Three Days in the Presidentials (excerpt) 
... the relief prompted by the sure footing and easing grade was quickly eroded by the sight of stone grey clouds scudding overhead, ripped by the jet stream as if on amphetamines. Alex too, worried me. He was lagging, his nerves were unsteady and I wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t going to go vertigo-berserk and splay himself rigid to a boulder. Not that I would have blamed him; city dwellers are used to seeing masses framing their views and it’s disorienting to find oneself with a view unframed.
Vertigo is a real and debilitating response to unfamiliar exposure and its perceived danger. Almost everybody who spends time in the mountains has at one time or another found themselves clinging to a rock unable to will themselves to move. It is rarely rational and it’s never convenient. For Alex who’d had a history of vertigo induced paralysis and who’d make a point of reminding me of it repeatedly, the chance of it happening again was all too likely.
He needed to commit and he needed to do it soon for two reasons. If he didn’t, we’d be going back down the sorry excuse for a trail we’d just come up. And secondly, between us we had 5 young children, a wife each, and a whole mess of mortgages, loans and other things that 40 year olds from Toronto accumulate. By continuing up the ridge without full confidence that he’d be able to rush (read run jump and fly) at the first sign of truly shitty weather, we’d be putting way too much at risk. A night in the jet stream was just not on.
As history proves, the White Mountains kill just as easily as Colorado’s 14,000 footers, just as quickly as the ragged Coastal Ranges, and just as off handedly as Mount Bachelor, Mount Hood and the Sierras. As incredible as it may sound wind speeds in the Presidential Range have frequently been clocked at more than 200kph and in one notable April afternoon exceeded 370kph. Temperatures, even in April have fallen as low as -30 degrees Celsius. In a good year no one dies. In an ordinary year there are deaths from hypothermia, falls, avalanches and icefall. Not more than a kilometre from where we stood a hiker would die the following September, having succumbed to exposure after becoming disoriented by hypothermia, The Presidential Range, in spite of its modest heights and masses of visitors is in no way a range to be trifled with.
It was incumbent therefore, that Alex say without reservation that he was into IT, that he was excited about going UP, and he’d have IT no other way, because by not saying so, by saying instead, “Let’s see what happens,” or “Let’s go just a little further,” or “You go on, I’ll follow,” he was giving himself a back door and it was a back door that wasn’t certain to stay open. Every time I turned around to see how far behind me he was my eyes were drawn westward to the horizon above the Great Gulf searching for clues that the weather was about to turn seriously foul. And the big air blasted clouds coupled with our ever closing turn-around-time had me turning more and more uncomfortable.
I felt like an ass putting Alex on the spot but putting it to him straight-out seemed to work. After a moment’s thought his demeanour lightened and there was a “fuck, yeah!” about his step. Our spirits rose as we gained elevation, marking progress from cairn to cairn. On our left, the bald peaks of the Northern Presidentials, Adams, Jefferson and Clay were laid out in a spectacular grey on grey tableau. Behind us, the Carter Moriah range lay shrouded in a low lying mist. Even when shy of the summit we ran smack dab into our turn-around-time I was feeling fully alive and full of accomplishment.
Paradoxically, the minute we turned downwards, this time onto the Daniel Webster Scout Trail, the sun came out and the temperature on the leeward slope rose into the high teens; a slight compensation for the rugged descent we were about to face. Imagine if you will, descending 400 stories on stairs three feet high, some of them covered with snow, some undermined, some covered in ice and some just plain old big fucking stairs, none quite the same height, none offering the same footing. Now imagine a knee so tender and sore that the only bearable position is to keep it locked bolt straight, weight born by its other, by your butt and by your arms. It’s a lovely trick of the creator this … joints that don’t announce the full magnitude of their displeasure until a body is as far away as possible from the nearest bottle of anti-inflammatories. I’m whining. It hurt. Fucking lots.
Screaming knee aside, I remained cogent of the beauty inherent in the emergent spring; the sounds of distant water, the creaking and crackling of trees as their barren canopies were pushed and pulled by valley breezes; the sharp snap as frozen ground thawed and released the trapped tension of winter’s undoing; and the gentle trill of runlets provided an intimate counterpoint to the big sounds of distant winds.
Lower in the valley rich aromatic loam released spores into the warming air that rose to the nostrils, breezes played with salt at the back of our sweaty necks, and the tracks of moose preceded us across a swampy flat. And even lower, increasingly robust tumbling bumbling cataracts poured over and through the rocks and roots of our ever downward descending track ...
... and then, eventually a mile from Pinkham Notch we came onto the engorged tourist buses and cars lining the highway, hundreds and hundreds of cars; more cars than in Whistler after a legendary two foot dump … 1,000’s of skiers walking along the highway to the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead where they pooled like salmon on the lawn, some still waiting their turn to join the migration upwards, most their day already exhausted ready to find the nearest clutch of cold beer and easy camaraderie. Here was the legendary spring migration in all its magnitude.
Tired and sated, I limped up the highway past them all, past the Land Rovers with NY plates and decaying pickup trucks, past sprawling mounds of mountain gear, past strutting undergrads and shaggy AMC vets, past the prone exhausted bodies of the hardcore, past 10 year old kids still hyper from their first and greatest grand adventure and past the posses of teenage kin. I limped past the father daughter pairs newly bonded, past unseeing lovers and aging fratboys recumbent on the lawn. I limped past silver haired ladies with character carved into the corners of their eyes, past those who’d turned forty and those who hadn’t, into the car and home.
Trevor Paetkau