A Holiday Weekend of Chaos at Hermit Lake

I don’t know if there’s a better job than backcountry caretaking. You get paid to live in the woods! But it also has some tremendous challenges. The biggest being that at some point you have to go do something else. Occasionally, you have to deal with absolute insanity at your site, as I did Fourth of July weekend in 2017 at the Hermit Lakes Shelters in Tuckerman Ravine, New Hampshire.

8 shelters, 3 tent platforms. Capacity 90.

As you can see, Hermit Lake is a monster site for one person to handle at full capacity. It’s busy enough on spring skiing weekends to warrant two caretakers, but it’s usually fine with one at all other times. After a slow start to the summer 2017 season, this weekend hit me like a tsunami. 

A moose and her calf were living in the campsite. It was an experience I’m so grateful for, but also created some tension in the campsite. I devoted much of my welcome speech to where I’d seen the moose last and what to do if they were hanging out around the site. The rest of it was explaining the layout of the site and begging people to tell me if there was anything wrong in the bathrooms. It was better to deal with it right away than let it get worse. 

Friday night, June 30th, was literally the calm before the storm. NOAA had predicted a large rainstorm overnight, so the site only had a few guests. Most of the day, I’d worked on trimming back the brush growing into the Tuckerman Ravine Trail above Hermit Lake and documenting the conditions of the trail signs in the area. I spent the evening on the deck of Hojos, the caretaker cabin, watching the moose. The mother was typically unphased by the masses trying to get pictures of her and her baby, but the calf was often skittish. I worried how the mother would react if someone made the calf too uncomfortable.

It poured overnight, raining just over 2 inches. I found time to get out for about three hours the next morning to continue taking pictures of trail signs, making it to the base of Huntington Ravine and coming back before the site got busy. Streams were flowing high on all the trails I was on. A few skiers had hiked up to get some July turns on the little snow left in the bowl. I hadn’t seen the moose at all that day. Because of the storm, it wasn’t as busy as it should have been, but there was plenty of traffic. 

On Sunday, all hell broke loose. I spent my morning stocking the bathrooms and trying to keep the old flush toilets unclogged. As of 11am, things were functioning as they should. I was in the cabin for a few hours organizing the photos I’d taken of signs over the last few days, eating lunch and talking to guests. Nothing could have prepared me for the state of the bathrooms when I went to check them again at 1pm. In about two hours, hikers clogged nearly every toilet in both bathrooms, and no one told me anything was wrong.

Two nights before, the storm must have knocked the siphon for the gravity-fed cistern that supplied the water for the toilets out of the stream. The flushing of toilets slowly emptied the cistern, and there was no water left to move waste. I closed both bathrooms, hanging signs directing visitors to the two barrel toilets in the site. Unclogging the toilets wouldn’t be an option until I restored the water supply. Since it was the Sunday of a holiday weekend, no one was available to hike up and help me. 

The stream that fed water to the site was about a quarter-mile uphill, so I set off to fix it. The method that we used to start the system with five people at the beginning of the season did not work with one person. It took me about two hours and several trips back and forth to the cistern and the siphon, but I finally got water flowing into the cistern again. It would need to fill for a few hours before I had enough water to work on the toilets, but things were back on the right track at Hermit Lake.

I made my way back to the cabin to check the site and make dinner after seeing that the cistern was filling. 75 hikers had already made reservations in Pinkham Notch by around 4:30 pm, so they stopped accepting more. That would assure space for folks that were arriving to the site from trails other than Tuckerman Ravine. I’d left a sign in the cabin letting people know that I was away fixing the water supply, and that they should find space in the shelters where they can - the site would likely fill tonight. Things were mostly in order when I did my rounds, so I finally had the chance to sit down and eat some Annie’s Mac and Cheese with Field Roast sausages. 

Before I could take a bite, a hiker stormed into the cabin to announce that a woman broke her leg on the headwall. It was just after 5 pm. I asked if anyone called 911, but there wasn’t enough service to do so. While I radioed down to Pinkham that there was a rescue, I packed first-aid supplies and shoved some Annie’s into my mouth. Once I had what I needed to help and finished calling for more hands, I set off up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail. After about three-quarters of a mile and climbing most of the way up the headwall, I found a woman with a left lower-leg injury. Her husband and a friend had splinted her leg with a hiking pole. It was apparent she wasn’t hiking out. I relayed what I saw to the on-duty search and rescue coordinator. Help would come, but it always takes time to organize a team to head up from the valley.

Once I checked her over, I informed her it would probably take a few hours for help to hike up to us and our best course of action was to move as much as we could. Her husband, her friend, and I helped her scoot down the steeper parts of the trail. While she could face forward and lower herself using her arms and uninjured leg, we made steady progress. We slowed to a crawl when we reached the flatter part of the trail at the bottom of the headwall. I sent her husband and friend down to the nearest first aid cache to retrieve a litter. Meanwhile, I sat and comforted the women and took another look at her leg. Nothing seemed to be better or worse, which is about the best you can ask for during a backcountry rescue.

It felt like it took a long time for the two men to return with the litter. When they did, we loaded the woman in and dragged her along the trail. We made incredibly slow progress. Her companions were getting tired, and I dragged the litter myself as night was falling. I saw headlamps coming our way at around 9 pm. 15 to 20 AMC volunteers and two New Hampshire Fish and Game officers had arrived to help. I grabbed a strap on the litter as we transitioned to a six-person carry, with three people on each side. 

“Taylor, aren’t you tired?” someone asked after a few minutes. 

Yes. Yes, I was. Just how much hit me as I trailed behind the litter. I think I carried the litter with the group once or twice more on the way back to the caretaker cabin, where Fish and Game had an ATV waiting to take the woman the two miles back to the trailhead. We finally made it back to the cabin around 11 pm. I handed out Snickers and Clif bars to those that had helped the woman down. 

I ate a Snickers myself as I said goodbye to the injured woman, her husband and her friend. Fish and Game drove her down, and the AMC volunteers hiked back to Pinkham.

Now I had toilets to unclog.

The next day, I did little more than hang around the campsite, talk to hikers, and finish cleaning the bathrooms. A couple hours of easy trail work on Raymond Path got me away from the site. I took a refreshing nap during the day. Probably my only one at Hermit Lake. There were a decent number of campers, so after I did my rounds I said I had to do some work on the solar panels and watched the sunset from the roof. 

Fourth of July brought a few more skiers. I dragged the litter back to the cache it came from. It was a fun challenge to pull the sled for about a half hour uphill. After putting the litter back, I scrambled around in the boulders north of the Tuckerman Ravine trail. I found a golf ball in there once. The moose had reappeared, devouring leaves in front of the cabin in the middle of the night. 

As was tradition that summer, I hiked the Huntington Ravine Trail up to Mt. Washington with some AMC friends as part of “Huntington Wednesdays.” Repeatedly scrambling up those steep slopes was one of my favorite parts of that season. Each time, I knew better where to put my hands and feet to move up the slabs and chimneys more quickly and efficiently. It felt great to be back in my routine after such a crazy weekend. The Mt. Washington summit was the usual crowded tourist trap. We’d come from our own world and quickly descended back there. 

An eventful and fulfilling stint.