The Hike Lifetime

Two intrepid photographers trek hut to hut across New Hampshire’s Presidential Range and discover hardship, pain, beauty, and wonder.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LITTLE OUTDOOR GIANTS

(Jarrod McCabe + Dominic Casserly)

Dom on his way from Madison Spring Hut to Pinkham Notch:

“We were in the clouds as they enveloped and released us into the views of Mount Washington. We were in heaven.”

BY

Late last August, when the adventure was over— after nearly 70 miles of ascending and descending mountain peaks and trekking along boulderstrewn trails, of clambering over rocks, of feeling sweat streak down their bodies, of hearing thunder boom along exposed ridges, of shouldering backpacks that chafed and bruised, of feeling that ache in the knees that was relieved only when they sank into icy mountain pools—when all that ended after 10 days, what Jarrod and Dom knew with certainty was this: how much they would miss it all. They had come here to photograph what many call the most beautiful yet arduous stretch of the entire 2,174-mile Georgia-to-Maine Appalachian Trail: the White Mountains’ Presidential Traverse. They would cross 11 summits while sleeping at each of the eight Appalachian Mountain Club huts, the oldest mountain-hut system in the country. The huts gave them history and tradition, but also bunks and camaraderie and home-cooked meals that tasted like no other. Each day Jarrod and Dom wrote and painted in a leather-bound journal, and at the end one wrote:

“We knew it would be epic and hard and special and mysterious … The White Mountains are not the majestic, far-off, exotic mountains I always wanted them to be, but now they’re even more special to me—they’re familiar. And they’re home.” —M.A.

DAYS 2–3

this page, clockwise from top: Day 2 was “a hard day,” but after dinner Jarrod “shot the sunset from the ridge above [Greenleaf] hut.” End-to-end AT thru-hikers like Griffin Doninger, here planning his route at Greenleaf Hut, often work a few hours in exchange for a sleeping-pad spot on the floor and fresh meals. Hut-crew members (they call themselves “croo”) know that hikers crave fresh, hot meals. Jarrod and Dom dutifully recorded each delicious meal: “Steamy bowls of soup fogged up one bank of windows in the dining room, while fresh bread got slathered in butter …” opposite: Elizabeth Yon heads north along the Garfield Ridge Trail toward Galehead Hut. She wanted to accompany Jarrod and Dom, but one hard trail, which, they wrote, “tossed us around with boulders and spat us back out,” soon took its toll, and she headed down. In a few days she rejoined them.

Day 3

An exhausted Elizabeth Yon weeps into her handkerchief as she finally comes to the end of her “brutal hike” before reaching a place to rest at Galehead Hut.

Day 4

clockwise from top left: A hand-carved sign indicates that Zealand Falls Hut and its welcome waterfall-fed pools await. A thru-hiker with the trail name “Stretch” shows Jarrod his special salve for sore muscles and chafed skin. “Stretch” and “Pizza Man” share thru-hiker stories in the early sun at Zealand Falls Hut. Sweet relief from heat and aches: “From the hut porch you could step out onto the smooth ledge and find yourself a cool pool of mountain water to soak your legs in.”

Mount Washington’s summit rises above the clouds and Lakes of the Clouds Hut. Jarrod (pictured here) wrote: “Halfway through dinner the clouds began to part … I grabbed my camera and darted up the mountain. The view was breathtaking as the clouds shifted around and layers of clouds collided. Once dusk came on, you could see city lights on the horizon.”

DAYS 5–6

this page, clockwise from top left: Jarrod and Dom reach Mizpah Spring Hut, the AT’s newest, after a 12-mile walk from Zealand Falls. Socked in by weather, they find restful quiet as one hiker, Cynthia Dow, paints with watercolors, while Elizabeth Yon, who had rejoined the photographers, joins Jarrod’s nightly cribbage game. After a day of gorp and peanut butter, hikers at Mizpah Spring Hut enjoy family-style dinner at 6:00 p.m.—sharp.

