We are on the cusp of attaining our long-held goal of hiking all of the White Mountain 4000 Footers thanks to the weekend’s propitious trip to the Carter Notch Hut, when we bagged 4 of the remaining 5 peaks. Now, only one 4000 Footer remains: The rugged, beautiful, elusive Bondcliff, which, barring a freakish heat wave, will have to wait until the spring. Our gear has reached the limit of its effectiveness in the wintry elements; hiking season has ended.

We made the reservation at Carter Notch Hut last month, a crap-shot in terms of the weather, but the huts are popular this time of year because they are “self-service,” meaning that you must pack in all of your food and bedding. Not fun, but the cost is only $30/night. Mr. P has vacation days to burn, and my Fridays off may shortly come to an end, so we left for New Hampshire on Friday morning to allow plenty of time to summit Wildcat Mountain that afternoon.

We took the Nineteen Mile Brook trail to Carter Notch Hut, an easy 3.7 jaunt with some patchy ice and snow. No one was at the hut, not even the caretaker, which was sort of worrisome, but we claimed our bunks in the unheated bunkhouse, ditched our food and stuff, and set off to summit Wildcat Mountain. It was a 1-hour near-vertical hike to the summit.

Summit of Wildcat Mountain

View of Carter Notch Hut from Wildcat Mountain

We returned to the hut. Still, no one else was there. We ventured into the kitchen and fiddled around with the stove to boil water for tea.

Carter Notch Hut Kitchen

The sun was setting and the cold was beginning to permeate the unheated hut. Finally a young man burst in, out of breath. It was the caretaker, full of apologies. It turned out that we had arrived in the window between caretakers’ weeklong shifts. He told us that we were the only guests on Friday night, but a full house of 40 was expected on Saturday night. I had a hard time picturing 40 people in the main hut; no wonder it was nicknamed “Cozy Carter.”

Cozy Carter

The caretaker made his dinner, then Mr. P and I heated up the stew that we brought. Perhaps because there were only two guests, the caretaker didn’t light a fire, so we were already pretty chilly when we headed to the bunkhouse. It was about 20 degrees when we jumped into our sleeping bags. I was so cold that I opened a pair of handwarmers to restore feeling to my appendages.

“Mr. P, did you hear about how those people died in a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona last week?” I ask as I pressed the hand warmers into my numb feet.

“No,” he answers. “What’s a sweat lodge?”

“It’s like a really intense sauna,” I say. “The Native Americans did sweat lodges as a ritual, and now New Age people seeking spiritual and physical health  pay thousands of dollars to sit in a cramped, hot, steamy room and sweat profusely.” Pause. “Doesn’t that sound heavenly?”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” Mr. P says.

“I’d rather be in a sweat lodge than a shiver hut,” I add.

We woke up the next morning at 7:15, alive. After breakfasting with the caretaker, we set out on our 9.4 mile trek across the Carter range.

First up, Carter Dome. The air was crisp and cold, but we warmed up quickly on the steep climb out of Carter Notch.

View of Carter Notch Hut and Wildcat Mountain

Summit of Carter Dome

There was a smattering of past-peak foliage in the lower altitudes. The contrast between the autumny copper and the wintry white was beguiling.

View from Carter Dome

Next up was the minor peak of Mount Hight, which is touted as having the best views in the Carter Range because of its unobstructed view of Mount Washington and the Presidential Range. Lovely Alpine Zone scenery, too.

Mount Hight

Mount Hight’s Alpine Zone

View of the Carters from Mount Hight

We continued onto South Carter. We had a hard time finding the summit, but then Mr. P spotted a tiny wooden sign on a tree.

Summit Mark for South Carter

The day before, when we were driving towards the White Mountains, the snow-covered peaks loomed above the leaf-covered trees like ghosts. We couldn’t stop marveling over the beauty of the day.

The Presidental Range

Near Middle Carter Summit

Summit of Middle Carter

We were making incredible time on our hike. The snow and ice was a little cumbersome, but we wore microspikes on our shoes, and the snow actually helped us walk easily on rocky paths. We made it back to the hut at 4pm and decided to hike back to our car and drive home. After the previous night of sleepless cold, we needed a good night’s sleep.

