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.