Day6

Peter Nichol, a Concord, Massachusetts, science teacher, and his son Ayden arrive at Lakes of the Clouds Hut on Mount Washington, the highest hut along the entire AT, after a day hiking through rain and fog. ”No matter the weather, they were always smiling and enjoying the trek.”

Day 7

To be a hut “croo” member means the chance to join one of the most revered mountain traditions, requiring endurance and a love of outdoor adventure. Carrying packs weighing anywhere from 40 to 80 pounds, AMC croos supply far-flung huts. Here Lakes of the Clouds croo pack fresh food down to their hut from atop Mount Washington.

“I wish I’d done that when I was younger,” Jarrod said. “I’d encourage every college student to do that.”

DAY 8

Jarrod and Dom relax in their bunks at Madison Spring Hut. Each day they recorded observations from their journey. After sitting with two brothers at breakfast, Jarrod wrote: “I thought about what it would be like to have a brother to hike with all the time … I guess that’s why I have a Dom.” above: AT thru-hikers were filled with stories and became compelling portrait subjects for Jarrod and Dom’s cameras. below : Some 300 more miles lay ahead of them—days of sun and rain—before reaching the summit of Maine’s Mount Katahdin. Only then would they stop.

For more photos and a look at Jarrod and Dom’s journal, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/Huts-Hike

New Englanders have been whispering for decades: If many of its restaurants feature Manhattanstyle (red) chowder, if many of its residents root for the Yankees (and boo the Red Sox), if many of its towns send a third of their residents on trains to New York City each workday, is Connecticut really New England?

BY RICHARD CONNIFF ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN S. DYKES

No doubt your mind goes blank. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, they’re the real deal, “the heart of New England,” as they like to fashion themselves. You consider Connecticut, at best, some dim, vestigial part of the genuine New England experience. The appendix, say.

Or maybe more like the wallet, with the entire state stereotyped as not New England at all, but more like one big bedroom community for hedgefund managers from New York, with some weapons manufacturers and insurance executives tossed in for diversity. Connecticut is the state that “let’s be honest, nobody else in the region likes or respects,” Jon Stewart joked last year on The Daily Show And the humiliating thing is that he was talking about the Mid-Atlantic region.

So does Connecticut really even belong in New England?

I’ve lived here for 37 years, and probably ought to know. But with considerable doubt I set out to answer the question. This may be partly because I grew up in New Jersey, which also lives in the shadow of New York, comes in for more than its share of ridicule, and yet somehow boasts a distinct identity—and great musicians like Sinatra and Springsteen to crow about it to the world. “Is there some Connecticut equivalent I’ve been missing?” I asked a Hartford native, and he shot back, as if in disbelief at my ignorance, “We had Gene Pitney, ‘the Rockville Rocket’!” Letting that sink in, he added, “Also The Carpenters.”

Well, you see the problem. It was compounded for me because I’ve frequently traveled for my work as a writer, and I’ve often been puzzled, after experiencing the literature of Ireland, say, or even Maine, to come home to a state whose great books all seem to be about someplace else. (Think

Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Styron.) Even the director of the Connecticut Humanities Council once lamented, “Connecticut has no literature of itself.” Wallace Stevens might arguably be an exception because he sometimes wrote poems about Connecticut. But perhaps wisely, he also kept his day job. As an insurance executive.

In search of a longer view, I phoned University of Connecticut geologist Robert M. Thorson. Like me, he’s a blow-in, but he’s become an adoptive

Connecticut Yankee and an expert on stone walls. (Memo to “Heart of New England,” and also Robert Frost: If you’re seeking “the epicenter of traditional New England stone walls,” Thorson’s book Exploring Stone Walls will steer you to the corner where Rhode Island and Massachusetts meet, ahem, Connecticut. Oh, and while we’re at it, your iconic New Hampshire play Our Town ?

Written by Thornton Wilder, a Connecticut resident.)

But back to Thorson. When I posed my question about Connecticut’s New England legitimacy, he replied, “Look at the landscape first, and don’t ask whether The Carpenters are the culture.” The arc of ancient mountains that runs like a spine through New England gets its start in the foothills of southwestern Connecticut, then sweeps up through the Litchfield Hills in the northwestern corner of the state, the Berkshires in Massachusetts, the Green Mountains and the White Mountains in … I forget those state names just now … rising finally to Maine’s Mount Katahdin.