Before we left, we stopped in the hut for a hot tea and a nip of whiskey, and promptly fell into conversation with a group of eight 50-something hikers who brought up ten bottles of wine and wanted to share. They were hilarious and outgoing, and we had to tear ourselves away from them. But we had our warm beds on our minds…

Mount Isolation. Now there’s a mountain that lives up to its name. The easiest route to the summit clocks in at around 14 miles, which is a hike, indeed. Given that the terrain is largely flat, it’s an entirely feasible trip to accomplish in one day, but only if said day starts near the trailhead. And since Columbus Day weekend is prime foliage time, even the shack motels in the White Mountains are booked solid with leaf peepers from around the world. $125 to sleep in a smelly room that hasn’t been updated since the 1980s? Why do that, when sleeping in the woods is free?

Thus, we decided to break up the hike to Mount Isolation by backpacking and spending Saturday night in the woods. We left for New Hampshire before noon on Saturday, underestimating the impact that the leaf peepers would have on the traffic, both on the highway and on the local roads in the White Mountains. The full extent of leaf mania was made clear to us when we rounded a curve on I-93 and there were scores of people milling around the side of the highway and traversing the two lanes in order to take some pictures of peak foliage. Crazed leaf peepers, risking their lives on an interstate highway to snap low-quality digital pictures of some red and yellow leafs!

I don’t understand leaf peepers: Why would you want to drive around looking at leafs, when you can take a walk in the woods? You can gaze at a canopy of leafs above your head as they wink in the wind, tread upon a soft bed of freshly-fallen leafs, and even use them as toilet paper.

Walking in the Leafs

So although we didn’t start hiking until 3:30pm, it was okay because we only had to hike 3.7 miles to Rocky Branch Shelter #2, where we’d spend the night. I was nervous that the shelter would be full and we’d have to find a campsite for our tent, but it turned out we were the only people crazy enough to want to spend the night in 30-degree temperatures. We pitched the tent on the shelter platform, reasoning that the tent might retain some of our body warmth.

Rocky Branch Shelter #2

By 6:30pm, we were already pretty cold, so we decided to eat dinner. Dehydrated backpacker food: Mr. P had a hearty concoction called Chili Mac, while I had dehydrated eggs with a chopped-up avocado. By the time we finished dinner, cleaned up our stuff, and hung our packs on a tree branch, I was more than ready to abscond to the relative warmth of my sleeping bag.

I don’t know what time I woke up, but it was the dead of night. It seems that the dehydrated eggs had turned my normally-iron stomach into jello. Not to be too graphic, but my body wanted to expel the eggs by any means necessary. Up or down, either route would do. Yet the eggs did not move, they stayed lodged in my digestive track, causing hours of turmoil as I lay in my sleeping bag, sleepless and uncomfortable, with ice cold feet and clammy hands. Mr. P dozed beside me, his bear-like snores both a comfort and a taunt.

In the morning, when I “woke up” (a term used loosely, as it implies substantive sleep), it was snowing. Not hard, but resolutely and with patches of stickiness on the rocks and logs. We decided AGAINST our planned breakfast of dehydrated eggs, and opted instead for salami. Then, we consolidated most of our stuff into Mr. P’s pack, which we hung back in the tree so we could summit Mt. Isolation unencumbered.

Hanging the pack

Nice hike to Mt. Isolation. It took less than 4 hours from and back to the shelter, an easy trail but with quite a bit of water and mud on parts of the trail. And about a half-dozen river crossings, ugh.  Oh, how I loath skipping across a raging brook on wet, uneven stones with mud-caked boots and a sleep-deprived sense of balance. But we made it to the summit without a dunking. We were alone of the summit of Mount Isolation, which felt appropriate, and quite cold.

Summit of Mount Isolation

View from Mount Isolation

Mount Isolation Summit Cairn

And now… leaf porn for any peepers out there!