It’s All About the Climb…
My answer was, “When you have time”. My other daughter Steph chimed in, “We will make time”. And with that, the plan was hatched; soon my cousin Kellie joined the quest. On September 2, 2018 we four headed for New Hampshire.
Mt. Washington has the most volatile weather on the east coast, so we allowed for three possible days to make the climb. Day one we got up at 5:00 a.m., to find out at 5:05 that they were calling for afternoon thunderstorms. I have no desire to be on the top of any mountain in a thunderstorm. Day two arrived and it was supposed to be a perfect day: 90 degrees at the base and in the 70s at the peak.
We arrived at the base at 7:40 a.m. to go into the camp store and see the display of all the ways people died climbing Mt. Washington. My cousin was questioning her decision to join us at this point. Standing at the base looking up, we were reassured by Laura that she did it before and we would be fine, so off we went. About 2½ hours in we got to the Forest Ranger cabin where we could fill our water bottles and take a break. We looked up to see a small waterfall coming straight down the wall of the mountain. Little did we realize that we would be climbing up right next to it in about an hour. It was at that point that Kellie said, “I told everyone I was HIKING Mt. Washington. I am changing that to CLIMBING!”
When we reached “the bowl”, Steph’s back started to spasm and she began to hyperventilate from the pain. She stopped to rest. Laura kept going, and when she made it to the parking-lot at the summit she waved her hands wildly and said, “This is it, Steph, this is all you have to do!” She lied!! As we crested the parking lot, in front of us sat the longest set of wooden stairs I had ever seen in my life!! You might be thinking, you have climbed a mountain, stairs should be nothing. When you have climbed a mountain and you see the stairs, you think, “You’ve got to be kidding me; I have to climb those to get to the peak!!!!” Legs trembling, we climbed those stairs, to get our picture with the sign at the peak, only to wait in line behind people who had “climbed” Mt. Washington in a car or the train. We made it!! But the climb was not over yet; now we had to get back down…..
As we all tend to do, I was beating myself up thinking, “What were you thinking climbing a mountain?”, but when I went to my grandson’s first birthday party the following Saturday, his other grandmother looked at me in my big cast and said, “What an awesome story!! You could have tripped on the stairs or fallen off a curb and done the same thing. YOU climbed a mountain!” YEAH, I CLIMBED A MOUNTAIN AND THEN CLIMBED DOWN WITH A BROKEN ARM. How many people can say that? Wow, what a change in perspective! I am so proud of all of us and how we handled the entire experience. I would do it again in a minute, though my husband probably would not encourage it this time😊!
And now, for the rest of the story…a month later they were chipping ice off the weather station on Mt. Washington; 25 degrees with 30 mph winds.
By Michelle Poole, Director of Community Outreach