What is a mountain?

I am often frustrated, especially when talking to Westerners, who wield their magnificent Rockies, Cascades, and Sierras, by the difficulty of explaining that the Whites are indeed rugged and dangerous. The number of fatalities on Mt. Washington is a useful number to quote in such discussions.

Larry Price, a Mountain Geoecologist, lists three criteria in identifying high mountain landscapes. “High mountains should rise above the Pleistocene snow line, the zone of rugged and serrated topography associated with mountain glaciers and frost action; high mountains should extend above the regional treeline; high mountains should display cryonival processes such as frost-heaving and solifluction.” By this measure, the Whites qualify as high mountains—barely. The Presidentials exhibit various features formed by mountain glaciers, including the eastern ravines and an arête or two, while the alpine zone is notable, if small. Soil stripes are present, even if confined to tiny Monroe Flats.

I am reminded of a quote in Forest and Crag, Guy and Laura Waterman's wonderful history of hiking in the northeast. "Ferocious weather attacks these alpine zones, especially in winter. Winds elsewhere regarded as hurricane force are routine in these alpine zones...Taken with cold temperatures, frequent low visibility due to clouds and blowing snow, plus erratic changeability, Northeastern winter weather more than makes up for the region's lack of high elevation or consistent dramatic relief."

Washington, of course, is the site of the highest wind speed ever recorded. I’ve never gotten caught in wind over 100 mph, but I have felt some pretty strong breezes. This summer, when I was visiting Hilary Gerardi and her croo up at Greenleaf, our plans for a long day hike were ruined by the gale. We did notice, while devouring the latest adventures of The Pirates!, the steady increase of the peak gust on the Davis monitor. The anabatic wind, blowing up from the south, was funneled up the ravine encircled by Agony Ridge on the west side of Greenleaf, peaking in the tiny notch between the hut and the summit ridge; Eagle Lake, in the middle, was in a fury.

After trying our hand at drinking glasses of water in the wind, Hilary and I headed up the ridge to scout out conditions on the summit. The higher we went, the more the wind subsided, which was disappointing but made sense because Agony Ridge no longer constrained the air molecules. At the summit, a straggle of thru-hikers emerged out of the fog, looking vaguely hypothermic, though they were still energetic enough to badmouth the huts and assert the advisability of camping illegally. With little to see and peeing into the wind getting old, we headed down. It is one of the huts’ greatest luxuries that its inhabitants can habituate themselves to these initially fearsome conditions, and as Guy Waterman observed, such conditioning is one of the great joys of living in the mountains.

Thoughts from a kinda-sorta-ex-hut kid

This piece is written by Beth Weick, currently the rotating caretaker in the Eastern Pemigewasett and a former Lakes of the Clouds Hutmaster.

For those who don’t know me or would feign not to, I’m writing this as a shelters caretaker. A new and different gig for me, and one that generates all manner of comparisons to the huts, however unfair and non-judicious that may be.

So. Guests. In shelters, we call them visitors, but we all know to whom we are referring. Those folks who come up from near and far to traipse about these White Mountains. Too many are foolhardy and stubborn, from Boston; many are also foreigners who don’t speak the language…from Quebec; and then there are the others who are from the far corners of our country, and abroad.

Let me tell you: you want your hutguests to be as inadequate as they are. Yes, guests—“goofers,” if you must—are the source of complaints, stories, expletives, frustrations, and burgeoning alcoholics. But that’s the point. Without miserably incompetent hikers, half the hutkid repertoire is gone.

In shelters, I daily interact with folks who can shoulder fairly well-packed packs, follow a map, feed themselves, entertain themselves, and infer from the rain that the weather is bad. They know that moose don’t become reindeer after age 10, they know the alpine zone wasn’t built by cutting down the trees, and they can distinguish between a wind generator and fighting mountain lions.

Boring. Not only do I have no one to complain with, I have little to complain about. Imagine what this would do to a hut.

