A couple weeks ago, I took vacation time to visit friends and family in New Hampshire. The highlight of the trip was my visit to Mount Cardigan. It’s a somewhat less imposing climb compared to many of the nearby White Mountains, at 3,155 feet above sea level. But in the words of another party of hikers who I encountered on the trail, “‘easier’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘easy.’” The weather was clear on the day of the hike, but several days of rain earlier that week made the hike pose two very different challenges. On the one hand, there was a pressure cooker: humidity trapped under the forest canopy in the valleys below the mount. On the other, was the summit: bare granite unshielded by tree cover and exposed to powerful, cold winds.
Both areas had difficult terrain. The path was closer to a suggestion on how to navigate the wilderness than a properly groomed trail. Inside the pressure cooker, it was characterized by slipperiness and wetness. Not easy going up, but downright dangerous going down.
Several times, I found myself looking up Mount Cardigan’s peak and the other ledges. The slabs of rock are truly impressive in their scale. They need to be seen to be believed, but at one point on my vacation — not at Cardigan, but at another mountain I visited on my trip, Monadnock — I noticed little dots on the top.
After watching them for a moment, I saw that the little dots were swinging their arms backwards and forwards and moving up. Those were people. And if I’m going to continue this hike, I quickly realized, I need to keep going upwards myself until I shrink down to that small size.
I thought that I couldn’t do it, but one step at a time, I did. Eventually, the seeminglyimpossibly steep rock faces around each corner stopped being demoralizing. As I got better at finding and securing my footing, they became fun puzzles to solve.
After going up Cardigan for about three-and-ahalf hours, my hiking buddy and I descended to the other side of the mountain to find our lodgings for the night: three walls and a roof, maintained by volunteers, open to visitors.
We bent over to get in and out. That, combined with the forest floor covered in green moss, reminded me of Gandalf visiting his hobbit friends, whose little homes are much too small for him.
We then cooked dinner in a pot and gathered whatever dry material we could find to make a fire outside. Then we slept in our sleeping bags, woke up the next morning, and did the whole thing again in reverse (plus a detour) to get back to the car.
I’ve been trying to apply the experience to other areas in my life. I remember looking at the summit and feeling like I couldn’t make it up, but still completing the journey by going one stretch of trail at a time. Any big accomplishment is like this. The task seems overwhelming until you break it down to smaller, more achievable goals. And eventually, you reach the top.
