile traffic that typically uses the Base Road in winter. Up until this year the road itself served as the snowmobile trail, but because the Cog Railway is now running weekend ski trains on Mount Washington, the road is being kept open to motor vehicle traffic on a year-round basis.
In making his ruling, Judge Fitzgerald did put some restrictions on snowmobilers. They will only be allowed to use the railroad grade during daylight hours, with use restricted from a half after sunset to a half hour before sunrise.
In light of the current snow situation, of course, there’s been little in the way of added controversy of late. At present there’s not enough snow for the snowmobiles, so it’s been impossible for anyone to say that allowing the sleds on the railroad grade is having an impact–positive or adverse–or AMC’s Highland Center operation. Stay tuned, however. This story hasn’t gone away just yet."
"Lack of snow putting a damper on winter sports activity
By Mike Dickerman
One quick glance out my living room window reveals to me and the rest of the world what everyone living here in the White Mountains assuredly knows already. The start of the winter outdoor sports season has been anything but spectacular.
With more rain, sleet and freezing rain falling of late than snow from the heavens above, it’s been difficult, if not impossible to get excited about the season. Though I know significant amounts of snow have fallen in the mountains and higher terrain of the area, I also know the snow cover is thinner than it should be this time of year. With no new snow to speak of in the last couple of weeks–only freezing rain and several days of above freezing temperatures–I have to believe that most hiking trails worthy of a winter climb are, by now, either woefully thin with snow cover or so hard-packed and ice-laden that a walk on them will be more troublesome than pleasurable.
To me, winter hiking is all about slapping on the snowshoes and trekking slowly, methodically up a mountain path barely discernible owing to the six or eight inches of new snow that have fallen overnight. It’s about ambling one slow step at a time through a foot of new fallen powder, or lazily tromping through a high elevation forest of evergreens completely coated in a thick layers of snow and rime ice.
The start of this winter reminds me of the winter of 1988-89, when I was hot to trot on climbing the White Mountain 4000-Footers in winter and cared not a hoot whether there was snow or not on the trails. Two hikes in particular still stand out in my mind from that relatively snowless winter. One was a traverse of the Carter Range by way of the Nineteen-Mile Brook, Carter Dome, Carter-Moriah, and Imp Trails. For the first couple of miles on this hike, it wasn’t snow we were walking on, but an eight-inch thick river of ice that had formed along the trail following a warmer-than-usual late January thaw. Without the aid of in-step crampons, we never would have made it even a half mile up the trail due to the extremely slippery and dangerous conditions along Nineteen-Mile Brook. It wasn’t until we reached the junction of the Carter-Moriah Trail at Zeta Pass that conditions were even close to pleasant. And that’s only because the trail over South and Middle Carter had yet to be broken out.
The other memorable trek of that winter season was one that Steve Smith and I had taken up to Mount Adams and Madison in the Northern Presidentials. Due to the lack of snow we had barebooted our way up the Valley Way Trail, but just before we reached Madison Spring Hut in the col between the two peaks, the trail suddenly turned into one large riverbed of solid ice. It required all our wherewithal (not to mention crampons) to make this last tenth-of-a-mile walk to the hut as the ice had to have been close to three feet thick. Somewhere in my archives I have a photograph of a trail sign along this stretch of the trail. I kid you not when I say the ice covered the signpost right up to the base of the signboard itself.
For every snowsports lover’s sake, let’s hope Mother Nature gets all this freezing rain and what not out of her system before too much more of the winter has elapsed. Seeing bare ground in my backyard on New Year’s Day just isn’t right and isn’t what White Mountain winters are all about. Give me snow–lots of snow–and everyone’s winter will be just that much brighter as we start the New Year.
Lack of snow curtailing snowmobiling, too
Besides putting a major crimp in snowshoers’ winter activities, the lack of snow has more or less sidelined snowmobile activity throughout much of the White Mountains region, including the Bretton Woods-Crawford Notch area, where an ongoing trail controversy has been making lots of headlines of late.
Shortly before Christmas, a Merrimack County Superior Court judge ruled against the Appalachian Mountain Club, which was seeking to stop the state of New Hampshire from opening up a new snowmobile route within just a few hundred feet of AMC’s new Highland Center at Crawford Notch. Under Judge Edward Fitzgerald’s ruling, the N.H. Trails Bureau will be allowed to open up a new trail along a 4.2-mile stretch of the former Maine Central Railroad grade between Fabyan’s Station (Bretton Woods) and the top of Crawford Notch. From the railroad grade, snowmobilers will then be allowed to cross Route 302 near the Gateway to the Notch and proceed a short distance west alongside the highway to the Mount Clinton Road. This road will serve as a connecting route with the Jefferson Notch Road and the Cog Railway Base Road.
As I recounted in this space last month, the state says it needs to open up the new route because a recently constructed snowmobile trail running along the Base Road from Fabyan’s to Jefferson Notch Road is not expected to be able to handle the huge amount of snowmobile traffic that typically uses the Base Road in winter. Up until this year the road itself served as the snowmobile trail, but because the Cog Railway is now running weekend ski trains on Mount Washington, the road is being kept open to motor vehicle traffic on a year-round basis.
In making his ruling, Judge Fitzgerald did put some restrictions on snowmobilers. They will only be allowed to use the railroad grade during daylight hours, with use restricted from a half after sunset to a half hour before sunrise.
In light of the current snow situation, of course, there’s been little in the way of added controversy of late. At present there’s not enough snow for the snowmobiles, so it’s been impossible for anyone to say that allowing the sleds on the railroad grade is having an impact–positive or adverse–or AMC’s Highland Center operation. Stay tuned, however. This story hasn’t gone away just yet."
