The old man coming down the mountain warns us that the rocks ahead are steep and slippery. He is prodding at the ground that drops off ahead of him with his trekking poles. A pack looms over his head. “How far are you going?” he asks with concern, looking at the kids. We tell him just to the hut today. He says again, “very steep up there. Could be bad weather.”
We are down in thick forest below Mount Washington/Agiocochook, New Hampshire. The trail starts out with ferns and moss and fallen logs that you can tell would collapse in on themselves if you stood on them, all of it so sodden and green. Noodles has a big pack on with everything we could possibly need. So do I. Scout, 9, has on a 14-liter pack and is porting her own sleeping bag. Japhy, 7, has on a day pack that reminds me of the mini vinyl backpack I used to wear between my shoulder blades to blue-light discos in the ‘90s. More an accessory, though he is porting his yellow Crocs off a carabiner for when we get to the hut.
The forecast from the Mount Washington weather station notes any and all possible weather we might encounter: lightning, strong winds, thunder, hail, period of heavy rain, limited visibility. Noodles went out to L.L. Bean the week before to drop a bomb on new hiking shoes, waterproof pants, and raincoats for the kids, which seemed excessive then but now feels smart as we head up into the lap of what state parks cheerfully advertise as the “worst weather in the U.S.” The summit sits at the intersection of two jet streams and is large enough that it generates its own weather systems, typified by violent winds.
We left the hotel at 7 a.m. to be on trail at 8 a.m. and hopefully up to the hut before the weather closes in and we are drenched—it is one thing to ask your kids to trust you as you leave behind the car, but another to knowingly send them up into wind and rain. It’s only three miles up, but a pretty good elevation gain since the hut is above treeline at 5,030 feet.
At first, Japhs is the more wary hiker. He wants to hold my hand as he steps from rock to rock and over tree roots. Not ideal to hike a single-track with a pack holding hands. Scout is talking loudly about how excited she is to be there, how beautiful it is, how good her legs feel, how probably no other kid has ever hiked a mountain this big. We pass whitewater and small falls, and follow the trail up the crotch of Ammonoosuc Ravine, which turns to giant rock steps and begins to cut south. At this point, doubt creeps into Scout’s narration. Rather than reassure herself that she is strong and adventurous, she worries out loud about the rain and the lightning. She starts asking us how far it is to the hut. When the trees will be smaller than her. Whether that means the wind will blow her off.
That’s the chief worry for Kerouac’s character in Dharma Bums as he climbs the Matterhorn in the Sierras. He’s cursing his own decision to put himself on a mountain only to be blown off when Japhy Ryder (a stand-in for the poet Gary Snyder) comes yodeling down the hill from the summit. We named Japhy after the character, but pronounce it “Jaffy” rather than “Jay-fee,” just to add to the fuckery.
Japhy starts scrambling up the rocks, which slope in large slabs upward. “It’s the void,” he says, pointing into a dark hole between boulders. I ask him what he means. “The end of the world in Minecraft. After that you turn to skeletons.”
The conifers shrink and the sky opens up, mostly white clouds choofing overhead in fast-forward. Japhs scrabbles upward while I slip and slide in my sneakers (only remembered that my hiking boots had lost their tread when I pulled them out of the cupboard). We have moved from trail blazes to cairns, majestic piles of rocks pointing their beaks at the next cairn. I’m anxious to break treeline but equally anxious for the exposure that will bring. Japhs clambers up a rock and screams, “the hut!” I remember what a magic trick that was as a kid, when the hut my parents said would appear did actually materialize at the end of a walk. Parents are always saying things but you can’t believe all of it.
Japhs stands at the top waiting for Scout and Noodles to come into view below. “I’m a yeti! I’m a yeti!” he yells off the top of the rock in a ludicrous voice. “Run for your loives!!”
I tell him to wait but he can’t. He burrows through the krummholz (say it a bit like “crumbles” and isn’t it perfect for the gnarled little twists of conifer at this height?) up and around to the hut. When I get there, the door of the hut is open and I hear the croo member inside asking him, “Did you walk here? Are you by yourself?” Yeah, this kid with an empty day pack and yellow Crocs.
