First things first, congratulations to all this week’s T’13 admits. Enjoy the holiday season knowing that 2011 will mark the start of a terrific journey for you. We T’12s are looking forward to welcoming you to Tuck!
There’s a great deal of talk about opportunities to get outdoors while at Dartmouth. This can mean many different things: a short jaunt up Gile hill; canoeing the Connecticut; skiing in Killington; running, hunting, cycling, hiking, snow shoeing, skating – in short, LL Bean catalogues come to life in and around Hanover.
Occasionally, adventure trumps leisure. This weekend was such an occasion. A group of seven T’12s took off immediately after our final Fall B exam and drove to the White Mountains for a winter mountaineering and camping trip. Our group included veterans of Chimborazo, the Alaskan wilderness, Mont Blanc, and the Long Trail. Yet, each of us approached the trip with a degree of trepidation, our heads filled with stories of misery and tragedy at the hands of our host: New Hampshire’s Presidential Range.
The Whites did not disappoint. Our initial climb from the Appalachia parking lot took in festive forests of snow clad conifers. Had Rudolph or Mr. Tumnus popped their heads out of the woods, I’m not sure any of us would have blinked. The Watson path, leading to Mount Madison, had clearly not been travelled, by human, reindeer or fawn, in quite some time. We trudged through the steep virgin snow, beating a path between heavy white branches, and finally reached the sign:
Above the tree line, biting winds whipped loose snow and brought temperatures down to around -20F (-30C). The pleasing squeak of crampons on packed frozen snow was interrupted every few steps by the thud of a footstep plunging thigh deep into driven powder. An exposed area of my face now bears the marks of wind burn. But, we made it to Madison’s summit:
We pitched our tents in the moonlit snow in a col on the other side of Madison and settled down under clear, frozen, starry skies for beef stroganoff, cookie dough and Jefferson’s Kentucky bourbon, as winds lashed our tents.
We awoke the next morning to glorious calm. The winds had died, the clouds had mostly parted and the White Mountains were majestic. This day was a rare gem in winter mountaineering and we made the most of it, summiting several peaks in the area, including Adams, and marveling at New Hampshire’s glorious landscape and wildlife. This was the outdoors.
Did this outing mark the birth of the Tuck Mountaineering Club? The TMC is alive; long live the TMC!
Read the full article: TMC does the outdoors