water. Even in summer, the North Sea is so perishingly cold that it can kill a person
immersed in it in as little as thirty minutes, so the survival of all sixteen men was cause
for some jubilation. They were wrapped in blankets and guided below, where they were
given a hot drink and abruptly dropped dead--all sixteen of them.
But enough of arresting anecdotes. Let's toy with this fascinating malady ourselves.
I was in New Hampshire now, which pleased me, because we had recently moved to
the state, so I was naturally interested to explore it. Vermont and New Hampshire are so
snugly proximate and so similar in size, climate, accent, and livelihood (principally, skiing
and tourism) that they are often bracketed as twins, but in fact they have quite different
characters. Vermont is Volvos and antique shops and country inns with cutely contrived
names like Quail Hollow Lodge and Fiddlehead Farm Inn. New Hampshire is guys in
hunting caps and pickup trucks with license plates bearing the feisty slogan "Live Free or
Die." The landscape, too, differs crucially. Vermont's mountains are comparatively soft
and rolling, and its profusion of dairy farms gives it a more welcoming and inhabited feel.
New Hampshire is one big forest. Of the state's 9,304 square miles of territory, some 85
percent--an area somewhat larger than Wales--is woods, and nearly all the rest is either
lakes or above treeline. So apart from the very occasional town or ski resort, New
Hampshire is primarily, sometimes rather dauntingly, wilderness. And its hills are loftier,
craggier, more difficult and forbidding than Vermont's.
In the Thru-Hirer's Handbook^ (the one indispensable guide to the AT, I might just say
here), the great Dan "Wingfoot" Bruce notes that when the northbound hiker leaves
Vermont he has completed 80 percent of the miles but just 50 percent of the effort. The
New Hampshire portion alone, running 162 miles through the White Mountains, has thirty-
five peaks higher than 3,000 feet. New Hampshire is hard.
I had heard so much about the ardors and dangers of the White Mountains that I was
mildly uneasy about venturing into them alone--not terrified exactly, but prepared to be if
I heard just one more bear-chase story--so you may conceive my quiet joy when a friend
and neighbor named Bill Abdu offered to accompany me on. some day hikes. Bill is a very
nice fellow, amiable and full of knowledge, experienced on mountain trails, and with the
inestimable bonus that he is a gifted orthopedic surgeon--just what you want in a
dangerous wilderness. I didn't suppose he'd be able to do much useful surgery up there,
but if I fell and broke my back at least I'd know the Latin names for what was wrong with
me.
We decided to start with Mount Lafayette, and to that end set off by car one clear July
dawn and drove the two hours to Franconia Notch State Park (a "notch" in New
Hampshire parlance is a mountain pass), a famous beauty spot at repose beneath
commanding summits in the heart of the 700,000-acre White Mountain National Forest.
Lafayette is 5,249 feet of steep, heartless granite. An 1870s account, quoted in Into the
Mountains, observes: "Mt. Lafayette is ... a true alp, with peaks and crags on which
lightnings play, its sides brown with scars and deep with gorges." All true. It's a beast.
Only nearby Mount Washington exceeds it for both heft and popularity as a hiking
destination in the White Mountains.
From the valley floor, we had 3,700 feet of climb, 2,000 feet of it in the first two miles,
and three smaller peaks en route--Mount Liberty, Little Haystack, and Mount Lincoln--but