“Mt. Washington Spring’’ (painting), by Susan Wadsworth, at Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester, May 28-July 17.
Lost and found in the mountains
Mt. Washington from Intervale, N.H.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I was wandering around in the Internet the other night and came across a 1941 movie called Sun Valley Serenade, a musical film set in the Idaho ski resort of the same name. Seeing it took me back to February 1971, when I watched the film in a hotel room in Jackson, N.H. I was up there covering, (for The Boston Herald Traveler) the search for a couple of guys lost or dead just up the road, on Mt. Washington. The search was being run out of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Pinkham Notch facility.
For three days, about a dozen of us journalists (including from such national media such as Time magazine) hung around as rescuers from the National Forest Service looked for these guys. They eventually found them safe in a shelter somewhere near the tree line. But the authorities were very angry that such inexperienced climbers had jeopardized the rescuers on that infamously stormy mountain. (I’ve climbed it myself twice in the winter with an experienced team. It’s a beautiful spectacle.)
“Do those little bastards know how much this is costing?’’ griped one of rescuers.
Of course, we journos were bored much of the time, but some of us snuck away for cheery drinks and dinner in Jackson, hoping that nothing exciting would happen while we were enjoying ourselves.
But what I most remember from that trip, one of many crazy expeditions during my time at The Herald Traveler, was sitting in my hotel room as wet snow fell outside watching Sun Valley Serenade on the TV and, particularly, listening to the song “I Know Why’’ being sung while backed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. One of the lines is “Even though it’s snowing, violets are growing.’’
Corny but it brings a pang about the passage of time
I probably have yellowed clips of my stories of the lost climbers in the cellar, but I’d bring on an asthma attack looking for them. In those deep, dark, pre-Internet days you’d need clips to get your next newspaper job, if you were foolish enough to want one.