1) You’d never miss a drinking opportunity due to late night “guided hikes.”
2) You could have meat, bread, and peanuts in every meal without hysterics and epi-pens to boot.
3) “Excuse me, sir” and “please, ma’am” would never imply “get the f*** out of my kitchen.”
4) You’d never revert to Borat-isms in a fruitless attempt to communicate with the ceaseless French-Canadians.
5) You’d never ruin a sunset moment with stock-option conversations or unsupervised rascals picking up the wilderness.
6) The tip jar would be $100 lighter because people could carry their own packs, or find their own family, or not break their ankle.

Moral of the story? Medicocrity, nay, failing at even mediocrity is never as fun to witness as in our “high mountain destinations. May guests live on as goofers in our huts, and may their obliviousness always hide them from it.

Bushwhacking Whitewall Mountain

It has been a wet summer, and my hiking, like my writing on this blog, has amounted to less than I had wished. Nonetheless, I was inspired to bushwhack Whitewall Mountain a couple of weeks ago, accompanied by the intrepid old hutsman Alex MacPhail (or Macfool, as they called him when he worked in the huts).

Whitewall sits directly across the notch from Zealand Falls Hut, and its white cliffs provide a striking foreground to our view south through the notch. It was first named for an obscure local woodsman, but after one of JE Henry’s immense fires scorched the area so severely that the soil was incinerated down to the rock, it was renamed for the scars that endure, though much diminished, to this day.

As we did the bushwhack on a pack day, I had little time to spare. Shortly after breakfast, we descended the doozy and plunged into the brush immediately opposite the junction of the Ethan Pond and Zealand Trails. This way, we minimized the angle of our ascent and avoided any contact with the slides or cliffs, but we did ensure that once atop the main ridge opposite the hut, we would have to walk farther to reach the ledges on the south side of the summit. Indeed, while the initial slope was easy, the ridge proved overgrown.


Alex, who holds the record for the hut traverse (twelve hours) and once hiked (sprinted?) from Lakes of the Clouds to Zealand in 2:10, pointed out that the vegetation has changed since he roamed the ridge in the sixties. Apparently, there are many more balsam fir, and the forest has grown up considerably. While we encountered many beautiful birch glades, shining white as well emerald green thanks to the damp hobblebush, the going was generally slow through the spruce-fir forest.

The glades were full of moose scat, and we found many flattened ferns that had been used as bedding. Unfortunately, we did not encounter any megafauna, nor did we find evidence of a rumored “antler grove,” but we did find plenty of bear scat and a semi-alpine bog. At one point, I wandered off, nearly losing Alex in the process, to examine some largish trees in the distance—some of them were approximately ten inches in diameter, so they may be survivors from the pre-Henry days.

Eventually, we crested the summit and found some outcroppings of bedrock. After some more scratching and clawing, we emerged onto the ledges themselves, which have superb views over the heart of the Pemigewasset, including Carrigain—“the prince of the wilderness,” according to Professor Charles Fay, one of the AMC’s founders—the Hancocks, and the Bonds, in addition to the splendid forests in-between. While the mist obscured more distant peaks, it added an ethereal dimension to what mountains and valleys we could see.

The ledges themselves were of interest, as well. Some of the more sheltered crevices were blackened, evidently from the fires of a century ago. There was a Z shaped from rocks on the ground, presumably the handiwork of a past Zealand croo, as well as some rocks my own croomate Nick Anderson had left earlier in the season.

Before heading down, Alex wanted to check out a gully that runs from the ledges to the Ethan Pond Trail, about a thousand feet below in the notch. Given the night’s rain and the instability of the rocks, we had chosen not to ascend this way, but a closer look convinced me to try going down this way, especially as I still needed to pack. Alex declined and returned the way we came, more or less.

His was probably the right decision. The couloir drops between two cliffs, and there are some very large, very loose chunks of rock that need extremely careful negotiation. After observing just how fast and hard several shot down the slope and smelling pulverized rock in the air, I slithered into the brush on the side of the slide and avoided treading on rocks as best as I could.

After several hundred feet, the gully emerges beneath the cliffs, and the entire mountainside becomes a sea of scree and boulders. This section is slightly less steep, so I descended much more quickly and easily, feeling a palpable sense of relief. At the bottom, the steadiness of the Ethan Pond Trail was exceptionally welcome.

