Talking nerdy about cost functions
This post’s primary purpose is to share photos from the majestic White Mountains. Here, the trail rejects its traditional patterns. If we could quantify the various obstacles in a landscape – elevation (the most important), gradient, rocky faces, swamps, rivers, dense forest – we can create a spatial cost function that assigns essentially a difficulty score to each unit of land area. The path of most trails follows the minimum of this spatial cost function. Hence, trails traverse passes, not peaks, cross rivers at narrow points, and switchback up a steep hillside.
In the White Mountains, the trail nearly maximizes this spatial cost function instead (while also prioritizing a minimal point-to-point distance). It heedlessly clambers up a rocky face, mounts most peaks, makes no use of switchbacks. I cannot recall such sustained ruggedness.
Lake of (in) the clouds
Amidst the most challenging 150 miles of the Appalachian Trail, the Whites also soar above treeline for 15 miles, posing a significant obstacle during the (frequent) adverse weather events. I navigated halfway through these 15 miles largely engulfed in cloud. The forecast read ‘chance of thunderstorms’; I would know if one approached only from the sound of thunder. So at the base of Mt Washington, the highest of the Whites, I stopped into the Lake of the Clouds hut. There, I was fortunate to sweep the floors in exchange for leftover dinner and spend the night on the dining room floor. In a symbolically appealing result, I could also summit Mt Washington on the 4th of July.
Another benefit of this arrangement: Mt Washington emerged from the clouds this morning. I learned that Mt Washington’s reputation for the “worst weather in America” refers not to its continuously awful conditions but to the summit’s ability to attract the most screaming of winds, the most rapid deterioration of visibility and temperature at a moment’s notice. For my time on the summit, the absence of winds and people created a silence that must be quite abnormal.
Whirling neon lights, an American tradition
I caught and descended the Whites with Pig Pen, Globetrotter, Typical, and Sideshow, friends who had mutually supporting one other through the Whites. We travelled together to Gorham NH, picked up red and blue slashes at the gas station, and headed to the carnival. The carnival packed maximum sensory overload, a mess of neon lights, running children, those masses of Americans who pile into minivans for a big event. Pig Pen and I rode a twirling carnival ride, stunned as we whipped through the air at the contrast with the naturally muted sensory experiences of the past week.
