Undaunted, I adjusted my balaclava and stamped the spikes of my crampons into the ice-encrusted snow to make sure they were on good and tight. Together, Paul, Brian Post (a photographer and avid mountaineer) and I strode off, making our way higher and higher along the snowy Tuckerman Ravine Trail, which wends its way through a deep green pine forest and offers glimpses of frosty, windswept peaks.
Our destination on this cloudy mid-December morning was the top of Mount Washington in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire. At 6,288 feet, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast. Thousands of hikers make the ascent in warmer months, most often starting, as we did, at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Pinkham Notch Visitor Center on the east side of Mount Washington. In winter, the four-mile hike to the summit, which gains about 1,000 feet of elevation with each mile, attracts a hardier lot.
But it’s not the height or the steepness of the mountain that impresses most people — it’s the weather. The mountain has a long and infamous reputation: Hurricane-force gusts are typically recorded several times a week in winter, with the winds topping 100 miles an hour at least weekly. In 1934, the Mount Washington Observatory measured the fastest wind speed recorded on the earth’s surface, a stunning 231 m.p.h.
On average, more than 200 inches of snow piles up during the long winter season, from October to May, creating white and wondrous snow-packed slopes.
In many ways, fantastic meteorological happenings aside, trekking up Mount Washington typifies the thrill of any winter hike: a chance to experience familiar settings anew, when forests and rocky slopes are decked out in winter’s dazzling finery, icicles and all.
“To me, the best things about winter hiking is the lack of people and bugs: no crowds, no mosquitoes and no ticks to worry about,” said Penn Burris, who works for the American Alpine Club, in Golden, Colo., in a telephone interview. “There’s a simple purity in all that quiet.”
