Hiking – Tom's On The Move

December 9, 2016

Tubal Cain

The snowfall was one thing Lauren and I hadn’t counted on when we set out in search of the Tubal Cain mine in the Dungeness Valley.

First there was the drive up from Sequim, where we climbed a couple thousand feet into the Olympic Mountains via a winding dirt road that was full of potholes. We got to the trailhead a bit before noon. The snow was beginning to pack onto the dirt. Soon enough, it would become impassable.

There was only a light dusting on the trail as we began our hike, but as we gained elevation, the snow deepened. High white peaks glared down on us.

A couple hours into our hike, the trail we’d been following through the trees became a slog through deeper powder. Following the twists and turns of the trail became more difficult. There appeared to be a fork next to some orange flagging. Lauren thought we should go left, but I insisted that we go straight ahead. My way petered out into a meadow a couple minutes later. The snow made it difficult to see where anything went.

We doubled back and tried Lauren’s route, which led into a boulder garden. We passed a few pieces of metal, which seemed out of place. A B-17 had crashed here on a rescue mission back in the ’50s, and apparently the debris had scattered over a large area (though we were probably looking at old mining equipment.) The main crash site was close by, and was a popular spot for visitors to check out, but it seemed unlikely that we would have time to check it out now that it was getting late.

Lauren at a stream crossing along the trail

Moss closeup

We had both put off lunch for a while, and were hungry. A large, overhanging boulder made for a semi-sheltered rest stop, where we could sit down.

The rocks had a weird smell to them like a mix between stale beer and marijuana. For a second, I wondered if someone else was out there with us, but we had seen no other tracks in the snow.

We sat down on my sleeping pad, eating fistfuls of Lauren’s homemade trail mix. I looked dubiously at a bruised up banana I had brought along. Fortunately, Lauren had the idea to incorporate it into a sandwich with flatbread and pieces of a chocolate bar. As if this weren’t fancy enough, she added a bit of the flambé. Using my lighter in lieu of a torch, she put the chocolate to the flame, melted it over the banana in a fine drizzle. This method took no small amount of time, but the melted chocolate pattern elevated the utilitarian wrap into backcountry gourmet.

_mg_1334

_mg_1342 — Wrap construction and Lauren with the finished product.

Unfortunately, the clock was running down on us.

If we didn’t head back soon, we would likely finish our hike in the dark. I decided that we owed ourselves another 10 minutes of searching for the mine before we called it a day.

I pulled the map out and squinted at the features to see where the trail was supposed to go.

It looked like the mine could be on the other side of a creek, so we crossed over. I took us up a snowy hillside, approaching a cliff wall. Something about this felt right, but I couldn’t tell if I was drawing conclusions based on false optimism. I beat my way ahead of Lauren through the drifted snow on the way uphill. There was a patch of gravel that looked trail-like. Once again, there was that strange skunky odor in the air. A few steps beyond and I was at the bottom of the cliff.

And there was the mine! It was a dark opening, a mouth in the gray body of the rock.

Row on row of icicles hung above the darkness like an array of fangs.

The beast had announced itself with stale breath — the dead odor that I had perceived earlier.

A drool of a stream gurgled out from the unseen depths.

Come on in.

I let myself savor my trepidation and turned back down the slope.

“Whoo Lauren! Come on up! You gotta see this!”

Several icicles fell off the rocks and smashed into the stream below. Plenty more of them were waiting up there — a definite hazard.

I also wanted to go in. But how far did the rabbit hole go?

I took a headlamp and a small lantern out from my pack. Well, we’d come this far.

Lauren was game to accompany me on some minor-league spelunking. I walked in first, with ginger steps upon the various stones and pieces of smashed up wood poking up above the water. There were segments of dilapidated tracks that would have transported cars full of ore back in the day.

Here in there were half-rusted pipes put in there God-knows-when; I only trusted half of them not to shatter beneath my feet. I shone the light in front of me, saw only a uniform corridor, retreating to oblivion. There was no undulation or other variation as in what one would expect from an ordinary cave. Neither were there stalactites or stalagmites. It was just tall enough to walk under, just wide enough to stretch hands out to reach either side.