The Appalachian Mountain Club huts are staffed in summer by 20-year-old kids who are, I assume, working through undergrad. The Lakes of the Clouds Hut is the largest, with 90 beds across its bunkrooms, and a dining room cantilevered off the side of the Presidential Range. We are given our pick of beds among the three-story bunks of room 6, and Scout and Japhs immediately reach an impasse over who gets the middle bunk with the narrow shelf near the window. There is a near-identical middle bunk on the other side of the window, but it has a full-length shelf, and so: despair from Japhy who wants the perfect place to display When Will It Blow?, his paperback about Mount St. Helens.
Scout and I go exploring around the lakes and toward the trail up Mount Monroe. We’re rock-hopping by one of the lakes when two boys, 6 and 8, come over with their father. “Don’t get your shoes wet,” he warns as they leap from Rock Island to Rock Fort with Scout. “Those are your hiking shoes, you can’t get them wet,” the dad urges again. The kids skip on, ignoring him. I have the Merlin bird app open, but there is no point with extra kids here, so I close it. “Not over the water!” says the dad from dry land. “Nope, you’re not listening. We are going in. If you’re not going to come over here I am coming over to fetch you in 3-2-” One of the kids is still rock-hopping and steps perfectly into a gap between islands, going knee-deep in the water with his boot and pants. “What did I say!” The dad is not happy now. How could the child hop and skip on the rocks floating up in the sky?! They are sent back to the hut.
Scout and I waft around, she raving about the landscape, and me repeatedly telling her how proud she should be of herself. It starts to mist, so we head in, and the show begins. As we sit at a table playing gin-rummy with Noodles and Japhs, rain lashes the windows of the hut and hikers barrel in, rivulets of water streaming off their raincoats. We are warmed by the smug feeling of being a family who in this instance have made the right choices. We are a dry family. We have apricots. The rain escalates to hail, which pings off the roof. A 70-year-old man dives into the hut, battered by the weather. His pants have been punched by the hail and are hanging 12 inches below the top of his arse crack, which is pale as a quartz conglomerate. “Dad, I can see his butt,” whispers Scout in her Miffy pajamas, and truly, here is the majesty and force of nature, just a few feet away from us by the jug of hot chocolate powder. This is what we meant when we stressed to them the rules of the backcountry.
More hikers appear at the door from the cloud and they all are received: a group of ten sodden men around 40, a newly engaged couple and a father, an older thru-hiker volunteering in the hut to earn a bunk that night.
As quickly as the weather blows in, it is swept away by the next bands of wind, which open up blue skies. The four of us walk up nearby Mount Monroe in Crocs. I’m trying to pinpoint some birds I can hear among the dwarf conifers and instead capture an extended track of Japhy whining. (Later, I manage to identify them: a blackpoll warbler and a white-throated sparrow.)
Dinner in the hut is cooked by “Chef Tom” (a 20-year-old) and served family-style at long tables. The menu is lentil soup, salad, and vegetable pot-pie. Japhy doesn’t fancy any of that. “This is dinner,” we say, and for once we really mean it. The frozen nuggs are two states away. He crawls out from under the table to fish Fruit Loop snack packets from down the hall.
We pass the tin pans down the line like medieval peasants, and everyone dives into dessert, which is a carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting and a thick crust of charcoal (compliments to Chef Tom). Afterward, plates are clinking in the kitchen where the crew chant and cheer, and everyone else dribbles out onto the rocks around the hut. If you ever saw the bit in City of Angels where Nicholas Cage and the other angels stand on Santa Monica beach to watch the sun set, it’s like that. The tangerine sun angles in, turning all the rocks a flamingo pink, and the kids climb up onto rocks feeling like they’re hovering in the wind. You can see squiggles of mountains clear across Vermont. People stand still on the tors, their heads turned to the west, becoming cairns themselves.
To solve the bedding crisis, I offer to share my bottom bunk with Japhy—an off-menu item, since we have held firm on keeping the kids out of our bed. Here is how he wants to sleep: facing each other, his hands clasping my face, and my arm around his back doing scratches. Casual. During the night, his knees are back in my stomach for the first time in 7 years, and one of the men in the room is talking in his sleep. “What the fuck?” he yells out the first time, and it takes me a moment to realize it’s not a lucid conversation with any of the other 17 people in the room. Then, he calls out “Dad!” And a bit later, "You didn’t think I could make it up the mountain!” Who showed whom?
