Big Bend Country

Sunrise in the desert after a frigid night.


The Santa Elena canyon from the north. The Rio Grande makes a dramatic exit, turning sharply to the east (left) in the beginning of the "Big Bend."


The canyon is about 1500 feet deep, with sheer sandstone walls.


Looking north into the desert as the Rio Grande changes course.


Tom does Clint by a silty bank.


The sandstone dips quite sharply in the opposite direction from the river's flow, creating the illusion that the water flows steeply but smoothly downhill. We could only walk about a half mile into the canyon before the banks ran out.


The Chisos Range framed by the canyon walls.

Two more days in the Chisos

Juniper Creek Canyon.


The South Rim.


Casualty of the wind.


A perfectly flagged tree.


The Boot, with the Sierra del Carmen and Mexico in the distance.


Though December, the trees in the High Chisos were still changing. Texas does have a few pockets of autumn color.


This javelina and his companion were all too familiar with our campsite.


My companion, Tom Barnett, and a post-hike treat. Tom promptly retreated into his tent for a nap.

Change in the Zealand Valley

It’s almost fifteen years since I began hiking seriously in the Whites (I took a bit of flak at summer camp for reading the White Mountain Guide during rest hour), but I am only beginning to understand how dynamic the landscape is. Humans are naturally inclined to consider nature in stasis; our life spans are too short to comprehend the immensity of geological time spans or even, too often, the pace of ecological change.

While many environmentalists have recognized this concept, the tipping point for awareness among northeastern outdoor enthusiasts may have come with the book Reading the Forested Landscape by Antioch University’s Tom Wessels. Using examples from northern New England woodlands, Wessels shows how a keen observer with only a passing knowledge of ecology can deduce landscape history by interpreting visual clues.

One of Wessel’s former students, Alex MacPhail is an OH (Old Hutsman) and a White Mountain native. Alex, now in his fifties, started working in the huts at a teen, and he has stayed involved in various capacities since then. I first got to know him as a tireless plotter of Pemi Loops (a grueling thirty-some mile circuit of the Franconia, Twin, and Bond ranges) when I worked at Galehead, and he came in to visit us at Zealand very often this summer. I chronicled our escapade on Whitewall Mountain in August.

Alex’s ecological knowledge is more than passing, and he has combed the Pemigewasset and particularly the Zealand Valley for decades. This is the kind of perspective that is invaluable to ecological insights, so I am thrilled that he has started White Mountain Sojourn, a new blog to record some of his observations. And indeed, he includes is a potpourri of other interesting items, including a record of encounters with the Presence.

A couple months ago, Alex sent me a picture of Zealand Falls Hut from 1969, posted at the beginning of the piece. I gave many a talk on the history of the Zealand Valley this summer, but I am still amazed by the changes in the hut and its surroundings since those days. Contrast 1989 photo with this modern shot, and observe the expansion of the hut building. Indeed, the recent photo was taken a dozen or so feet in front of the old one because the brush has grown up so high in the meantime. What was an open view to Zealand Falls is now obscured by Balsam Fir.

Change is a constant rule of existence. To forget it is a fundamentally human hubris.

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.