Madison Spring Hut

The High Huts of the White Mountains (map is up top) are a series of eight mountain huts in the White Mountains, in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, owned and maintained by the AMC. They are positioned at intervals along the Appalachian Trail, generally separated by six to eight miles.The huts are maintained by a team of five to nine caretakers - called the "croo" - during full-service season. Each crew member works for eleven days on, three days off. During the eleven working days, they must make four trips back down the mountain to get perishable food and other supplies, carrying heavy loads. At the beginning of each season, fuel and supplies are flown into the huts by helicopter.Madison Spring Hut, built in 1888, is both the oldest hut site in the chain and the oldest hut site in the United States. The first overnight guests stayed in the winter of 1889, and in 1906 a fee was instituted to utilize the shelter — 50 cents per night. The original hut was expanded in that same year, as well as 1911, 1922, and 1929. In 1940, a fire — caused by the ignition of gasoline for the gasoline-electric power generator — destroyed much of the hut. The following year it was rebuilt and re-opened. It is the second highest hut in the chain, and sleeps the third highest number of guests. The hut is accessed most directly from the Valley Way Trail (from the Appalachia parking lot) and is generally considered the most difficult of the full-service huts to access, based on distance and elevation required to reach it. If you've ever done the hike, you'll know that to be true. The Valley Way Trail is STEEP.

Happy Summer



A blog full of journal entries and pictures from GoodHarbor's 1979 cross-country bicycle trip can be found right here.
Today is June 21st, 2010, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the first day of summer. I would imagine that most of you have your "big trip" and/or tripS planned for the season, and if you don't, it's about that time to get out the ol' map. Wilderness.net always has some good ideas.

If you have indeed made some plans to get out on the trail this summer, which if you're still reading this, I would imagine you have, please share your itineraries with each other in the comments. I'm sure we'd all love to know what everyone around the country (world?) is up to in the coming months.

Happy trails, people.

Skyline Drive

As the post below suggests, I spent the better half of the week driving around the middle of Virginia (Stonewall Jackson Country) eating fresh biscuits and walking through the BEAUTIFUL Blue Ridge Mountains. I was there for work (not Cold Splinters stuff, but something I'll get at in the weeks to come) and got back late last night with thoughts of Foamhenge still on my mind.On the way back, we drove through the last 1/3 of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah, a 105-mile road that runs the entire length of the park. It was pretty and foggy and slow and winding, and surprisingly enjoyable for a National Park drive. I've never actually camped in Shenandoah before, but after a quick look around and a long chat with a park ranger in Front Royal, I'm itching to go back. Seems like one hell of a place.See you again real soon, Virginia.MP3: Stonewall Jackson - One Look At Heaven

Camden Hills State Park

Camden Hills State Park is located in Camden, ME, just a few hours north of Portland, ME and a few hours south of Acadia National Park and Deer Isle. It's a perfect place to go camping after a breakfast at Friendly Toast and a beautiful drive up Route 1 in Maine. On a clear day, you can hike up Mt. Battie and see Cadillac Mountain at Acadia. It's quite the view, friends. The camping is all done right next to your car, but the sites are big(ish) and quiet if you get there early enough in the season. I can't vouch for July and August.Go to Maine. Listen to Thin Lizzy. Enjoy the sun. Sing karaoke with sailors at Cuzzy's.MP3: Thin Lizzy - Running Back

Half The Park Is After Dark

To help meet the demand for night sky interpretive programs, the National Park Service Night Sky Program last year recruited 19 volunteer astronomers from around the country who were then placed in national parks, started a loaner telescope collection, produced audio podcasts and brochures, and supported the stellar night sky poster art by Dr. Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer at the University of Redlands, California.Nordgren spent a one-year sabbatical in national parks where he collected his experiences into a book and drafted the series of 14 posters that harken to the Works Progress Administration posters of the 1930's. The full series of night sky posters is available for browsing here.

Paul Petzoldt's Films of NOLS in the 60s

Paul Petzoldt (1908 - 1999) grew up in southern Idaho, and at the age of 16, made his first ascent of Wyoming's Grand Teton wearing cowboy boots. He soon recognized the need to have better training and better preparation, and in the early 1930s, started the first guide concession in Grand Teton National Park.In 1963, after years of developing mountaineering techniques, Paul Petzold testified before Congress in favor of the Wilderness Act. That same year, he helped establish the first American Outward Bound program in Colorado.Two years later, in 1965, Petzoldt founded the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyoming. NOLS is the leading nonprofit outdoor education school, with more than 120,000 alumni. NOLS has 14 locations around the world and educates more than 3,000 students annually.The video after the jump was found "deep in the archives next to PPWE sleeping bags and under the wool knickers" by NOLS, who had their interns clean it up. Holy hell is it wonderful. Beautiful shots, wonderful narration by Petzoldt and some fine, fine musical accompaniment. One of the best things I've seen in a long while.WATCH THE VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP.

