"april is the cruelest month ... stirring dull roots with spring rain" -- part 1...

so starts "the waste land" by t.s. eliot. and so started april, only not nearly warm enough to rain!

i saw a tweet back in march that linked me to 30 days of riding and a pledge to ride everyday in april. despite the likelihood of some fairly sketchy weather--as likely winter or mud season, as spring--in april here in the north country, i was all in and pledged immediately. #30daysofriding offered up a way to share the love, and i committed to document the days.








d1: sure enough the first day of april was cold. but i figured i wouldn't freeze on my commute. i didn't, but i definitely dressed for it.












d2: the next day was a tad warmer at least commuting home. when i left in the morning it was in the low teens but the sun got it up into the high thirties, maybe even 40~ish when i headed home. i took a long way and went up over talbot hill, down codfish hill. the gravel section was definitely muddy.












d3: was windy and cool, but nice enough to ride out around the goose ponds. i caught a trio of bufflehead ducks in the river between big and little goose, but they swam off before i had the camera ready--you can barely see them.











d4: sunny again and i went by the goose ponds again via a new route, with more hills this time. stopped at both to get a picture of ice coverage. i managed to get out onto big goose ice at one point, testing its solidity with my dryness--i threw a big rock first, listening for the sound, like primitive radar.











d5: a friday, the day i visit my favorite bike shop--drummonds custom cycles--and sweep. on the way over i stopped to grab a picture of the tree in the boat on mascoma lake. i had skated by it a couple times over the winter and thought it made a pretty cool 'statue'. 










d6: first day cold, off to the library. saw the "giant's toothbrush", but no camera.

d7: warm~ish, off with skip first to take a few runs over to the skiway, and then riding around mascoma lake and about the town of enfield. stopped and chatted with my ol' teaching buddy john, out raking his yard. both adventures were sans veste!

d9: was more wintry mix, though mostly snow this time, but i opted to go back up in bob's workshop. i figured one more day wouldn't hurt...












d10: snow again, only when it stopped in the morning, it also warmed some and began to melt off the paved roads by afternoon--in time for me to ride before dark. making tracks out of the drive was fun and made for an interesting picture.







d11: almost got warm, and in the sun, felt pretty good. i rode to the library again and since it was cold, i took the camera, in case the "toothbrush" was in condition again. it was but this time it had bristles on both ends!

               











d12: got cold again over night, well down in the teens, and when i rode over to drummonds cc, the open edges of crystal lake were frozen over. it almost felt like winter again.










d13: i went over to drummonds to meet cory for a 'live weird' groupo ride. we got into some muddy gravel up west farms road and down wolfboro to big goose. no camera on the bike, but i stopped and got a picture of the fog on my way home from the shop. it was the proverbial 'thick as pea soup' at the bridge over the mascoma.

d15: cold~ish and very wet--as you can see over my shoulder in the well puddled drive. i got lucky and missed the really hard rain. 

ps--by the way, that is a smile! (i was feeling the whole halfway to may vibe!)









d16: rain and wind to beat the band all night. the photography gods stopped it by morning and on my way into work i stopped on the rt 4 bridge over the indian river at goose pond road. i believe one could call it well above flood stage even though it wasn't over the road yet.


all things considered, the first half of #30daysofriding, though plenty cold and wet, was a grand time to "go outside and play!" i didn't freeze or melt--yet...

'april showers bring'--tuckerman ravine!...

...and adventurers out of the woodwork for spring skiing and hijinks up on mt washington. of course a cold month can have plenty of snow, which can mean high avalanche danger. 

weather over april vacation--the third week in, for mascoma--can deliver some pretty iffy conditions, especially up in the mountains. this year, we hit the jackpot on MOC's annual trip up to tuckerman ravine! circumstances left only one day to use the school van and that was wednesday, the 17. it turned out to be the right one: sunny--read no rain--not all that windy, and + 50°F. you couldn't ask for more primo weather.



five students and a few parents met me in the school parking lot bright and early. a couple of the students and i had checked the avalanche conditions that morning--they were low--but at least one mother was well to the concerned side. the friday before, a lone skier had been buried and died when he triggered a sizable wind-slab in raymond's cataract, a large slide scar between tuckerman and huntington ravines. i assured her we would take all precautions and pay close attention to the warnings posted by the snow rangers. there is no shame in getting skunked out of skiing tux--the goal is to bring everybody home happy.