Zealand Falls Hut and its situation

Six days into our summer, the Zealand Falls Hut croo has yet to hit the trail, due to time spent opening the hut and, more recently, poor weather. Beyond a Mountain Classroom group that spent a couple of nights, we’ve barely had any guests and are spending most of our time in the croo room above the kitchen, reading, eating, and sleeping.

Only 2.5 miles from an access road, Zealand is the most accessible of the huts, and its situation, though not as dramatic as Galehead’s, is beautiful and interesting. Directly to the south is Zealand Notch, which leads into the vast (for New Hampshire) Pemigewasset Wilderness, where I spent many weeks doing trail maintenance while a teenager at camp. On a clear day, you can see from our porch through the notch to Mt. Carrigain, a massive, lonely peak. Its fire tower, no longer in use, has the most wild and inspiring views in the Whites, at least to my eyes.

The rock around here is mostly Conway granite, which possesses a distinctive white hue due to its high content of orthoclase feldspar. About 200 million years ago, Pangaea, the “original” supercontinent split apart, causing volcanism and a great deal of magma to swirl towards the earth’s surface. Some of it cooled underground, which meant that it hardened slowly into large crystals. This, of course, is a distinctive trait of granite.

Runoff has gradually but steadily eroded the old rock formations so that the granite, originally buried, is now exposed in many places. Various ice ages and their associated periods of glaciation have also left their mark. 50,000 years ago, continental ice sheets up to a mile thick extended across this entire region. The rock around Zealand Notch was probably already weak from streamflow, but the glaciers carved the pass into its distinctive U-shape as they moved southward.

The east side of the notch is highly eroded. In fact, Whitewall Mountain, as it is named, gets its moniker from the crumbling Conway Granite on its flank. The trail through the notch is clearly visible through the fallen rock; it is remarkably straight and wide, which betrays its origin. The region around Zealand was extensively logged between 1880 and 1897 by the notorious JE Henry, who later moved his operation to Lincoln, from which he ransacked the southern Pemigewasset.

Henry based his operation at the junction of what is now the Zealand Road and Route 302, where he built a company town named Zealand. From here, he extended his railway south, eventually extending through the notch. The sites of his logging camps are hard to pin down, but I am told the remains of an old locomotive are strewn about at the bottom of the notch. Henry’s engines were wood-fired, which proved disastrous because they threw off so many sparks. Given the amount of “slash,” debris leftover from the logging operation, it was inevitable that fire should break out. Two enormous fires, in 1886 and 1903, burned thousands of acres in the valley. More importantly for Henry, a fire in 1897 consumed the town of Zealand, which spurred him to move the business to Lincoln. Apparently the lesson he took from the experience was to exclusively employ clearcutting rather than leave valuable timber to be consumed by fire.

In any case, one of the fires that swept through the notch was so intense that it burned up all the organic material in some places, leaving nothing but bedrock. The slope is steep enough that no soil has accumulated in the years since.

The hut gets its name from the waterfall within earshot to the south. While this brook empties through the notch, there are a pair of beaver ponds to the north which serve as the headwaters of the Zealand River. While the beavers move around from year to year, they have a dramatic affect on the landscape of the valley. Apparently the rushing sound of water motivates them to gnaw trees, though I would love to know how exactly researchers proved this point. Beavers are much more mobile in the water, which is why they construct dams, and they feed on the twigs and shoots of the trees they fell. They are a primary source of disturbance in valley ecosystems, infusing their pond areas with new growth and attracting animals that feed on pond vegetation such as moose.

Just above the ponds, across the notch from the hut, the crown damage on white birch is plainly visible. Many birch were severely damaged during an ice storm that hit New England about ten years ago. While they weren’t necessarily killed outright, trees suffered many broken limbs, allowing parasites access to their interior. Disease is now finishing off many survivors. Additionally, birch, being a pioneer species, colonized the area after the logging and fires of the Henry era. A century on, they are now being replaced by slow-growing, shade tolerant species such as balsam fir.

