Mountain Living

It took going to college in the rolling hills of central New York state for me to realize I am, at heart, a mountain girl. Although I’d spent countless hours of my childhood hiking up mountains in the summer and skiing down them through the winter, I’d always taken those mountains for granted. So when I landed in a mountainless landscape, it didn’t take long to realize there was something critical missing from my life.

There are lessons to be learned in the mountains. Patience. Perseverance. A deep love of beautiful things – and the rugged power that is often hidden by that beauty. And the lesson of taking the good – good snow, good weather, good times with loved ones or alone – when you can get it.

I spend lots of time in winter on the mountains, namely on one: Cannon Mountain. It is the one with which I am most familiar. The one where I have spent the most time. It is not the only mountain I have loved, but it is the one that most feels like home.

Last weekend I took a few solo ski runs, after fulfilling my coaching duties for the day and before I had to return to the tasks that awaited me at home. At one point I paused, between chairlift ride and skiing descent, to watch four ravens play on the wind. They floated up, drifting this way, then that, just gliding above the trees and the humans sliding below them on the snow.

The wind was from the south, which rarely means good things for the skiing at Cannon. But the ravens didn’t seem to care. They take whatever wind they find, I guess.

That south wind was part of the reason I’d decided to stick around for a few more runs Sunday. Winds howling through Franconia Notch from the south in December typically bring warm, wet weather. The skiing was fabulous Sunday, had been great for the first few weeks of the season, and I wanted a few more laps on the all-natural stuff before whatever that south wind carried watered it all down.

In the mountains, the lines between seasons are not so definitive as they are in lower realms. I have been buffeted by icy summer winds at the top of Mount Jefferson, when the sun shone calmly at the trailhead. I’ve been knocked around by tremendous gusts and pelted by freezing rain in August on Mount Adams. I’ve hiked through October snow to reach Lonesome Lake.

I’ve watched an impossibly long sunset linger across distant peaks from just below the summit of Mount Washington (only hours – and many miles – after being caught in that Mount Adams cloud). I’ve seen a magical show of sun halos and pillars and glittering diamond dust in the December sky above Cannon. And I’ve skied mid-April powder on the mountain while crocus shoots push through the dirt in my yard not far away.

Last weekend the snow and ice were so thick and white on the stunted evergreens near the summit of Cannon that the kids I coach decided the forest looked like an army of yetis. To me it seemed like some fantastical wonderland. That is how I often feel in and on the mountains – as if it’s too astoundingly beautiful to be real. Mountains can be breathtakingly beautiful from afar, but nothing compares to standing on a high summit as the world goes on below.

I’ve had some challenging moments in the mountains, and some that have scared me, too. But it’s the magical ones that bring me back again and again, whether it’s toiling for hours to reach a summit by foot or riding a chairlift for the easy thrill of gliding back down. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 13, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Shaw-Doran Mt. Wash climb

Paralympian and all-around bad ass athlete Tyler Walker (and teammate Laurie Stephens) climbed the Mt. Washington Auto Road in wheelchairs yesterday as part of the Adaptive Sports Partners of the North Country's annual Sunrise Ascent fundraiser. In honor of the event, here's a story of the first wheelchair ascent, from the August 13, 2005 Caledonian-Record.

BY MEGHAN McCARTHY

Staff Writer

Cam Shaw-Doran climbs hills mainly for the pure thrill of a speedy descent.

When he pushed to the top of the northeast’s highest peak last week, however, it was not for the glory of the downhill ride, but to become the first person in a wheelchair ever to summit 6,288-foot Mount Washington.

“We didn’t train at all. We just went over and did it,” Shaw-Doran said of the hike suggested by his friend Geoff Krill, who is also in a wheelchair.

The two set off up the Mount Washington Auto Road early Aug. 1 with a few friends and a video camera to document the trek. While Krill, exhausted, gave up the effort around the six mile mark – the road is 7.6 miles long – Shaw-Doran pushed on, reaching the summit at dusk.