“The whole damned thing is New England,” Thorson said, “and Connecticut is a very respectable part of it.” The same rolling hills, the same forests and ponds, the same rocky shores and pocket beaches, from Eastport, Maine, to, yes, Greenwich, Connecticut.

The real question, Thorson was saying, is why Long Island—basically a line of New England rubble dumped by receding glaciers—ended up being grabbed off by New York. But to myself, I was thinking, “Hmm, Long Island. The Hamptons. Billy Joel. Definitely the appendix. We can let that one go.”

Connecticut has plenty of nicknames— the “Nutmeg State,” the “Land of Steady Habits,” the “Constitution State,” the “Provision State”—and they all come from stories about our past. That “Nutmegger” thing, for instance, supposedly started with the idea that our far-ranging Yankee peddler forebears sometimes sold wooden nutmegs to suckers in other states. (Our story is that those customers were just too dumb to know that you have to shave nutmeg. They tried to crack it open like a nut instead.) We’re the “Provision State” (also the “Arsenal State”) because we’ve ranked among the nation’s top weapons suppliers since at least 1776, when rebels tore down a statue of King George III in Manhattan and shipped it to a foundry in Litchfield, to be recycled into musket balls for our soldiers to deliver back to the British.

And yet Connecticut also suffers from the widespread notion that it has no identity, no sense of place. Maybe it’s because we have nothing to make us stand out along the lines of Boston’s “pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd” speech impediment. Nor do we say “ayuh,” or call good things “wicked.” Our accent is largely Mid-Atlantic newscaster standard. In sports and culture, we feel the tug of New York a bit too much on one side of the state, and of Boston on the other. (One wit suggested that our state motto should be “We’re kinda close to the places you really want to be.”)

Connecticut, a man who can dismiss Vermont as, historically speaking, “a wholly owned subsidiary of Connecticut.” Hosley has made his career as a Connecticut museum director and curator specializing in the state’s culture and history. He also runs a Facebook group with the somewhat symptomatic title “Creating a Sense of Place for Connecticut.” (A different website specializing in Connecticut museums uses the underwhelming slogan “Destroying the myth that there is nothing to do here.”) We met at a franchise coffee shop, one of the great purveyors of the “anyplace/noplace” sensation (though with a nice caffeine buzz to help customers forget).

“Connecticut has a lot of authenticity,” Hosley began. “What it doesn’t have is a lot of strong, coherent identity.” European colonization began with “little puddles of settlement,” each community living independently from the others, “and that independence survived even after they came together.” State identity matters now less than the very distinct identity of our towns, 169 of them.

Even residents often mistakenly regard Connecticut as an anyplace/ noplace they happen to live right now. Half of us supposedly wish we lived someplace else, according to a 2013 poll. For outsiders, it can seem like just a place to race through en route to Maine, Cape Cod, or some other “more authentic” New England place. We are, said one friend, the “New England Flyover State.”

I turned for help to William Hosley, also a blow-in, from upstate New York by way of 1970s Vermont. At 61, he’s a boyishly ebullient devotee of all things

We tend to repeat this number ritually, but it probably underestimates our fragmentary nature, because of proud bastions of local identity within towns: Ivoryton and Centerbrook, for instance, are sections of Essex, but distinctly different from Essex proper. This intensely local character turns up in the richness of the state’s 600 or so museums and historical societies—but also in its intractable segregation by race, ethnicity, income, and social status in communities that are sometimes side by side.

“Connecticut is really a thinking man’s state,” Hosley said. “You have to be alert to nuance—what differentiates places and makes them stand out. You have to be a connoisseur of cultural differences. If you want a foreign experience, just drive 20 minutes. There’s so much diversity packed into this state.”

Taking Connecticut at an angle, from Stonington in the southeastern corner to Salisbury in the northwest, it’s a two-and-a-half hour drive, three if you dawdle. But away from the anonymous

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