Evidently, the Zealand Notch area is subject to a variety of influences—ecological, meteorological, geological, and human. While it is typically human to exclaim over the changes in landscape we last observed it, we forget the dynamism of the forces affecting the exterior of the planet.

A different perspective on the grains "crisis"

The media has lately seized upon rising food prices. The story is simple: Congress mandated a huge increase in biofuels production, spurring competition for various crops, particularly corn. The New York Times has run a series of articles on the ill effects, which include famine in developing countries, less conservation as farmers plant corn rather than leave land fallow, and bankruptcy for producers in the dairy, chicken, pork, and beef sectors. Indeed, the sustained growth in certified organic land may even be reversed because farmers can achieve comparable profit margins if they stay conventional and forgo the bother and cost of certification.

I don’t agree with the general consternation—in fact, I think the corn shortage has some silver linings for the US and the world. The memory of the crisis cheerleaders is stupendously short. Only three summers ago, the mainstream had its knickers in a twist over a corn glut. The Times' story on this faux problem included this arresting picture of a rotting pile of corn the size of a football field, too large to cover with a tarp.

Why might high corn prices be good? First of all, the US has long used its cheap commodity crops to undercut foreign producers. In the worst instances, the US donates “free” grain on a flimsy pretext. For instance, grain farmers in Ethiopia can’t make a profit if their consumers receive “free” American corn donated to prevent “famine.” Our Midwestern breadbasket is also used to justify Neoliberal reforms—if developing countries can count on cheap grain imports, it makes no sense to develop a broad base of domestic agriculture. Instead, they pursue a comparative advantage via crops such as coffee or cacao, but dependence on fickle foreign markets ultimately increases an economy’s fragility. Without competition from US grain imports, foreign grain farmers will thrive, although the immediate shortages are tough.

While it's similarly difficult for farmers and ranchers who are driven out of business, Americans could use a dose of reality regarding their consumption of these products. Meat, milk, and cheese are unhealthy in a Western diet unless consumed in small portions, but pocketbook rather than nutritional arguments are most likely to be convincing. Furthermore, these sectors of agriculture are horribly inefficient—ruminants consume enormous amounts of grain, so if the number of bovines decreases, the pressure on the grain supply will gradually ease, causing prices to fall.

Meanwhile, the high price of corn provides a compelling reason to do away with the unnecessary and wasteful agricultural subsidies that encourage overproduction. As for the possible decline in organic certification and farmland conservation programs, this will be more than offset if price increases provide an incentive for Americans to eat more healthily overall. It makes ever more sense to eat locally and organically (whether certified or not) to escape the costs of transport and artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Indeed, in my own research area—cattle ranching—the best way to avoid buying grain is to increase the amount of time an animal spends on pasture. While grass fed methods do nothing to better chances of “organic” certification in the eyes of the USDA, they make raising cattle less expensive and, if the cattle are rotated responsibly, they are better for the land than conventional methods. Moreover, the beef is healthier.

I do not want to leave the impression that I think the biofuels mandate was a good idea. The latest research shows that burning ethanol actually releases more greenhouse gases than burning gasoline. Is this actually surprising to anyone? You don’t need to be a chemist to figure out that carbon consumption of any type is going to release carbon dioxide as a byproduct, and anyone who has sat by a fire, whether fueled by wood or cornstalks, should know that the result is dirty. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t decrease unless we harness truly alternative power sources (wind and solar) for our engines or we truly forgo using them.

Similarly, the fact that Congress passed the biofuels bill is hardly surprising. Farm state Senators control agricultural policy, and the Farm Bill is all about paying farmers to produce crops we don’t need more of. They need to dispose of “corn gluts” to justify their payments, which is why the US donates so heavily to the World Hunger Program, and why High Fructose Corn Syrup, which sweetens nearly a quarter of the products sold by an average American supermarket, was invented. These Senators are remarkably effective because they support projects championed by non-agricultural Senators, as long as they get their way on the Farm bill.