Natives of the North Country, Krill and Shaw-Doran were both avid athletes and adventure-seekers prior to being paralyzed by separate accidents in the 1990s. Their Mount Washington hike is just one in a string of activities both men continue to pursue.

“Geoff totally lied to me,” Shaw-Doran, 26, said of the Washington climb. “He said, ‘Oh, yeah, the first mile’s the worst part.’ It just kind of got steeper and steeper.”

The feat took about 14 and a half hours and included pushing through some serious pain, as well as a hearty dose of the mountain’s infamous weather – chilling fog, squalling winds, and a succession of rain storms.

“I never felt like I wanted to stop, but I felt like I might not make it,” Shaw-Doran said this week, recalling severe muscle cramps and debilitating pain in his elbow. “Everything hurt.”

The climb was especially rough on his hands, which eventually became numb. To keep them from slipping off his rain-slicked, mountain bike-style tires, Shaw-Doran wedged his hands between spokes to turn the wheels of his chair.

The toughest stretch was a two-mile section of gravel. While Shaw-Doran pushed with all of his might on his chair’s large back wheels, the smaller front wheels would sink and spin. For much of the climb, his torso was pressed flat against his legs as he struggled to continue moving upwards without slipping back, especially near the end of the climb, where the grade is 22 percent – about a 45 degree angle.

“It’s brutal on your body,” Krill said. “It’s a great experience, but it’s not something that you’d want to do all the time.”

Krill, who has climbed other mountains on hiking trails in what he described as a team effort, said Washington was not on his peak-bagging to-do list, mainly because much of the route is paved. The motivation for the climb came at the end of June with a newspaper report that a man from Pennsylvania had tried unsuccessfully to reach the top of the mountain in a wheelchair.

When he realized no one in a wheelchair had ever summited Washington, Krill asked Shaw-Doran if he was up to the challenge.

“It’s our home state, and that’s the kind of thing we do around here,” Krill said. “It just made sense.”

While Krill did not reach the summit last week – he was bogged down by a 45-pound chair he said sapped his strength – he encouraged Shaw-Doran to keep pushing to get there.

“One of us had to make it up there,” Krill said. “You don’t go through this much effort and not make it.”

Against the grain

Shaw-Doran lives in Easton with world ski champion and lifelong friend Bode Miller in a house tucked behind the Tamarack Tennis Camp run by Miller’s family. The house has been dubbed “Cam-Bode-a” (pronounced: Cambodia) by some friends.

Before the car accident seven years ago that left Shaw-Doran’s legs paralyzed, he was an avid snowboarder. While the accident robbed Shaw-Doran of the use of his lower limbs, however, it has done little to diminish his playfully rebellious side.

In the first big air snowboarding contest Shaw-Doran entered as a kid, he was disqualified for doing a backwards inversion. Despite the disqualification, his jump – which he said he landed cleanly – was a big hit with spectators.

Shaw-Doran said it took him a year after the accident – six months of which were spent in the hospital – to be able to get around on his own. Gradually, he started hand-cycling, then skiing with a mono-ski – a bucket chair that rides on a single ski.

Now, he said, he can rip turns on any mountain in the winter and puts in 1,000 miles or more on his bike every summer. He’s a common sight along Easton Valley Road, arms pumping, chest heaving, as he works to spin the wheels and propel his bike along the pavement.

He’s also a student at Plymouth State University, where he’s working toward a degree in business.

Krill, who taught him how to ski with the mono-ski, said it took a little while to convince Shaw-Doran to get active again. Now the two spend a lot of time skiing and biking together.

“Life’s pretty cool in a wheelchair, and he’s figured that out,” said Krill, who was paralyzed in a snowmobile accident 10 years ago.

Krill is now the winter sports coordinator at the Loon Mountain adaptive ski program, where he teaches others who are wheelchair-bound that there’s plenty of fun to be had in the arena of the White Mountains.

Krill is also the first person to mono-ski Mount Washington’s legendary Tuckerman Ravine, a feat he accomplished this March.