A century ago, efficient men had chipped the tunnel straight and direct into the rock so it would bring them to the copper ore. The mine was named after Tubal Cain, a metalsmith and the biblical descendant of Cain — Abel’s jealous brother. For all the work that the men had put in, the mine had brought more hardship than profit. The clearest legacy of the men’s labors was the straight and narrow shaft bored into the rock.

There was one variation against the uniformity of the stone however. It was on the ceiling, where I perceived small hanging objects, here and there. Small, furry, hanging objects.

I turned carefully around to Lauren, noticed one of them near her head.

“Sooooo…” I said in a voice that was meant to sound calm, and which likely inspired the opposite, “How do you feel about bats?”

“I actually really don’t like them,” Lauren said.

“OK, so maybe we should walk back out the way we came.”

“You’re seeing bats in here?”

“Just don’t look up at the ceiling.”.

I waited until we made our retreat back to the light to announce that indeed there had been several chiropterans in the mine, one of which had been only a couple feet away from Lauren’s head.

Lauren noted that bats or birds, or anything flying at her head were really not her cup of tea.

They weren’t my cup of tea either. I recalled Stephen King’s book Cujo, where a bat bite turned a once lovable dog into a homicidal killer.

But that was just a story. What business did stories have to do with being afraid of the dark and its mutants and zombies and Gollum and old Tubal Cain himself, waiting for victims dumb enough to enter his lair?

What business?

I turned back to the mouth.

_mg_1268 — Mountain view within the valley

“I’ll be back in a little bit. I just want to see some more,” I said. You can tell them my story if I don’t come back.

Going back into the cave, I hunched over like Quasimodo, in hopes that any bats I dislodged would miss my face.* The stale air in the shaft made me uneasy. No photosynthesis putting out fresh oxygen here. Our nostrils can tell us much about our proximity to life.

I began to feel hot under my jacket as I walked into the earth. I picked my way above the stream, moving from stone to wood, to any section of pipe I trusted enough to put my weight on. I took one misstep and managed to put half my boot in the water.

“Damn!”

“Are you alright?” Lauren called from the open world far away.

“Yeah, I’m OK.”

I kept trudging forward. I wondered if there would be any side alcoves or tunnels and if I would have the nerve to explore them. A big open chamber would be pretty cool. All I found was the same endless tunnel. Finally, after I spent many minutes of walking straight, the ceiling dropped lower and the walls closed in. The corridor went further toward some unseeable destination.

While the passage was still wide enough to move through on my feet, do to so, I’d have to walk through the stream, which ran deeper in the narrows. With a couple of hours of snowy hiking ahead of me, I was in no mood to turn my feet into ice blocks.

I hated to admit it, but I was relieved not to have an excuse to turn around. If not for the obstruction, how much farther would I have gone?** I guessed that I had gone about 100 yards through the narrow corridor, or about the length of a football field. I was ready to go back.

Hardier explorers than I will have to plumb the mysteries of Tubal Cain.

I picked my way back over the stream to the entrance of the mine. Every step made the walls a little brighter. I exhaled in relief and then took a breath of the fresh mountain air outside.

No bats had attacked, I had made it out alive and it was time for Lauren and I to hike back out through the snow to the car. I was glad get back to the land of the living.

The author takes a moment to mess with his pack

Notes

* After I returned from the hike, I talked to a friend who had been on a few cave tours. Even when bats fly out, they will avoid collisions with sonar, she said. The best thing to do if a bunch of bats come at you is to stay still and let them steer away. If you freak out and flap your arms, they are more likely to be confused and hit you.

** Apparently, the Tubal Cain mine goes almost 3,000 feet back into the rock. So I was probably only a tenth of the way in. I also learned later that the mine is still private property and I was not supposed to go in because of risk (unspecified.) I’ll plead innocent here, having not read this anywhere before the trip. I dug information about mine history here: http://www.kawal.net/tubalcain.htm.

I learned about the scale of the mine, its current ownership and the B-17 here: http://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/an-eerie-october-hike-to-downed-b-17-and-old-mine-site/

November 7, 2015November 7, 2015

Of Mice and Mountains: A November Mount Washington Ascent

_MG_7379 — Hoar frost decorates a cairn on the trail to the Mount Washington summit

The high slopes of Mount Washington don’t look so far away from the trailhead at Pinkham Notch — the same way that on some nights it looks like you could reach out and pluck the moon out of the sky.