The wakeup call is Lou and Liv from the hut croo singing in unison, “It’s SIX-THIRTY-SEVEN, time to GET UPP!” like an SNL cold open. I open to a squint, ready for the sight of Japhy’s eyeballs staring right into mine, but I’m alone on the bunk. When I go out to the dining room, he and Scout are playing Garbage with a hiker who got engaged the day before on the summit of Mt. Washington. “I always wind up playing with the kids from youth group,” she explains when I realize she has been playing cards with my kids for an hour. I don’t give organized religion enough credit for the very good youth-group leaders they put out.
After breakfast, which Japhy does not eat, we start the 1.5-mile hike to the summit of Mount Washington. We are 0.2 miles from the hut when Scout has to pee among the fragile alpine flora. We shoulder our packs and start trudging up again, stepping from rock to rock, following the faded patches where the lichen has been worn off. The summit is blotted out by clouds, and we are all tucking our chins into our coats and scarves to escape the wind. Japhs lies down on the trail. “I need more oxygen,” he says, his arms out.
Scout is sitting down pretty regularly, too. “It’s good for me to rest for a minute,” she says, and I explain again that sometimes the only way is to keep plodding slowly forward without a break. Soon, the summit will appear. When you walk up high, you hear why and I must simply keep going. For my part, I love it. The diapensia and bluets and haircap moss look exactly like the plants on the Main Range in Oz. Why not lie down among them, says Kerouac:
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.
I give Japhy a sip of my Boost orange tab water, and he pulls his bones together and starts simply motoring upward. Scout and I are left behind at a mortal pace, and the blue and orange of his jacket and Noodles’ jacket flit further ahead between the drifts of cloud. After a couple of falsehoods, the summit comes, as it always was going to, and it’s busy, since Mount Washington is home to a weather station, observation deck, carpark, railway station, lodge, souvenir shop, and museum. Half of New Hampshire is up there for a road race that day, but the weather doesn’t care for those plans. Hypothermic runners in plastic blankets clop on tired feet toward the gift shop. A man disembarks the cog train and his cabbie hat is immediately blown clear off the mountain into Tuckerman’s Ravine. I see it disappear like a bird diving into the sea. Other tourists are in t-shirts and clutch their bodies as they find themselves at the summit, which is 40 degrees colder than the base.
The Indigenous custodians of the land believed it was an insult to the gods to climb the mountain. In 1638, Darby Field, a wise guy, summited the mountain to prove that he was not under the gods’ jurisdiction, and to claim the land in turn. Colonialists initially thought the top might be covered in white crystals. On walking up into the summertime blizzards, they found it was merely a lot of rocks and some snow. But what a pile of rocks.
We faff about taking summit-bagger photos and see the family with the two boys has also reached the summit. There are framed posters on the wall detailing how each of the hundred-some people who have died on the mountain met their end. People see the posters and think: I should buy some bumper stickers. We get four.
Everyone has bought tickets on the cog railway for an easy ride down, since there is no more glory to be gained by the down-trek. The track tilts at over 30-degrees in some places, and we watch as a cross-section of the hike we did the day before passes by the window, moving us down into the krummholz and then into tall forest.
Near the bottom, there is a young man in a pack trying to outrun the train on a nearby trail. We all cheer, “go Alan!” The train slows to change tracks and Alan runs ahead, his pack leaping about behind him. “Go Frank!” Yells Japhy when we get close again.
“Frank?” I say.
“That’s Alan. I’m Frank,” says Frank, sitting across the aisle, who also came from the hut the night before.
When we get to the bottom, Alan has made it safely down. We wave as we go by.
Notes:
The hut was kind of expensive for a bunk bed, yet kind of cheap for hiked-in carrots and all-you-can-drink hot chocolate: $72/night for children, $108/night for adults
Mountain info: Not without peril : one hundred and fifty years of misadventure on the Presidential Range of New Hampshire by Howe, Nicholas S
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What a great adventure! It sounds like you all did amazingly. And that photo by Noodles is indeed breathtaking!
What a great experience! Great read, I felt like I was there.
Congratulations Japhy & Scout!❤️