Shaw-Doran has also figured out how to get going really fast on his bike. That love of speed – and his tendency to go confidently a little bit against the grain – is something he shares with Miller, who may be the fastest guy on the mountain on any given day, but is unlikely to show too much semblance of traditional form.

Shaw-Doran said the fastest he’s ever gone on his bike – about 60 miles-per-hour – was coming down Three Mile Hill in Franconia.

“I was kind of cheating,” he admitted. “Because I was drafting Bode in his Porsche.”

Inspiring others

Krill and Shaw-Doran both said they don’t have much desire to climb Mount Washington again. Krill would rather hike in his modified mountain chair, which has two long poles at the front – instead of the standard small front wheels – in what he described as a rickshaw style that allows other hikers to help pull him through river crossings and over boulders.

“There’s a lot of other things I would do before [hiking Washington],” Krill said. “I would rather go to places that are a little bit more pristine – I guess paths less traveled.”

Shaw-Doran would rather be out on the road with his hand-cycle or on a snowy mountain with his ski.

“I think I’ll bike across the United States,” Shaw-Doran said when asked what his next adventure would be. “That’s just an idea. I’ve always wanted to do it.”

Krill is game, and the two may embark on that long journey next summer, he said, if they can find the time and the sponsorship money to do it.

If they go, Krill said, he’d like the expedition to include visiting rehabilitation hospitals along the way. He hopes to carry a variety of sports gear to demonstrate to others in wheelchairs the vast possibilities for athletic and recreational activities.

“They just don’t realize what’s out there,” he said. “They need to see people doing it, who are active in it, to understand.”

While Krill said he and Shaw-Doran didn’t want any media attention prior to the Washington hike, because it would have taken away from their enjoyment of it, he said rousing others into action was one of his prime motivating factors.

“It’s great for the attention afterwards, because maybe it’ll inspire someone else in a chair,” Krill said.

Inspiration seems to be all in a day’s work – or a day’s play – for Krill.

“I would have never, ever gone or tried or made it without Geoff. I wish he could have been there with me,” Shaw-Doran said of his successful summit of the mountain. Then, with a grin, Shaw-Doran remembered that Krill has already achieved his own first on Washington: the mono-ski run down Tuck’s.

“He owns the other side of the mountain,” Shaw-Doran said.

Helping those who help others

The ballroom at the Mount Washington Hotel filled last Friday evening with firefighters, police officers, emergency first responders, and residents of communities throughout the region, all dressed to the nines for the fifth annual awards dinner of the North Country Public Safety Foundation.

The dinner is a way to thank these professionals and volunteers – who are, essentially, always on duty – for their service to the community. Throughout the evening a slideshow played behind the stage, showing these folks at the work they do. One photo was of Jose Pequeno, former police chief of Sugar Hill. He is smiling in the photograph, sitting behind a desk, with photos of his family lining the wall. That photo accompanied a 2005 article I wrote about Jose, then Sugar Hill’s only police officer, just after he was called up by the National Guard for a tour of duty in Iraq.

Jose had earned a reputation as a good guy, quick to smile, always ready to offer a helping hand. The day I took that photograph he was both apprehensive and happy. He worried about leaving his wife and three young children (now teenagers) behind as he went halfway across the world to war. He was proud to be fulfilling his duty as a soldier. He was ready to serve and confident that he would return home safely.

There is no certainty in life, even less in war. In March of 2006, about a year after I took that photo, Jose was devastatingly injured in an explosion in Iraq. As news of his injuries reached home, there was an immediate effort to “Bring Jose Home,” and from that effort emerged the North Country Public Safety Foundation. 

I was in the newsroom the day word came from Iraq of the explosion that killed National Guardsman Christopher Merchant of Vermont and injured Jose. Both men were 32 at the time, the same age as me. Eventually we learned that Jose’s injuries were severe and included a debilitating head injury from which he has never recovered.

A month after the explosion in Iraq, as Jose remained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., friends and neighbors gathered for a fundraising dinner and auction at the Sugar Hill Meetinghouse to kick off the Bring Jose Home campaign. That night, the community raised over $22,000 for their police chief and his family.