one thing about being in the mountains, in any conditions really but especially winter, you want to pay attention to all possible dangers. many of the kids i lead up there, have never been in an avalanche zone let alone avoided van-size hunks of ice careening down the super steep slope, or crevasses with waterfalls rushing at the bottom. it is exciting to be up there, but one needs to be aware and more than a little cautious!


we had a fine ride up with the kids getting more and more amped the closer we got to the white mountains. there had been a few substantial snow events over the past week, and a fresh 6 inches just two days earlier. it made everything look very white and super inviting--if you like snow. in the pinkham parking lot, we packed our gear according to whatever style we preferred: skis on packs vs. skis on feet with skins and headed over to the tux trail for the classic group photo in front of the weather-conditions board.

parents josh and wendy, students cardigan, celia, dirk, justin, and hawk

the ~3 mile hike/skin up varies on your energy level. after starting with the skinning crowd, i fell in with the three youthful nordic skiers in fine shape--hiking fairly quickly. we stopped here and there to strip off layers and drink water--with lots of cameras we even took a few pictures.

           cardigan and josh skinning, koby and hawk hiking...                                                                      ...dirk, justin, koby, and celia posing!

     

shortly before you reach the hermit lake shelters and 'howard johnson's', you get a great look up to the ravine. first timers do some serious omg-ing here when you point out "that's what you'll be skiing!"

at hermit lake, the fast youngsters continued on into the bowl after a short break and i waited for the rest of the group on the lunch deck. from the deck you look directly at the lower snow fields and most of hillman's highway. the rim of the bowl is visible as well. 

it's a quick ski over to hillman's or a steep-ish 20-30 minutes up the little headwall into the bowl. as you can see, coverage was particularly good this year.






after the others came up and we had a bit of lunch, i took off after the advance crew. we had planned to meet at lunch rock, but justin and celia were already boot packing up to take a half-run--justin on nordic skis and celia alpine.

dirk and i watched celia carve turns down to us and we all wondered at justin as he went higher and higher--this was going to be good. celia captured his first run! he starts up behind a little clump of bushes in the middle/takes off/and oops...

        


the folks watching were all cheering when he got back up and continued...for a while at least. the cheering kept up, but justin didn't. nordic skis are sketchy at best on the steep stuff, but justin kept at it and by the end of the afternoon he had mastered circumnavigating the main part of the lower bowl in four big traverses, complete with a couple of step turns, a beautiful telly, and no falls!

 

celia and i took a hike up and run down right gully. it felt good to be on the steep again and would have been even better had i locked down my binding under my right boot. i was wondering why half my turns felt so loose. on our way down we passed hawk heading up and doing a little tanning. we got back to our packs in time to watch cardigan and josh come down the bottom of lobster claw. 

  
                  cardigan smiling while setting up her next telly turn...                                                                              bang--nailed it!

shortly after that hawk came flying out of right gully and zoomed by like he didn't even see us. (he didn't.) josh and i wondered aloud, "was that hawk? it looked like him." whoever it was, he stopped briefly at the top of the little headwall and then took off back down to hermit lake. we hoped he would wait there. 

all that activity and some more justin runs got celia excited to do another--this time she aimed for the lip. timing was getting tight so she took right off and didn't dawdle on the way up. josh went up the whole of lobster claw and dirk, justin, cardigan, and i breathed deep at lunch rocks.

soon enough, the two skiers came down in fine style and we all met in the lower bowl for a picture--sans hawk who hopefully was chilling with missy down on ho-jo's deck.

shadows make it hard to see but we all were wearing wicked big smiles, pumped to have laid down a bunch of those tracks behind us! 

we wound our way down the little headwall, cutting over to the lower snowfields to avoid the cutler brook which was starting to undermine solid coverage. at hermit lake we found hawk and missy and got everyone started down the sherburne ski trail. i was playing mop up and watched as the energizer bunny--justin--started to struggle as his energy to drive those skinny skis ran down. having had less than optimal sleep the previous two nights, he had been with the 'life smarts' team in florida (they got home at 2:00a that morning--with the van), all those runs in the bowl had worn him out. the moguls were particularly vexing... even so we caught up to dirk who caught a 'mysterious blue jacket' letting off the brakes for some bump action on his go pro.

