Mountain Medicine
Sore Legs and a Heart Full of Joy in NH's White Mtn Region
This piece is part of the Departures section, where I post occasional travel writing. Note that natural medicine, divination/mantic arts, and food writing each have their own sections as well, alongside the Seeds from the World Tree home page. -JEd
If there are beach people and mountain people, well, you can guess from the title which one I count myself.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come to love surf and sun, especially down South where the water’s balmy enough for even an under-insulated frame such as mine to splash and swim for hours. I’m not anti-beach, by any means. But…the mountains. Words on a screen can’t convey the melancholy, the bittersweet longing that mountains represent. I can’t explain their pull. But mountains have a medicine I can’t deny. My soul tugs me towards them, always has.
This past Tuesday was the day of my annual sojourn to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. I’ve been hiking in the Whites since age seven or so, and I try not to let a summer go by without at least a day trip from a family base in Northeast Vermont to their rugged, granite bosom.
Last year rainy conditions meant my hike was a modest one, so this year I wanted to do something substantial. I headed to Mt Eisenhower, at just over 4,800’ one of the lower peaks in the Presidential range.
This elevation range may not sound like much, especially to one schooled out West, where a mile high is barely a mole hill. And true enough, the Whites are not high mountains by most standards.
But they are amazingly rugged. For one, they’re prone to some of the worst weather in North America (see below). At these latitudes, even 4,500’ above sea level is enough to get a taste of arctic tundra of a kind you’d otherwise have to travel well over a thousand miles North to find.
They’re also breathtakingly beautiful. For my money, these mountains are right up there with the Himalayas for splendor, albeit of a very different sort.
Maybe it’s that I know these mountains. Their lines, their rocks, ridges and gullies. Their flora and fauna. Wandering through their folds I’ve encountered spruce grouse, moose and Lady’s Slipper; have eaten wild blueberries, alpine cranberries and Indian cucumber from the side of the trail. I’ve been baptized in a dozen icy, pellucid brooks and streams. I’ve climbed twenty or so of the Whites’ 4,000+ footers (mountains tall enough to have a view) and never once regretted the journey.
These mountains have shaped me, helped build what strength I have. Every year they’re a testing ground, a power-up bought with sweat and sore legs. But they always give more than they take. Joy seems to be a side effect of a day spent struggling up and down their rocky, unforgiving slopes.
As for this year’s adventure, I had planned to summit, but conditions above tree line convinced me to turn around a few hundred feet shy of the top. As this sign is at pains to point out, the weather up there is no joke.
In this case, I found myself inside a cloud that was streaming over the pass at more than 40 miles per hour; visibility was shrinking to little more than twenty feet, and I frankly wasn’t sure which of several small trails constituted the final summit loop. Especially as a solo hiker, it’s as well to stay humble; it’s not there was going to be much of a view. So I headed back down into the comparative shelter of the krumholz (zone of dwarfed, stunted trees just below the alpine zone proper), ate my lunch of cold roast lamb, and started the descent.
Not summiting can have a shade of disappointment, but the main thing in my mind is not to conquer the mountain (an illusion at the best of times). At the risk of cliché, it’s about the hike itself. The ritual of it, the communion with my body and its limits. The way a thudding heart and pumping limbs clear the cobwebs from the system and make room again for simple joy.
The sense of recovering a piece of myself in those woods once again.