Although corn prices are the highest they have been in decades, talk of reforming Farm Bill subsidies, which will be renewed this summer, has died almost entirely. The biggest opponent of the subsidies is (surprise!) President Bush, but since environmental groups refuse to work with him and the farm bill doesn’t have the cachet of illegal immigration in the red states, he’s unwilling to put his neck on the line by really fighting them.

Changes in supply are a natural feature of our economy, but coverage tends to focus on the negatives (the same goes for global warming). The winners will be those who can adapt the quickest to the higher prices of corn and other grains. In the meantime, observers should strive for a nuanced perspective of events in the hope that we can use the new pressures to achieve a more sustainable economy.

Shiprock

Were it not for the many other geological spectacles around Four Corners, Shiprock might be as famous as Devil’s Tower. Indeed, they are both remnants of ancient volcanos. Composed of breccia and other igneous rocks, Shiprock originally formed the volcano’s throat, several thousand feet underground, but in the 27 million years since inception, erosion has exposed the remnant.

Shiprock rises nearly 2,000 feet above the plain, and it is visible for scores of miles. Early Anglo pioneers thought it resembled a Yankee clipper ship. Last week, my old friend Sam Sweet and I approached from the north, first glimpsing it just after passing into New Mexico from Colorado. None but the hardiest grasses survive the arid conditions of the surrounding plains. Shiprock sits in the middle of a vast Navajo reservation that, to quote Robert Spurlock, is basically a third-world country sitting in the middle of the southwest. A town named for Shiprock lies fifteen or so miles from the formation; there was no sign of employment beyond service and government jobs. Power lines, apparently routing electricity from the turbines along the Colorado River to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, crisscross the vast expanse of the reservation. I never once caught a glimpse of cattle, which are ubiquitous elsewhere in the arid southwestern landscape.

Navajo legend tells that a village once occupied the top of Shiprock (Tse Bit’a’i to the Navajo), whose inhabitants cultivated the fields below. Lightning sheered off the trail leading to the bottom, leaving only a cliff and forcing the village to starve. The Navajo now forbid the rock’s ascent. Oddly, David Brower, later of Sierra Club fame, led the first recorded climb of Shiprock.

Highway 491 provides a constant vista of the peak, however, so we did not offend any resting spirits. Our Rough Guide, which contained a priceless section on “Traveling in Indian Country,” urges travelers to avoid making eye contact or being overtly friendly, as the natives apparently do not understand such paleface behavior.

Briefly disembarking to absorb Shiprock’s grandeur in the open air, I was struck by the trail of broken bottles along the road’s shoulder. Highway 491, nicknamed the Devil’s Highway, actually used to be 666 (the sixth spur of old Highway 66), until Bill Richardson and the New Mexican Congress changed it in 2003 to avoid “the mark of the beast.” Within the Navajo section of the road, a succession of fatal accidents led some to believe the road curse. Alcoholism is responsible for most of these deaths, however. Highway 491 is a road I would hesitate to drive at night—Shiprock is a massive, unearthly presence, and the image of headlights swerving head-on into my lane persists.

A bee in the organic bonnet

This rather dry piece is part of my Masters Thesis, but I did most of the research for my undergrad thesis. All of the pictures are from southwestern Wisconsin, fall 2005.

The organic dairy world is one of the most important sectors of the organic industry as a whole. In 2003, its sales totaled $1.4 billion. People seem to associate milk with health and childhood, which perhaps convinces them to accept premiums for organic milk. Indeed, in the 1990s, the organic dairying grew the fastest of any sector of the organic industry (Greene, 2001).

The National Organic Programs (NOP) rules governing organic dairy cattle mention access to pasture, but they do not specify what access entails. Thus it is possible to feed dairy cattle organic grain while confining them on large dairy farms, sometimes called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The debate over what access entails has played out in the competition between the two of the largest organic dairy operations in the country—Horizon Organics and Organic Valley—which approach organic milk production in markedly different ways.

