Every year, Boston has an average of about 20 days of good weather. What constitutes “good” weather is subjective — for example, cold weather aficionados like myself find salvation in sunny autumn days with temperatures in the upper 50s. But by normal standards, good weather means a sunny, warm day in the mid 70s to mid 80s with low humidity, low winds, and not a hint of rain. And I swear we only get 20 of them. And today is one of them.
It being a Sunday, normally we’d take a day trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire and bag a few 4000-footers, but social obligations kept us local. I was gratified instead to read a feature in the Boston Globe about the dangers of hiking in the White Mountains, and how “amateur” hikers often underestimate the ferocity of the weather and overestimate their preparedness. It’s nothing I didn’t already know after reading Not without Peril, an excellent book about 150 years of “misadventure” on Presidential Range in the Whites, whose author is quoted in the Globe article as saying “The biggest mistake is not turning back.”
Whenever we hike in the Whites, I’m haunted by the tragic stories in Not without Peril. I think about the woefully unprepared hikers who freeze to death. I think about the seasoned mountaineers whose experience gives them foolhardy courage to toil through storms and succumb to exhaustion and exposure. I think about the tragic accidents, the avalanches and falls into gullies and crevasses, that no amount of preparation or caution can prevent.
It’s scary and sad to think about people dying in the mountains that I revere, but it instills a great awe for the weather that this tiny range is capable of entertaining. Nature isn’t all singing birds and serene sunshine. Though, today it is.
