MRG

It snowed last week and that was weird. Then it started dumping yesterday, and I started wondering what state I was in. I was studying in a problem set session for one of my engineering classes, so I figured that I was still in Hanover. I quickly turned to my friend Tats.

Powder day tomorrow? I asked.

Skipping school? She asked.

It is dumping on TOP of last week’s dump. I pointed out.

OK. She said

I decided that we were going to press the glass at Mad River Glen on a powder day in New England. Heather and Carolyn joined us, so the next morning after making breakfast bagels at 5:30, digging cars out at 7:00 and finally getting on the road at 7:30, we got to the lift just in time for opening. It was NE epic: tight trees and enough pow to make you forget the scraping noise of your skis on geologic formations. At MRG there are few lift options: the lift with a 30 min line and 2 people at a time or the single lift with a 30 min line. On the single chair, which is the last single chair at a ski area and the fastest single chair in the world for its era, you get ten minutes of you, the howling wind, your thoughts, your numbing feet, and the view of the ground under your swinging feet. By the time you get to the top, you are either shaking from the sky high experience, or from the cold. 

Thankfully there were some serious adventure to be had that could keep us sufficiently breathless and smiling. The terrain was so bare other than the past two storms that every terrain feature was fully exposed. Small drops were around every turn, and streambeds became small powder divots that if you weren’t prepared sent you over the front end without a second thought. We skied until we could no longer keep our balance and were hangry, then skied some more. The lift line smiles were infectious and the powder turns were enough to keep the angry in hangry at bay. After taking our last run, we made the comical drive back out of the mountains past stranded Prius’s sans snow tires and made one pitstop to eat every sandwich at the to go counter of a gas station. 

Mousilake Skin

After the struggle-bus that was yesterday’s Whaleback skin, I figured that redemption was in order; so I rallied two friends, Carolyn and Heather, to skin up Mt Mousilake. We arrived at the trailhead at noon and sunset was 5:00, so the clock was ticking. Heather has a huge stride so in no time at all it was clear that with my flu, I was going to be the slowest of the group. Despite the hacking cough I developed over the course of the 6 mile skin, it was a bucket of fun. From the looks of the track on the way up, we were only the third or fourth to go down and the cold weather was keeping the snow fresh and our pace up. At the top, the clouds parted for a view and I don’t think I could have asked for a better group of girls to rip down the mountain with.

Whaleback Skin

It started doing a really weird thing in Hanover this week; it started snowing, almost a foot. So over my complaint of the flu that I caught after the woodsman's competition at McGill, Hannah and I woke up early to skin up Whaleback, a local one-lift ski hill that doesn’t open on the weekdays. I was happy to be out, chugging along until about halfway up, when I started to feel awful. The king of awful when you don’t know whether you want to throw up or curl into a ball. Rory, another friend, looked over and asked if I shouldn’t be in bed. After a long struggle with my inner demons (or the common flu), and after sitting down in the middle of the slope while telling the crew to push on, I got back up and proceeded up the slope. After that initial struggle and after poaching an untracked run with pow, I felt a lot better. Well enough, in fact, for two more laps.

Winter Carnival

In the Dartmouth of old (which I’m not proposing to bring back), the winter carnival snow sculpture was a big deal. People worked on the sculptures until they were an incredible sight to behold. Nowadays there are other things at play. Some are just bureaucratic – we aren’t allowed to embed rebar in the sculpture for strength. Other factors are weather related, like the fact that it rains so much nowadays in NE. Still the biggest factor is people related. People at Dartmouth just haven’t been all that stoked about the snow sculpture in the past few years. So when a friend of mine became in charge of the sculpture this year, I started rallying the already stoked woodsman’s community for some chainsaw oomph. And I guess I wasn’t the only one frustrated over past sculptures, because everyone put in some time. I put in seven hours chain sawing over the course of four days and the final result was really cool for the carnival of thrones theme.

What do you think? Up to snuff?

Timber

On the woodsman’s team, we have a few quirks. We don’t get to practice very often. We usually forget at least one or two tools, and we always have fun at meets, no matter the conditions. After getting back from Mt Katahdin, the temperatures plummeted, right in time to go to the coldest woodsmans meet that we do – McGill U in Motreal. We arrived in the great north and proceeded to the captain’s meeting on the Macdonald forestry campus. There sitting in a classroom were the other schools, all Canadian. Canadian woodsmans teams have quirks as well: line dancing, only playing country music, and being on average the size of two of me, but during competition they mean business.

So in we come to an intense woodsman's meeting, tripping over our feet and trying not to show everyone how unprepared we were for this level of serious competition. Needless to say, after three years of being ‘the American team’, we weren’t changing our image one bit.