Both companies were founded as cooperatives around the same time—Organic Valley in 1988, Horizon in 1992—and both were originally located in rural Wisconsin. Their rise roughly mirrored the explosion of the entire organic industry. After initial difficulty in finding their market niche, both companies settled on dairy products. However, while Organic Valley continued as a cooperative, buying milk only from member farms, Horizon, while continuing to purchase from its member farms, also bought its own large dairy farm in Idaho in 1994, which holds 8,000 cows, followed in 1997 by another in eastern Maryland, which houses a comparable number (Brady, 2006). Growth continued, and in 2003, as major food corporations began taking notice of the growing profits in the organic sector, Dean Foods purchased Horizon—now based in Boulder, Colorado—for $216 million (Pressler, 2003). Presently, the subsidiary works with 515 farms, and according to its website, 80% of its milk comes from members rather than its own operations in Idaho and Maryland (horizonorganic.com, 2008).

Nonetheless, Horizon has received considerable criticism from consumers groups. The Organic Consumers Association is leading a boycott of Horizon (as well as Aurora Organic, supplier to Wal-Mart, Safeway, Costco, and Target) because of the lack of access to pasture for cows on the large dairy farms. Logistically, bringing several thousand cows out to pasture is a daunting challenge when the cows also need to be milked twice daily. Practically, this means that the cows generally see pasture for two to three months per year, at the end of their lactation cycle. Since the USDA organic standards are vague, such conditions are legal as long as the cows are fed organic grains. The abundance of fecal waste and irrigation at large dairy farms—the Idaho farm was essentially created out of a desert—are also cited as reasons for the boycott (Brady, 2006). While major supermarket chains have not dropped Horizon or Aurora, the OCA has made some headway among natural food stores and coops.

Organic Valley, a giant in its own right with over 1300 member farms, has pursued a less controversial but also less lucrative strategy, at least in the short term. While diversifying into citrus and meat production, it has resisted using large dairy farms, however, instead relying entirely on small producers. Such a strategy has thus far proved healthy for the cooperative’s image, but the limits to supply come at a price.

In 2004, Organic Valley’s third largest customer was Wal-Mart. Executives at Organic Valley credit Wal-Mart with improving the cooperative’s efficiency and timing. Nonetheless, when a case of Mad Cow Disease was found in Washington State in 2004, consumers began switching to organic milk in such droves that the demand quickly outstripped supply. A shortage in organic grain for feed exacerbated the problem. Organic Valley was forced to shortchange its smaller customers in favor of Wal-Mart. The specter of competition with Horizon Organic, which was selling milk at 15 cents less per gallon than Organic Valley, convinced Organic Valley executives to drop the Wal-Mart account, despite the fact that the giant retailer had not asked for a price cut. Instead, Organic Valley focused on supplying its natural food store and co-op customers, avoiding vulnerability by maintaining a diverse set of clients. Though in 2006 Horizon sold $339 million worth of milk to Organic Valley’s $232 million, Organic Valley’s business with small distributors is growing. It is betting that the innovative nature of these businesses and the awareness of its consumers will endow it with long-term viability (Pattison, 2007).

Meanwhile, the bad publicity from the OCA boycott is beginning to take effect. Like Horizon, Aurora owns a pair of large dairy farms in Colorado, which separately hold 4,000 and 3,200 cows, and one in Texas, with 3,300 cows. When John Mackey, the vegan chief executive of Whole Foods visited the smaller of the two Colorado facilities, he deemed its conditions poor enough to preclude his grocery chain from carrying Aurora milk (Warner, 2006). Under threat of losing its organic certification, Aurora agreed with the USDA to decrease its herd size and buy more pasture, but it now faces several class action lawsuits (Martin, 2007). Horizon has not generated as much opposition as Aurora, but it was still compelled to issue its “Standards of Care,” which details how its raises its cows (horizonorganic.com).

Thus in the dairy industry, the controversy over pasture access, generated by the vague language of the NOP rules, tends to boil down to tension between corporate dairy companies and smaller, independent or cooperative producers. The influence consumer activism has borne on company behavior is worthy of note, and whether comparable activity will occur in regard to organic beef deserves attention.


Pictures: Cows on Mike Sebion's farm in Viroqua; the co-op in downtown Viroqua; a retail outlet for Organic Valley in La Farge; and Mike Sebion on his farm.