when the two 'skinny skiers' and i got to the bottom and the van, hawk's and celia's gear lay beside it with no sign of them. cardigan reported they had run back up the tuck trail to the first bridge--something about celia was keen on a swim. sure enough as dirk, justin, and i were loading cargo, a dripping celia and laughing hawk appeared. sometimes it's the unplanned activities you remember most!

cardigan, josh, and missy were staying up in the north country for another night, possibly another day in the bowl. that meant there was an extra seat in the van for folks to spread out and catch a nap on the way home. i asked hawk to ride up front to talk to me and help keep me stay conscious behind the wheel. 



as we headed south, every one seemed satisfied and talking about plans for future trips of all sorts--from going off to college, to coming back to the ravine. i judged it had been a perfect day.

justin was in total agreement and reminded us of the MOC motto, "go outside and play!" 

more sun than you can 'shake a stick at'...

although why you would want to, is a fair question!

ok, friday's wet, snowy day was not sunny. and the 4 inches of mush was looking pretty sketchy at best. but i had to try something to get off the first couch, out of the second book, and away from a third pot of tea. so i loaded the usual gear and went to check out the shaker wma. i figured even if it was crappy, i could stop in for the friday sweep at drummonds. 

it was, crappy-ish, though it took two runs and a wintry mix blessing my head and shoulders to convince me. i bailed on a third try and went over to drummonds to pick up a broom. i went to bed that evening feeling satisfied that i had accomplished something.

when i woke saturday morning i was not expecting to see it still snowing. four more inches of white on the ground and the thermometer down around twenty boded well for a proper ski, sans broom. when it started clearing around 10:00a, i figured skip would be calling any moment. 

the phone finally rang around 1:00p--which made perfect sense, it was post lunch-o'clock! i went and fetched him and his gear and we headed up to cardigan. we played the 'guess how many cars in the lot' game and were both shocked to see it full up--many of them snow covered from being there overnight. i parked roadside, happy to see there was a lot more snow up here than down below.



as you can see by the trees, the snow was a little sticky, so we started up with no skins attached. the lines of white you can see in my picture are all on the south side of the trees. the wind overnight was obviously coming out of that unusual direction, but i had heard it might be a 'nor-easter' coming up the coast and dumping some snow in the mountains. lucky for us it did. 

our luck continued as we got higher, it got deeper! i snapped a picture of skip practically skiing over the east amc sign, normally three feet or more above the ground. equally amazing, at least to me, is how long he adjusts his poles. he swears he goes faster.

besides deeper, the snow was drier and getting slippery-er. i convinced skip it would be both faster and easier if we skinned-up before the steep sections on the ski trail. he is always game for going up fast and easy.



in no time we were up at the top of the chute, only slightly bummed that a snowshoer had gotten there before us. the track spoiled the pristine line so i didn't bother to take a picture. the cornice was even bigger than it had been when we had hiked up last weekend. the drop in was sweet and i felt pretty good hooking around the mostly buried pine at the corner a hundred feet after. that was when i saw the huge 'mogul' in the middle of the narrow path! there was no avoiding some airtime...i stayed upright and got in a few good turns after. 

skip must have done something similar as i heard a big whoop not too long after. by the time he came around the corner he was wearing a huge smile! we took off, stoked that conditions were about as good as they get up here. 

at one point i grabbed his camera and skied down to get a movie of him coming through the woods on one of his favorite lines. unfortunately, his little cannon, works a bit differently than mine. i got a good movie of my skis and the three whistles we signal each other with. here is a picture of the fresh line--goes straight up beyond the tracks--at least. you can thank me you can't hear the whistles.

turns out, it was pretty slow so he just kind of cruised along with minimal turn action. at the next steep section, i got another video of skis and whistles. here, again, is his untracked line with my tracks coming in from the side.

oh well, i can't tease him about his camera skills anymore. especially after he took a great still of my run further down, skiing the skinny side of the creek.


we skied out the rest of the way over the moon at how good conditions were. so good, that i suggested we go run the glades over to shaker wma. still smiling, skip said sure.


immediately, we bailed on the glades but decided since we were over here, to just ski to the upper junction. there was barely two inches of really crusty snow over a tracked up icy base. before descending i snapped a picture of us as happy campers. i was not sure how long that would last.




i took off and after a handful of turns was thankful we didn't go any higher! you had to stand taller and pretty much cruise the fall line. it was fast, but not totally furious. 