Dolly Sods Wilderness

The 17,371-acre Dolly Sods Wilderness in Monongahela National Forest, WV is named after the Dalhe family, who in the mid-1800s, used open grassy fields called "sods" for grazing sheep in the area. Located high on the Allegheny Plateau, Dolly Sods is known for its rocky plains and upland bogs. It is the highest plateau of its type east of the Mississippi River with altitude ranging from around 4,000 feet to about 2,700 feet. The lower elevations consist of a forest of northern hardwoods and laurel thickets. Higher up, groves of wind-stunted red spruce stand near heath barrens where azaleas, mountain laurels, rhododendron, and blueberries grow.David Hunter Strother ("Porte Crayon") wrote an early description of the area, published in Harper's Monthly magazine in 1852:

"In Randolph County, Virginia, is a tract of country containing from seven to nine hundred square miles, entirely uninhabited, and so savage and inaccessible that it has rarely been penetrated even by the most adventurous. The settlers on its borders speak of it with a sort of dread, and regard it as an ill-omened region, filled with bears, panthers, impassable laurel-brakes, and dangerous precipices. Stories are told of hunters having ventured too far, becoming entangled, and perishing in its intricate labyrinths. The desire of daring the unknown dangers of this mysterious region, stimulated a party of gentlemen . . . to undertake it in June, 1851. They did actually penetrate the country as far as the Falls of the Blackwater, and returned with marvelous accounts of its savage grandeur, and the quantities of game and fish to be found there."

1983 Appalachian Trail Log

The Don Nelan Shelter, which was burned by vandals in 1990, was located in Sugar Hollow in Carter County, Tennessee. The shelter's complete log from 1983, along with a wealth of other great information and stories, can be found at the Appalachain Trail Museum's website. Iin case you can't see all that well, the log from above reads:

3/12/83: Snow, Snow, Snow- about 3 inches. 7:00 a.m. and it's cold as shit. Thanks to T.E.H.C. for nice shelter. There have been several obscene notes recorded in here previously. We destroyed all but the one before. My response to it is, when the weather is hot and sticky that's no time to dunk your dick but when the frost is on the pumpkin thats the time for dicky dunkin. Hope everyone after us freezes also, Ha-Ha. Time to head for Dennis Cove and consume some Tang, apples, and Spam. HAPPY HIKING TO ALL!                                 Matthew, Clark, Bob, Willis                                     Georgia --> Maine 

Righty and Lefty

After spending most of my yesteryear in the Chicago suburbs, I was always under the impression that Euchre was a midwest thing. But after living in New England New York for the last five years (good lord), I've found more and more people from all over the country who know how to play. (They were taught by a midwesterner?) If you find someone who knows what Righty and Lefty are, it's an instant bond, an instant club. Whenever my college roommate's family came to visit, we would go to dinner, stock up at Liquormart and then rush home to start a Euchre tournament that would usually last most of the night. What a way to spend a Friday.It also happens to be the #1 card game for sitting around a campfire in a Crazy Creek, so if you don't know how to play, ask a friend to teach you. And if you don't have any friends that know how to play, bummer.

The Conquest Of Everest

On May 29, 1953, at the age of 33, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the 29,029 foot summit of Mount Everest. Hulu has the full stream of The Conquest Of Everest, a documentary about the expedition, so if you'd like, you can click here and watch the film in its entirety.

right back in the same mountains they had left behind.

From "A Novelist Looks at the Land" by Sharyn McCrumb:

In Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in America, geologist Kevin Dann writes that the first Appalachian journey was the one made by the mountains themselves.The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches north into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers.  People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach the wall of mountains. They follow the valleys south-southwest down through Pennsylvania, and finally find a place where the ridges rise, where you can see vistas of mountains across the valley. The Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Cornishmen - all those who had lives along the other end of the serpentine chain - to them this place must have looked right. Must have felt right. Like home.  And they were right back in the same mountains they had left behind.Perhaps it isn’t a unique experience in nature, this yearning for a place to which one is somehow connected. After years in the vast ocean, salmon return to spawn in the same small stream from whence they and their forebears came; monarch butterflies make the journey from the eastern seaboard to the same field in Mexico that had been the birthplace of the previous generation. The journey there and back again is unchanging, but each generation travels only one way. Is it really so strange that humans might feel some of this magnetism toward the land itself?I thought this bit of mountain geology was a wonderful metaphor for the journeys reflected in The Songcatcher, and that, in a sociological way, it closed the circle. I imagined my ancestor, Malcolm McCourry, harkening back to memories of the hills of Scotland he knew as a child. Perhaps when he saw the green mountains of North Carolina, he felt that he had come home. When I visit Scotland, I marvel at the resemblance between their land and ours— surely the pioneers felt the same awe in reverse.If you go looking for the serpentine chain in Britain, the best place to find it is on the Lizard, a peninsula in Cornwall between Falmouth and Penzance that is the southernmost tip of England. There, at Kynance Cove, you can see the cliffs of magnesium-rich serpentine, and the chain of rocks in the bay that marks the path to Ireland’s link on the great geologic chain. Serpentine began as peridotite, first as molten rock beneath the surface of the earth, and then as a deposit on the ancient seabed of the Rheic Ocean, some 375 million years ago. When two prehistoric super continents collided, the Lizard was slammed into the landmass that would become Britain. Another continental do-si-do produced Laurentia, which traveled north of the equator, passing the Tropic of Cancer 100 million years ago. Since the last Ice Age, the Lizard has rested at 50 degrees north latitude, part of an island walled away from continental Europe by the rising sea. The boundary between the landmass of the Lizard and the rest of Cornwall lies at Polurrian Cove, a clear demarcation. In the tiny village of Lizard, craftsmen today carve bowls and pendants out of tremolite serpentine, just as the Cherokee indians in eastern America once carved bowls of their own from this mineral-- just as the Vikings farther north on the European chain carved spindle whorls from the soft rock. Will the circle be unbroken? Indeed.I have scores of cousins who have never left that mountain fastness: no amount of money, and no dazzle of city lights could ever tempt them to abandon the land. I feel some of that power of place as I write, looking out across the ridges of mountains stretching along the Virginia section of the Appalachian Trail, and knowing that deep in the earth the serpentine chain is snaking its way past my farm, pointing the way to Canada, to Ireland, to the Orkney Islands. My office sits perched on the edge of the ridge so that from my window I can see green meadows far below, and folds of multi-colored hills stretching away to the clouds in the distance. It could be any century at all in that vista, which is just the view one needs to write novels set in other times. I tell myself I don’t want to live anywhere else, but every year or two, I make my way back to Britain, and I spend a few weeks wandering around the west of Ireland, or the coves of Cornwall, or the cliffs of Scotland - an ocean away from home, but still connected by the serpentine chain.

100 Mile Wilderness

The Hundred-Mile Wilderness is the section of the Appalachian Trail that runs between Monsoon, ME and Abol Bridge, just south of Baxter State Park. It is generally considered the wildest section of the trail, and as you can see from the sign above, has no roads for 100 miles, so stock up on oatmeal and sardines.The AMC is working to protect this land through their Maine Woods Initiative that you can read more about here.MP3: Ted Lucas - It Is So Nice To Get Stoned

Hats

I found this hat in the "free pile" at work several years ago, and although I've brought it on several spring/summer trips, I've yet to actually wear it. Pure novelty. It's a Kangol that I highly doubt is made anymore. The bill of the hat goes on forever and it's just about the ugliest thing I ever saw. That's my friend Jay (notice the overalls) wearing the beauty at Joshua Tree two Christmases ago.What I do end up wearing is a 99 cent NEW HAMPSHIRE hat that I bought, along with a sling shot, at a general store in the White Mountains. Along with several rips, that thing is now stained many times over with sweat, dirt, food, and lord knows what else. It might be time to retire it. What a shame.What do y'all wear when you go out? Send me a picture. Would love to post it.

Frontiersmen Camping Fraternity

The Frontiersmen Camping Fellowship (originally called "Frontiersmen Camping Fraternity") was founded during the summer of 1966 by The Royal Rangers, a worldwide ministry of the Assemblies of God. From the "History" section of their website:

The early American frontiersman was an excellent example of man's ability to adapt to the outdoors and the wilderness. His achievements were also an example of courage and determination. The national office, therefore, made the decision to base this fraternity on the lore and traditions of these early frontiersmen.The first FCF chapter was organized in the Southern California District on July 8, 1966. High in the San Bernardino Mountains in a clearing surrounded by gigantic trees, a large group of Royal Rangers sat around a blazing campfire. As they waited, a feeling of mystery and expectancy filled the air.Suddenly, the blast of a hunter's horn shattered the night's stillness and echoed through the trees. National Commander Johnnie Barnes stepped into the firelight, dressed in a buckskin outfit and a coonskin cap. As lie began to explain the new FCF program, a hum of excitement rose above the sound of the crackling campfire. Assisted by two district leaders, Ron Halvorson and Bob Reid, these men proceeded with the first FCF callout. After pledging to endure a time of testing, the candidates were led away carrying a large rope to a mountaintop nearby for an all night initiation.Later as the new members (five men and five boys) were officially inducted into the fraternity at the final friendship fire, they sensed that this ceremony was a milestone in Royal Rangers history.That same year, three more chapters were organized in the Northern California, the Southern Missouri, and the Iowa Districts. This exciting and unique fraternity has so captured the imaginations of men and boys until the program has now grown to include organized chapters in the majority of our country.

More old guidebook covers after the jump...