Ahhh, yer all a bunch a woosies

As I read these winter trail reports, I am struck by the amount of traffic the 46s get in winter. You're almost guaranteed in having any summit trail open and packed down even this late in the season.

Time was (here I go ... "When I was your age...etc") when the trail register at the Loj listed 3 or 4 people who made the trip to say, Mt. Marcy, during a whole week!!! Believe you me, a solo winter hiker really earned that "W" or even just a the view from the top. Making it to the summit of Haystack in 4' of unbroken powder separated the men from the boyz. Now it seems more like a walk in the park.

And we didn't take no food with us either. We ate the bark offa the trees. You can still see the scars if you look close, only now they refer to them as blazes. ;->

Now that I'm up in age and can barely walk up the stairs I do get a thrill though at reading these reports. Any old geezers out there agree with me?

oldfogie said:

Making it to the summit of Haystack in 4' of unbroken powder separated the men from the boyz. Now it seems more like a walk in the park.

And we didn't take no food with us either. We ate the bark offa the trees. You can still see the scars if you look close, only now they refer to them as blazes.

Click to expand...

Was that back when the trail was uphill both ways, Grandpa?

Barbarossa said:

Was that back when the trail was uphill both ways, Grandpa?

Click to expand...

I've heard about people eating poo on the trails in the old days.

Dalraida: can you verify if you're reading??



-Wu

Ya I've heard about this...

Eating the bark off of the oldhoot tree is some good eating.

oldfogie said:

Now that I'm up in age and can barely walk up the stairs I do get a thrill though at reading these reports. Any old geezers out there agree with me?

Click to expand...

Count me in on that!

Hey, Barbarossa: This old geezer and his pals used to walk to school in central VT -- to school in the morning, home for lunch, back to school after lunch, and home in the afternoon -- and it really was uphill both ways. "And ya liked it," as they say. So there!

G.

What trails?

We ate bark offa the trees, drank water while kneeling in the brooks, wore cotton, opened our cold cans of beans with P38 openers and built our own trails. In the winters we skiied with white Army skiis and Mickey Mouse boots. Our trails were named Taft, Sosman and Wildcat. I do miss the clank of an aluminum canteen. Nowadays people marvel at the trees alledgedly gnawed by moose when actually an old hiker recently had a trail snack at that spot. We actually didn't invent Giarda, we were just the east coast distributors.

In the good old days when winter was colder and men were men if we wanted to go snowshoeing we had to chop down a tree and kill a deer with our bare hands first. And of course we didn't wear mitts or hats in those days. Signing out? That was for wimps. Trail lunch was obtained by scraping the lichens off of rocks buried under twenty feet of snow. Speaking of snow, that's all I ever used for toilet paper.

Hey, did I ever tel you about the time....

Luxury! Our father used to wake us up 1/2 hour before we went to bed. We'd eat a handful of gravel for breakfast, then break trail thru 8 feet of snow uphill both ways, and when we got home he would thrash us to sleep with his belt.

i thought since there are no leaves in winter they used pine needles for toilet paper. very nasty.

True stuff

Ah for the good old daze. My father was one of the woods workers when they were building the Kanc. My grandpa and I used to drive up to where the road was being cut and fly fish. I still have his bamboo fly rods hanging over my fireplace. Dad also fought the Brownfield fire. Childhood memories. I went to two one room school houses in East and West Holderness. In the winter they took the girls to school in an old station wagon and the boys had to walk. We hauled water for the day from a farm up the road. Only the bigger boys had that coveted chore. Being a tall skinny youth I never had that task.

dr_wu002 said:

I've heard about people eating poo on the trails in the old days.

Click to expand...

Those were good. Trail Chocolates. What a special treat!
Then we'd wash it down with Lemon Lime Snow!

Weenies

You think us weenies are bad just wait for the gen xer's to come up with a 46er video game. When they make it through all the levels of the game they will recieve their # and patch via e-mail. The good thing is that there will be less people on the trail again. Back to breaking trail and eating bark.

I remember when a 60/40 jacket was the cutting edge, polpro was the new "wonder" material, EMS only sold mail order through a catalog and the last stop to buy food before heading into the Whites was the IGA in Conway, where you would stock up on Slim Jims, instant mashed potatos, stove top stuffing and Durkees gravy... YUM!

Bobmak

Remember when a power bar was a Poptart?

Back in the old days,if ya drove thru Lincoln too fast,ya missed the whole thing!
Lucky if ya can drive thru at all on a Sat. morning these days!

I guess that's why I feel compelled to be the one who breaks the trail every so often - because that's what the mountain is really like.

While our new-fangled equipment allows us a lot of freedom, wooden snowshoes are still far better for flotation in deep snow, wool sweaters work better in real cold, and a compass is something to swear by at all times, whereas a GPS is not.

I go hiking with my 60-something parents sometimes, and my dad wears a big old wool coat when it's cold, and they carry old backpacks without hipbelts or sternum straps, and eat my mother's homemade cookies instead of powerbars. They climbed Katahdin recently and probably went faster than a good deal of the people with multicolored, many-zippered backpacks with straps dangling from all the corners. My dad once made his own crampons out of angle-iron, strapped them to his wooden snowshoes and on up Doubletop he went. Methinks it's more the person than the equipment.

>>> Luxury! Our father used to wake us up 1/2 hour before we went to bed. <<<

YOU HAD A BED?!?!?

Reekee said:

You think us weenies are bad just wait for the gen xer's to come up with a 46er video game. When they make it through all the levels of the game they will recieve their # and patch via e-mail. The good thing is that there will be less people on the trail again. Back to breaking trail and eating bark.

Click to expand...

Good call! Can't wait for hiking to not be cool any more. Maybe disco could make a comeback. LL Bean could make polyester 3-piece suits. Hiking would be called hiking again, instead of "treking", and it would only be for hicks like me. The word 'summit' would be a noun, not a verb.

O.K., time for another Long Trail Hibernator. Mmmmmmmm.

Back in my day, I use to hate it when the "adults" told me how much better it was in "their" day.

That's why as an adult (today) I try to empower the generation of today, rather than, tell them why it was so much better when I was a kid.

Jesus...I apologize...a little to deep for a Friday night. I'm a director at a youth facility and sometimes I can't shut off my "youth worker" mode. Back in the day I could though.

Peace.

Dalraida said:

We... wore cotton, ....

Click to expand...

Aha!

I feel vindicated. Last November on Chocura, I ran into a group of 6 or7 hikers from Worcester who had at least 2 decades each on me. (maybe 3, I'm not good at guessing ages). Since I was wearing a cotton t-shirt, the entire time back down to the trailhead, I must have heard "cotton kills" about a hundred times and that I wouldn't be allowed on an AMC hike if I was wearing cotton. Then they spend the next half-hour trying to recruit me. I asked why I would want to join them if I would have to buy all new clothes?

Either they forgot about the old days, or they were just ahead of their time.