The effort eventually garnered more than $120,000, enough to build the Pequeno family a wheelchair-accessible home in Lisbon. “This has been a project that has meant a lot to a lot of people,” Sugar Hill Fire Chief Allan Clark said the day the house was finished. “It was more than helping our police chief, but a statement of helping those who help others.”

For a series of complicated reasons, Jose did not come home to New Hampshire. He lives in Florida with other family and access to regular medical care. But the North Country Public Safety Foundation has grown from the initial Bring Jose Home effort, raising nearly $1 million in its six years, money that goes directly to helping those who help others in our communities.

Throughout the ceremony last week, speaker after speaker told of the cooperation and collaboration these professionals and volunteers share, from community to community, between departments, and across specific occupational lines. I was honored to share a table with a few of these folks, including Sugar Hill Police Chief Dave Wentworth and Assistant Fire Chief Doug Glover, who both worked with Jose, knew him far better than I did, and surely think of him often as they do their work.

I imagine I’m not the only person who wishes things had been different, that Jose and so many others did not have to go to war, that we could again see the smile he had that day in the photograph. We also hope that we will never need the services of firefighters or EMTs, law enforcement officers or search and rescue volunteers. But it is a comfort to know they are standing by, just in case. 

This essay appears in the November 9, 2012 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Have you hugged a snowmaker lately?

Photo: Greg Keeler/Cannon Mountain - Guns a-blazin' on Cannon.

When Alpine skiing first became popular in this country nearly 100 years ago, there were no lifts to carry folks to mountain tops, no grooming equipment to smooth trails, nor (gulp) snowmaking guns blasting layers of white onto mountainsides. If Ma Nature complied with lots of the white stuff, early schussers were lucky. If she didn’t, they found something else to do in the bare days of winter.

The snow lovers among us should be thankful, in an early winter as lean as this one has been, for the modern marvel of manmade snow. Snowmaking crews have been working day and night – wrestling heavy hoses, frozen metal snow guns, icy water, and subzero temperatures – to create snow-covered slopes amid a landscape of muted brown.

“It’d be tough to imagine any ski area in New England being open right now without snowmaking,” said Cannon Mountain General Manager John DeVivo early this week. As it is, local areas from Bretton Woods and Cannon to Vermont’s Burke Mountain are operating on about half their trails following a disappointing rotation of teasing snow showers and pouring rain through December.

Other normally snowy areas, from the European Alps to the Rockies and Sierras, have also had a slow start to winter. Ski areas in Colorado and California, which normally see hundreds of inches of natural snowfall each year, are operating solely on manmade. Powder hounds have nowhere to go for a fix.

On the heels of a seasonal snowfall as epic as last winter’s, this year is certainly a bit bleaker. But local ski areas are in as good a shape as just about anywhere else. “There’s a fair amount of skiing out there, and the bigger trails are all open,” noted Craig Clemmer of the Omni Mount Washington Resort, which includes Bretton Woods.

The local manmade has been surprisingly silky, the terrain varied, the corduroy replenished into neat, grippy rows each morning. For that, we have the snowmakers and groomers to thank. We’re not so far removed from the days when so little natural snow would have meant no skiing at all.

A complete lack of skiing would be devastating both to the local economy and the local psyche. Not only would the skiers and snowboarders among us be moping around, but the thousands of folks who work at ski areas or other businesses directly affected by the ski industry – hotels, restaurants, shops – would be without a paycheck.

The Bretton Woods Ski Area employs about 380 people. More than 400 folks work at Cannon Mountain. Countless others area residents rely on spending by skiers and snowboarders to make a living through the winter.

We snow lovers are hoping this week’s forecasted storm drops a load of snow on the mountains. And if it does, we’ll have our ski legs ready, thanks to the turns we’ve been able to make on manmade. So, keep on doing your snow dance, strap on your boards, and get out to your favorite ski area. While you’re there, you just might want to hug a snowmaker.

Original content written and copyrighted by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her blog: Writings from a full life.