Tuckerman Ravine - Mount Washington, New Hampshire: March 7-14

       Country: U.S. - Elevation: 6,289 Feet - Maximum Pitch: 90 Degrees - Highest Sustained Winds: 231 mph - Latitude: 44 degrees N              

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Tuckerman

Departure - Off to Boston

Arrival!

Bretton Woods Ski Resort

Tucks

       About Zero Latitude       

    Zero Latitude is the travel blog I created last year to document my backcountry ski trips and share some of my geeky obsessions. Since returning from Ecuador, I've put considerable thought into where to go next.  Like many adventure sports, backcountry skiing blends athleticism with exotic locations and extreme environments.  I've had my eye on Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire (pictured above) for a few years now and it seemed to be a logical choice - relatively close to home, dramatic scenery and loads of interesting history.  For backcountry skiers, climbing and descending its sheer face stands as a right of passage. 

    For those who aren't familiar with the sport of backcountry skiing, click here for a detailed primer.  In short, you climb remote, skiable terrain with a combination of skinning (walking up the mountain with your skis on using modified bindings and mohair skins), and once the gradient gets too steep, climbing with your skis attached to your backpack. After you reach your desired elevation, you reconfigure your gear for downhill mode and descend on skis.  A lack of ski patrols and avalanche control means you must be trained to understand, avoid and mitigate risks constantly. Avalanches, rock fall and crevasses are just a few of the threats faced by participants of the sport, and exposure to the elements at high altitude only amplifies the danger. I've previously summited and skied both the west and east faces of Mount Shasta (14,179 feet) in California, and climbed and skied Cayambe in Ecuador (18,996 feet). I have worked extensively with Shasta Mountain Guides learning proper technique, search & rescue, and avalanche assessment. My training has taught me that safety is paramount, and there is absolutely zero latitude for error in the backcountry.

The Next Mountain

    Tuckerman Ravine is a glacial cirque sloping eastward on the southeast face of Mt. Washington, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Although it draws hikers throughout the year, and skiers throughout the winter, it is best known for the many "spring skiers" who ascend it on foot and ski down the steep slope from early April into July. In this period, the temperatures are relatively mild but the natural snow-pack — which averages up to 55 feet (17 m) in a typical winter — is still adequate to ski most seasons. The record-setting high winds atop Mount Washington scour a massive amount of snow from the surrounding highlands and deposit it here.  I plan to climb and ski Tuckerman during the week of March 7-14.  Since I'll be there during the Winter season, I'll have to keep an eye on the weather and hope for a window of opportunity.

    The ravine is named after botanist Edward Tuckerman who studied alpine plants and lichens in the area in the 1830s and 1840s. According to the New England Ski Museum, the first recorded use of skis on Mount Washington was by a Dr. Wiskott of Breslau, Germany, who skied on the mountain in 1899, while the first skier in Tuckerman was John S. Apperson of Schenectady, New York, in April 1914. 

Kimberly

    Once again, Kimberly has agreed to tag along and keep an eye on me, but this time, she'll be climbing and skiing too.  We had a lot of fun exploring Ecuador together and I'm fortunate to have a kick-ass travel companion along for the ride.  Since December, Kimberly has taken a new position at Robins Air Force Base and won a Leadership Award.  I will need her leadership skills to make it up and down the face of Tuckerman Ravine.  I also plan on highlighting some of Kimberly's background and travels during our trip. Leadership, adventure and exploration are reoccurring themes in her family's interesting history.

    In addition to introducing Kimberly to backcounty skiing, we've decided to explore the New England Coast for a day or two and get in a few days of resort skiing. As always, I'll update Zero Latitude nightly during our week, which begins on Saturday, March 7th with our flight into Boston. 

Geek Notes 

   I enjoyed rambling on about things in the Geek Notes section during my last adventure and look forward to sharing more nerdy things from New Hampshire. To be honest, before planning this trip, I didn't know much about the State outside of Tuckerman Ravine and Bretton Woods.  I guess those are good places to start.

Glaciers and Ice Ages:

    As mentioned above, Tuckerman Ravine is a glacial cirque with a near vertical head-wall.  I've always been a fan of glaciers and their impacts on terrain where they carve out amazing landscapes like Yosemite Valley in California.  Over the past 225 years, average global temperatures have increased about 0.5 to 0.8 degrees celsius, causing some glaciers to recede. The current warming is not what created Tuckerman Ravine - it was formed around 2 million years ago by advancing glaciers that covered much of North America at the time.  

