[at-l] Fatal Attraction excerpt

[ellen at clinic.net (Bob C.)]

Many thanks for posting this piece, though I found it revived both sad and
exciting memories. I'm not really a serious winter mountaineer. But I love to
get out in the woods and mountains in all seasons.

 Also for two decades my job required that I report for a Maine newspaper on
 important, but often boring and technical environmental issues. In an attempt
 to write about something that people would want to read, and perhaps, by
 inference entice them to read more important things that I was assigned to do,
 I took to reporting on the Maine mountains, which until then had been sort of
 the "poor stepchildren" to the famous Whites next door in New Hampshire.

 I wasn't really a very good candidate for such exploits. I went to high school
 during WWII when physical fitness was all the rage. We were all expected to
 join the fight upon graduation. My prospects were pretty dim. At the end of my
 junior year I ranked third from the bottom in physical fitness in a school of
 400 males, the legacy of a mysterious disease that had me coughing
 uncontrollably 10 hours a day or more.

  But I hiked mountains nevertheless. My Maine winter experiences began on a New
  Years Eve in 1970, which I've told you about before, and gradually progressed
  to some pioneer explorations of the Maine mountains, both summer and winter.

  Well, one winter in the 70s we resolved to be the first party to do a winter
  "traverse" of Katahdin. Our plan was to use the Hunt Trail (The Appalachian
  Trail) to the summit, cross the range and exit via Chimney Pond and Roaring
  Brook.

  The trip into Katahdin Stream in early February was uneventful. We left early
  the next morning for the summit -- and arrived on the Katahdin Tableland by 10
  a.m. -- only to be faced by a total white out. We could have easily found the
  summit. It would be only a matter of working our way uphill. Our problem was
  to find our way back down via a safe route. We hung around for two hours and
  finally went back down.

  A strategy session decided we'd come back in two weeks to try again.
  Unfortunately, the next week a party had been playing with ice climbing on a
  low ledge above Chimney Pond when a sudden storm intruded. When they escaped
  from a ledge the next morning, one was left behind dead. Others lost limbs.

  When we returned the next week for our traverse, we suddenly discovered that
  the Baxter Park rangers were enforcing the rules for the first time. Instead
  of waving us through the gates they wanted to make sure we had axes in our
  packs, medical certificates from our docs, and technical gear that some of us
  had only read about. We left the park and climbed Whitecap instead -- probably
  a winter first.

  I knew the leader of the fatal trip. He had done much of the work on Bigelow,
  which ultimately kept the mountain from becoming the "Aspen of the East", a
  four season luxury resort on Maine's "second mountain."

  I edited his account of the fatal winter trip and persuaded my paper to
  publish it. I think it ranks among the finest accounts of mountaineering I've
  been privileged to read. Sadly, the account is  now lost in the bowels of a
  Maine newspaper.

  But I learned the lesson the easy way, that Haas learned the hard way. Winter
  is dangerous and wise folks turn back when life is threatened.

  Weary