It’s close, but not that close.

There are over four miles and 4,000 feet of hike between the start-point and the rocky, ice encrusted waste where New England’s tallest mountain tops out.

Ben and I wrangled our gear together in the parking lot. I crammed an old windbreaker into my pack with a puffy parka, secured my jumbo polyester sleeping bag to the outside with a cam strap.

“Do you really think I’ll need a parka?” Ben asked. “This fleece is pretty warm.”

“Trust me. You’ll be glad to have it when we get to camp and stop moving. Your temperature is going to drop.”

The packs were already bulging with the trappings of our hastily-assembled trip. I had got back to Connecticut from my friends’ wedding on the afternoon before the trip, while Ben had worked until midnight on the previous night. We’d made the drive from Connecticut to New Hampshire that day, stopping to pick up groceries and other trip necessities.

“You sure you want to carry that beer up the mountain?” I asked Ben.

“Of course!”

It was the first hiking trip for the two of us since Ben had come out to visit me in Wyoming back in 2012. It was also his first time going up Washington, a hike I recommend for any able-bodied Northeasterner. I’ve been lucky enough to stand on the top of this mountain several times over the years, starting with my first ascent with my dad back when I was seven.

On a good day, it is an easy climb. The trick is finding a good day.

The mountain is notorious for gale winds, snow in the summer months, avalanches in winter and some disorienting fog for good measure. Fortunately, the forecast in the days before our trip called for unseasonably warm weather and relatively mild 50 mph summit winds. I still loaded on the warm clothes and gear, along with plenty of food to keep the internal furnace running. I had no desire for the mountain to catch me off guard.

_MG_7446 — One of the helpful warnings for winter travelers. It was too early in the season for Ben and I to worry about avalanches.

The sun had already set beneath the cliffs of Boott Spur as we started up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail. We had about two and a half miles uphill to get to the camp at Hermit Lake.

The trail was a rugged course of bare rock and boulders, worn clean of dirt by generations of footsteps along one of the most popular hikes in the Northeast. The Cutler River swirled alongside.

We stopped at an overlook to admire the Crystal Cascade, then continued our climb beneath the fall leaves. A deciduous mix of birch, beech and maple trees began to give away to spruce and balsam fir with altitude.

That, I told Ben, was one of my favorite things about climbing mountains: it only takes a handful of miles to cross into different worlds. The next day, we would ascend past alpine garden and into tundra.

Light was fading as we approached camp. The trees were already shorter and thin here. The dark headwall of Tuckerman Ravine appeared above us, a cross section of a 1,000-foot tall bowl. At either end stand the twin outcrops of Lion Head to the north and Boott Spur to the south. Above us, the tiny points of stars emerged out from dusk.

The Hermit Lake camp takes up the base of the ravine with interspersed tent sites and lean-tos. The place gets hopping in the summer months and again in the winter when the skiers come out to take on one of the most intense slopes in the east. In November, there aren’t so many people. In fact, no one else was staying there that night aside from the caretaker, giving Ben and I first pick of campsites.

We chose one of the few structures that was closed in on all sides. After we set up our mats and sleeping bags on the floor, I started cooking up some lentils and pasta.

_MG_7285 — Ben enjoying some of our gourmet trail fare

That was when we had our visitation. A small gray form crept out from a gap in the doorway, and scurried over our clothes.

“Hey! Get out of here!”

The mouse looked at me with marginal concern. Then I made like I was going to rush it, and it ran back through the gap. I placed a rock to hold the door tight against the wall, but a moment later the mouse simply crawled through a new gap underneath. It perched on top of Ben’s hiking boot before I waved it away again.

“We’re going to have to hang everything up,” I announced. “It probably wants to chew the leather.”

We made use of the pegs inside the building to hang clothes and shoes. Food went into a bear bin near some outhouses.

Later, we went outside to check out the star show above the ravine. There was only a small breeze where we were standing, but we could hear blasts of wind, roaring through the boulder field atop the headwall. The clear night air revealed the misty trail of the milky way.

Periodically, we would see a shooting star make a brief streak across the sky.