    The Earth is currently in an Ice Age.  Read the last sentence again.  We are currently in an on-going 2.58 million year long Ice Age.  I was surprised to learn that, since most of my climatological knowledge is based on the Disney movie. It's called the Quaternary or Pleistocene Ice Age and is the fifth one to occur in the 4.54 billion year history of the Earth.  An Ice Age is an uninterrupted period during which permanent ice sheets cover a land mass. For the past 2.58 million years, Antarctica and possibly Greenland have been mostly covered in ice.  For most of this time, the planet was considerably colder than it is now and the Ice sheets extended deep into North America and Europe.  While the Arctic Ice sheet shrank during the 1990s and early 2000s, it has since stabilized somewhat as global temperatures have unexpectedly leveled off over the past 10 years.  Interestingly enough, the Antarctic Ice sheet is currently expanding slightly.  That being said, most climatologists expect the recent warming trend to continue at some point.

    Glaciers are features of Ice Ages that advance and recede during times of temperature fluctuation.  We are currently in a warming epoch called an "Interglacial Period" that started about 11,700 years ago. Global temperatures have been surprisingly stable over that time period with the exception of the Medieval Warm Period (950AD-1250AD) and the Little Ice Age (1350AD-1850AD) where temperatures varied by about 1 degree celsius from mean.  The dramatic warming that occurred 11,700 years ago caused Glaciers to recede and oceans to rise considerably.  Interglacial Periods typically last only 10,000 years, but climatologists estimate that our current warm period may last up to another 15,000 to 50,000 years (as long as a super volcano, asteroid strike, or nuclear war doesn't turn the planet into a giant snowball).  Anthropologist have theorized that the current Interglacial Period is significantly responsible for advances in civilization by making the expansion of agriculture possible. In other words, without this period of warm, stable climate, most extant humans would not be alive today and those who would be alive would likely still be living in caves and hunting Woolly Mammoths.  Here's some pictures of my favorite glaciers:

Hotlum Glacier Ice Falls on the East Face of Mount Shasta (May, 2014).

Me and Kimberly in a Glacial Crevasse at 16,000 feet on Cotopaxi in Ecuador (December, 2014).

Reality Check:

    According to the Mount Washington Avalanche Center, the first known death associated with Tuckerman Ravine was a 15-year-old "killed by falling ice" on July 24, 1886; the first recorded death associated with ice-fall was in January 1936; the first death associated with falling into a crevasse was in June 1940; and the first skiing-related death was in April 1943.  Just two weeks ago, a 32 year old investment banker from NY froze to death while attempting to summit Mt. Washington. She became disoriented while solo hiking in -38 degree weather with 141 mph winds.  The weather on Mt. Washington can change fast and is unforgiving.   

    The second highest recorded winds on the planet were logged on the summit of Mt. Washington.  In April of 1934, the crew at the summit observatory documented a gust of 231 mph. The record stood for 62 years until an unmanned station in Barrow Island Australia recorded a gust of 252 mph during a typhoon.  So Mt. Washington still holds the record for the highest human-recorded wind speed.

More:

    Races held in the 1930s attracted large groups of spectators and skiers to Tuckerman. Harvard-Dartmouth slaloms, Olympic tryouts, and giant slaloms all were held in the ravine during the Great Depression. But the races that caught the imagination more than any other, the races that still are talked about by Tuckerman skiers, were the three American Infernos of the 1930s. Just two years after the head-wall was first run on April 11, 1931 by Dartmouth men John Carleton and Charles N. Proctor, the Ski Club Hochgebirge proposed a 4.2-mile summit-to-base race on Mt. Washington, to be called the American Inferno, named for a similar race held in Mürren, Switzerland. The American Inferno races were only run in 1933, '34 and most famously on April 16, 1939. A shortened course was run in the spring of 1952 (because of a cloud-shrouded summit) that started just above the Lip of the head-wall, and was won by Dartmouth's Bill Beck. The races featured famous skiers like Dick Durrance ('34 and '39), Brooks Dodge ('52) and Toni Matt('39), who accidentally straight-lined the steep head-wall for the win, a still-impressive achievement (Wikipedia).

Bretton Woods and the Mount Washington Resort:

    This is where we will be staying...

    In 1944, something really important happened here, and Kimberly is connected in ways neither of us knew about until now.  More about that later.   

About me:

My name is Greg George and I'm a professor, consultant, and the Director of the Center for Economic Analysis.  I have a Ph.D. in Economics and a MS in Environmental Resource Management.  I enjoy skiing, surfing, astronomy and traveling. I have a great son and try to drag him away from his computer as much as his online schedule will allow. I was born in  Charleston SC, grew up in Vacaville CA, and currently reside in Macon GA, although I spend a lot of time in Myrtle Beach SC and various places in CA.  You can email me at econgreg@gmail.com and friend me on Facebook (I'm also on Linkedin, but don't use it much). The links at the top of the page direct you to the websites of selected gear that I use in the backcountry.