once skip got the hang of it, he agreed that it wasn't too terrible, just felt like a let down compared to our earlier run. to humor him, i said i would go back up cardigan and sled with him and linda in the morning.


and that is what we did! i picked the lovers up and we found an open spot up at the winter lot. the overnighters were still there. it was a beautiful day, even warming up enough we had to remove layers by the time we got up to summer lot. we kept them off all the way to turnaround rock. 



we tied up our sleds and put all our layers back on just past that. it was plenty breezy up top, but you could see a long ways--all the way to mt washington.




the sleds were waiting for us. i got there a bit early and took right off to go set up for another video session. i almost kept going the sledding was so good in the deep stuff! but i was also pretty keen on getting a video--without skis and whistles.

i won't put in the one of skip as his run was pretty lame. but linda's was smooth, especially after she took off her micro-spikes.

turns out linda had the fast sled. the 'hole' in skip's was enlarging as we went. and i couldn't stay out of the powder, which was so much fun, but a ton slower. 

we passed quite a few folks coming up as we went. i kept going 'off trail' and managed to avoid most. toward the summer lot, i finally convinced skip to follow me into the fluff. he zoomed by me at one point and plowed into the ditch at the bottom. i managed to slow down and stop. i also had to stop laughing as his legs started cramping as he lay there sprawled out.

on the road out, i tried laying down face first. it worked ok, but by the final section, i was back, mostly sitting up, feet forward, making turns. now that was fine way to go outside and play!

just another sunny day...

the sun came up this morning, shining on a thin blanket of new snow that had fallen over night. having spent a good portion of yesterday inside, the fresh white motivated me to get outside and play.

but first i had to listen to one of my favorite shows, on the media. as soon as that finished, i called skip and convinced him to hike up cardigan. that was easy. the hard part was it coming on lunch o'clock. i suggested he eat quickly and i would stop in to pick him up.

he was well fed and happy when i got over there and got himself dressed and packed without too much drama. we were out the door and going down the road--well, up the first stretch--just after noon.

i am not sure why he was surprised to see "four cars...?!" in the winter parking area, it was a beautiful day. we donned our micro-spikes, stowed our jackets, and started hiking. 

we met a friend andy, up at the picnic tables in the summer parking area with two of his buddies. they were snacking after their hike. still thinking about the cars down below, skip calculated that there would be one more person above, at least on the west ridge.

maybe that encouraged us to take south ridge when the two trails split. it's always fun looping, going up the steeper, icy south and coming down west. the weather of late, would make the ice flows the trail crosses thick and exciting.





we stopped to capture our mugs on either side of the bottom section--it looked really 'cool'. rounding the corner and switching back beyond skip in the above picture, we got to the upper flow, which maybe was even 'cooler'!



a tiny icy cave under the large rock on the right made me wonder how long that would stay frozen into the spring. one never knows, but i will put my money on ice into late may, possibly even june if the weather stays on the cold side. i will have to hike it some to check on that. 


not long after the flows we came out of the woods onto the ridge and could see up to the tower. the high rock was mostly bare, but some solid lines of snow got skip testing the surface every hundred yards or so--"this wouldn't be bad skiing!" 



i wasn't convinced. the salient adjective above was "solid"--any skis sliding today, would be sliding really fast. just to be sure, we turned off to check out the top of the chute. i was telling skip how the cornice was building up like crazy. the drop was part of the "furious" i posted back the last time i went off it! we took some pictures as it was even bigger today.



sliding down on his butt helped skip judge the speed he would be going down on skis. when he was back on top talking about dropping in this way or that, i got the feeling he was dreaming. if not, it would have made a great video!

we got up to the summit and met the predicted one other person, jeremy. turns out we knew him in a bunch of different ways. skip had even been to his wedding--it's a small world. it was plenty windy and we didn't stay too long. 

nor did we dawdle on our descent. the only time i really slowed was passing two skiers going up. i stared a bit waiting for skip to say something. he kept quiet, but maybe he was thinking what i was: "their run down is going to be crazy!"


on the summer road toward the bottom, he did mention "i'm surprised those skiers didn't catch us yet." i chalked it up to prudence which probably slowed them now and again. as we walked by the shelter, i found a swix hat frozen onto the concrete under a picnic table. that just about made my day--i've always wanted a swix hat.


the weather, the company, the mountain, the hat... it was a grand day to be outside playing!