“I wonder if that is happening more than usual tonight, or if we just don’t bother looking up most of the time,” Ben said.

I didn’t know.

Our concerns turned back to earth, where we were getting cold. And then there was the specter of the marauding mouse waiting for us back at the lean to.

Right after I got into my sleeping bag and turned off my headlamp, I heard Ben grunt,

“He crawled right over my face!”

I turned on the headlamp just in time to see the mouse scurry under the door. This time, I took out our trekking poles and extended them to fill the gap. Laughable defense against a critter small enough to crawl through a quarter-sized opening, but it was something.

I went back to sleep with my broad-brimmed hat over my face. At least, if the mouse crawled over me, he wouldn’t fall into my open mouth.

The next morning, we did an oatmeal breakfast and began our hike up through the ravine.

Thin waterfalls sprouted out along the granite cliffs in front of us. Steps of quarried stone made the ascent easier, but the steep climb had us puffing. Added to that, it was freakishly warm for the season, warm enough so that I stripped to shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt. I’ve experienced colder conditions on the mountain in July.

_MG_7335 — Water coming down the headwall

_MG_7349 — Ice-filled stream cuts through alpine garden above Tuckerman

_MG_7351 — View of Lion Head from within the ravine

_MG_7313 — Cool views! Hiking up the ravine with Boott Spur in the background.

Here and there, patches of snow and ice lurked in the shadows. A small frozen falls clung to the north face of the bowl. There were clouds racing over the headwall, but the cliffs sheltered us from the wind — for now. Scrub trees along the trail, were bowed permanently into awkward shapes from downdrafts.

The air got colder as we got higher. We stopped to re-layer right before we summited the headwall where the wind was blowing. When we got to the top, the temperature must have dropped 15 degrees. Gusts of wind buffeted us periodically, but we were had the semi-shelter of the summit cone. Now there were no trees, just broken boulders with lichen growing over. We had about .8 miles of this terrain to cover before the we got to the weather station that marks the top of Mount Washington.

We began to make our way over the rocks, stopping periodically, to glance over at Lion Head and down to Tuckerman. We wouldn’t be enjoying views for much longer. A dark plane of cloud cut the top of the mountain out of view. Soon, we were engulfed in that swirling mist.

Blast patterns of hoar frost decorated stony outcrops and trail cairns, a spiny mosaic mapping the wind currents and eddies.

_MG_7373

_MG_7410

_MG_7404 — Frost feathers on Appalachian Trail marker near the summit

We scrambled up the boulders, using the cairns to follow the trail.

A short ways in front of us, it went over a lip.

“I think I know what that is,” I said.

Sure enough it was the auto road to the summit. We walked along the pavement to the weather station. Here, at the top of the cone, we finally felt the full force of the wind blowing over the mountain. An icy path led to the pile of rocks where there were no higher rocks. A sign marked the summit. We lurched like drunks as the wind shoved us this way and that. We got to the top and slapped high fives through our gloves.

Recorded wind gusts for the day fell in the 50 to 75 mph range — unexceptional for a mountain that once set a world record 231 mph wind speed and had been predicted to gust 130 mph the day earlier.

Whatever speed the winds were blowing, the conditions did not inspire us to linger about the summit. We got our pictures and got off the top. We sought the shelter of one of the weather observatory buildings to layer up into parkas and windbreakers, then started our descent.

To mix things up, Ben and I opted to take the Lion Head Trail on the descent. This route kept us in the wind a little longer, but it also afforded some excellent views down into Tuckerman. Our quads were feeling it by the time we got down the rocks to Hermit Lake.

Ben was ready to call it a day, but I opted to take a quick run up the steep boulders of the Boott Spur Link to get a different view of Tuckerman and fill my daily masochism quota.

It was near dark when we got back, Ben already had pasta going for dinner. The beer was out, of course, a fine Smuttynose imperial red that did credit to The Granite State.

Our main objective complete, we would have a leisurely hike back to Pinkham Notch the next day.

As an added bonus, the mouse kept his distance that night.

In many ways, Ben and I had been like that troublesome rodent. We’d challenged the giant, and got out of the way before it had the chance to swipe at us.

_MG_7431 — View into Tuckerman Ravine from Lion Head Trail