Per usual, our team dressed in crazy colors and outfits and put on a show. I competed in single buck and vertical chop, two of the most rigorous singles/doubles combos. For V-chop, one teammate chops one block then the other teammate chops another and the total time is the score. When I’m not chopping, my job is to tell Annie (Animal) Laurie whether she should chop down/up, near wood/far or to switch to the other side. It is an exhausting, but incredibly fun event.

For single buck, I need to cut a piece of log 2’ in diameter with a really really long saw. To do this, the sawyer gets in a really low stance and tries to use a rocking motion to keep the blade cutting smoothly. With the snow and ice on the ground, I used microspikes and two teammates holding my feet in place. Even with all that help, I was ready to pass out by the time I was through the wood.

The best part of the competition was some of the funny moments. A snowshoe race is a one of the singles events and our guys team ran out of his snowshoes three times over the course of the two miles. The same guy lost one of his spikes in pole climb (see a pattern forming?) and still tried to make his way up. I became known as the panda girl by other teams and we even got a red and green picture featuring the winning Canadian team in matching union suits.

After all of that? The McGill culinary school made us some delicious dinner!

Katahdin

This term I joined a trip to hike Mount Katahdin. Katahdin is the tallest peak in Maine and is 19 miles deep into the Baxter Wilderness. In order to get to our base camp, 3 miles from the summit, we needed to ski in 13 miles, and hike another 3 miles with snowshoes for the first 1.5 miles then crampons for the rest.

In order to carry in enough food, we all pulled sleds. It was a long haul to our first camp, but we were reveling in being outside vs in the classroom. We pulled into camp after dark and began making copious amounts of food and rehydrating. The next morning we left our ski’s and boots, put on microspikes and started the haul up a well packed, but steeper 3 miles of trail. With dropping temperatures our water bottles were starting to freeze. A full moon was peaking over the mountain by the time we set up camp.

It was a freezing cold crystal clear night, and the moon reflected around us in a beautiful blue hue. We crawled into our lean to shelters trying to keep warm. With the wind whipping straight through the cracks in the walls and my half frozen water sucking the heat out of my bones, it was quite the struggle. I left the shelter and tried to warm up by shoveling snow against the side of the lean. I paused once I was slightly warmer to look around. Every contour in the snow was illuminated in moonlight and every footprint had a shadow stretching into the distance. This scene could have been pulled straight out of a picture of the moon's surface. If I wasn't shivering, chilled by my frozen water bottle and the biting wind, I could have more thoroughly enjoyed the beauty.

The next morning we woke up to a crisp, clear, still morning. There could not have been better weather for a summit attempt. Granted, with a group of 12, if we didn't have ideal weather we may not have moved more than 100 yds. The coordination involved in making that many people breakfast alone is quite the feat. To summit Mt Katahdin in winter, it is necessary to climb straight up an avalanche slide path to gain the ridge then hike up the windblown, icy ridge to the summit. After we dug a test pit on the path and deemed it safe enough, we started up. I hiked behind Max, one of the bigger guys on our trip, so every so often, even with snowshoes, he would posthole and let out a stream of expletives. You would think that after 16 miles, 3 would seem easy. But it just so happened that those last 3 were the neck craning, straight up type of miles.

Once on the ridge, it was a crampon adventure to the top. Crampons are really amazing things. They turn a sheet of ice into your favorite surface and grippy rocks into your enemy. We weaved our way through the rock and ice field to the top, as the minutes ticked closer to our turn-around time. We made it with fifteen minutes left in our scheduled allotted time. This left us time to take a few well deserved looks at the view, summit pictures and celebration!

From there it was all downhill back to camp, which is almost harder than going up. Crampons are slightly terrifying on an icy decline, and many of us opted for the backwards waddle for the icy part. After the saddle, we heel kicked steps while staring the entire way down the 50 degree pitch that we could tumble down with one wrong step. Once near treeline, we took off our crampons and switched to a glissading technique. Glissading is glorified sledding with an ice ax as your emergency brake. You sit on your butt, slide as long as you deem safe, then roll into a self arrest when you want to stop, say before you run into the entire group at the bottom of the slide path. In lieu of jumping up and down to celebrate we all jumped into a pile back at camp and devoured food until it was late enough to go to bed.

Since we summited on our first attempt we might have had an extra day exploring the wilderness. The only problem was that we had eaten all of our food. When I say all our food, I mean that during our 16 mile, sledding, skiing and hiking trek back to the bus, we ate the remainder of our peanut m&m’s, including an m&m breakfast. It was an excellent adventure, sledding dangerously down the steeper first 3 miles of the trail, then hiking across a lake and skiing the last thirteen. I can remember mile ten, coming into a state where I could no longer spell my name from exhaustion then dancing when we gained sight of bus. The first stop we made on the drive back to Hanover was a sub shop where we (including the vegetarians) ordered giant meatball parm subs. There is nothing like a challenging adventure and nothing like that first shower afterwards!