Three counselors were assigned to this trip: me; a male counselor, P.; and B., my boss, the head of the trips department. On Tuesday morning, we mustered the seven teenage girls, ages 13 -16, an interesting assortment of characters, and hit the road.
It was a beautiful sunny day as we started up the trail. The Mt Washington trip is reserved for the toughest, most experienced hikers at camp, and they were happy to be in the woods again; we set a brisk pace uphill through the forest. At the edge of the alpine zone, everyone was momentarily sobered by this sign:
and I thought again about what it means to lead other people's children into the wilderness. Under the guidance of B., with her military background, the trips counselors in our department took this responsibility very, very seriously. Other camps, as we soon learned, did not. On the 2nd day of our trip we hiked 7 miles across the peaks to the summit of Washington. It was a hot day and we moved at a deliberate pace, pausing often for water breaks. The trails were crowded with other hikers. Finally we were only a mile from the top; the summit was in view. But we stopped: there was a little boy sitting on a rock beside the trail. It was the same boy we had seen earlier, stumbling and pleading for some water and 'just 5 seconds' to rest. His counselor had refused him then, and now apparently she had abandoned him on the trail to catch up later. He had no water left in his bottle. B. snapped into action. She gave the boy some water from her own emergency supply and made plans to have him hike the rest of the way with us. At that point, however, the counselor came back. She was sweaty, angry, and English.
"Don't give him more water, it's his fault he already drank all his and most of mine. Get up Leo, you have to keep going."
B. asked her what trail she was taking; the woman had no idea. She was trying to hike up the scree slope next to the cog railway. We invited her to join us on the trail, but the counselor shook her head.
"Can't. I have to go this way, I've got more kids up there somewhere." She gestured vaguely at the summit and then took off, Leo shuffling in her wake. We never saw them again. Thank God the weather was good, that we didn't experience one of Washington's notorious fogs, the kind that goes down like a curtain over a beautiful day, reducing visibility to 10 feet or less.
The summit of Washington was a surreal tourist parade. After hours of hiking through the rugged mountainscape, we climbed onto this paved plateau, with a cafeteria, a museum, and a gift shop. The summit itself was the traditional pile of rocks topped by a weathered wooden sign – but it was surrounded by the concrete observation deck, and it put me in mind of the monkey island in a zoo. People who had paid to drive up wandered around in sundresses and flipflops. I have never visited a mountain so stripped of its essential mountainness. It was an interesting experience.
There was one thing they couldn't pave down, however: the wind. Washington holds the record for one of the highest recorded surface wind speeds: 231 mph. According to Wikipedia, it blows above hurricane force approximately 110 days out of the year. In February, when I was living east of Washington in Bethel, Me, the windchill one day was approximately -72 F. The gentle zephyr blowing the day we hiked up there was nothing. Just enough to knock you off balance if you stood on the summit too long. Done with the summit, we hiked down to the slopes of Mt Monroe to stay at Lakes of the Clouds, perched on the precipice below Washington. There was a girl's camp group of 40 at Lakes, and a church group of 20, for a total of 70 or so screaming high
school students packed into the hut, utterly shellshocking the few legitimate adult visitors and thru-hikers trying to share the space. Our group was overwhelmed too, so we hiked up to the summit of Monroe after supper to watch the sunset, seeking peace.
Up there it was cool and silent. The sun sank into banks of clouds, the mountains rolled away for miles, losing themselves in the blue haze of dusk. Directly below us the eponymous lakes nestled in the rocks reflecting the sky.
