Category: Coös

iSymposium

I cut out early at the end of day two of the Coös Symposium to race south on Route 16 to Berlin for the budget hearing. I felt I was leaving an abstraction of Coös County to go to Coös County, the real thing. I have to admit what I have missed most while at the Coös Symposium is the people that make up Coös County.

That may seem like a strange description, but the Symposium has been more a place to talk about solutions and strategies for remaking Coös than an opportunity to connect with the region. The makeup, I would estimate, is roughly one-half Coös residents and one-half outsiders like me. The conference lacks enough influence of the most important asset that makes the region special: its people. There is more creative energy and positivity than I usually encounter working in Berlin, but outsiders don’t have the uniquely Coös perspective that sets the region apart. It takes a critical mass of North Country residents to make the environment truly northern, and right now it’s still got the taste of southern.

I would love to see the symposium happen next time in Lancaster or Colebrook or Berlin, with the discussions held at restaurants and businesses and schools. I’d love to see this group interacting more with the residents of Coös, bringing their ideas, enthusiasm and solutions to the people who need them instead of keeping them cooped up inside grand hotels.

Let me make make myself clear: I love the discussions. But when I went to Berlin and spoke with a city councilor who had to turn down his invitation it became clear the glaring deficit in this model. He would have loved to have taken part, but he couldn’t make it because three days away is more than most people can manage. Like many enthusiastic Berlin residents, he has passion for the region, but he lacks the broad understanding of the issues that would enable him to better govern and promote the region. The conversations that have been happening at the Balsams would be perfect for him, but with a job, family and obligations he couldn’t manage it.

How many people could make that same argument? How easily does this model shed the participation of those who need to be most engaged: the next generation of leaders who are too busy living their lives to go for a vacation/workshop in the mountains.

How can the symposium better engage with Coös and those it purports to want to support? How can the event be made more accessible?

My pitch for next year: hold it in town. The conversations, connections and contributions this event can make are invaluable, but it would be better served if those conversations occured where the problems lie. Invite everyone, and try to connect with those least likely to see eye to eye. The energy from the conference is palpable, and that enthusiasm shouldn’t live just at the Balsams. What Coös really needs is a symposium infused into its being, something that can push the ball fast enough that Coös momentum starts to overtake itself.

Wild Light

Another day in the North Country. I drove home over the notch tonight around 7 p.m., just in time to catch the sun streaming through the clouds onto the mountain. I had to stop and run down to the river to take a picture, which, as usual, doesn’t do the moment justice. Even after I took the photos I kept catching glimpses as I drove south on Route 16.

A little further on, almost to the AMC Pinkham Notch visitors center, a couple cars were pulled over near the north end of the pond at the height-of-land. That’s a sign I’ve come to know well that there’s a moose about, and I slowed to grab a photo. It didn’t come out well, but seeing as I’ll likely see another dozen before the month is over I didn’t wait around for a better angle.

I went out on a tour of Lake Umbagog with Senator Jeanne Shaheen last year. She kept hoping to see a moose as we motored around the refuge. The other day there was a moose on East Milan Road, and barely a motorist blinked. In the North Country residents are accustomed to the extraordinary. They love the woods and the rivers and the wildlife, but to them it’s always there. I think about how different the rest of the state is in that regard. Someone asked me several weeks ago what I thought the North Country represents to New Hampshire residents. I think today I got a better idea of my answer. It is where the sunsets are stunning, and the moose share the road, and where the forests seem endless and inviting. It is reassuring to the rest of the state, both in the spirit of the residents who remain there and in the land that has endured there. It is a long way from being diluted through emigration, and it retains the essence of live free or die that has been slowly eradicated further south. It is a wilderness, in their view, though more often forgotten than not.

And I get to live it everyday. Amen.

Crisp Days, Level Nights

If you’ve been just looking at the photos in the recent blog posts without clicking on them, click on them now. I’ve been getting some great shots lately that I’m just disappointed I can’t tie in to anything to get them into the paper. The colors look dull in posts, but when they pop open they look great.

It was a crisp, cold day today, and the council finished the budget. Everyone got level funded, from the police and schools on down. There will be two fewer firefighters and two fewer public works employees. I get an interesting picture, because at the police department they complain about the council, and at council they complain about the police department. To hear each side tell it the other is railroading them.

Budgets are quirky. This one is thin. I’m scheduled to be at the Balsams for the Coös Symposium during the May 26th public hearing, but I may have to make a trip to Berlin for that. This has been hot lately, and I don’t want to miss where it goes. I wonder what cuts are going to matter to residents and how their comments will affect the council. I have a hard time believing support for expanded policing would cause many changes, but the school, fire and recreation departments may find themselves with some friends. It promises to be eventful from now until July first.

More Projects…

I’ve been a little quiet recently, because in addition to my Reporter work I’ve been working on two NHPR pieces and two other side projects. All of them have connections to or roots in the North Country (well, not one of the NHPR pieces) and I’m am super excited about them. It is interesting the possibilities available around here to people with the right set of skills and the right level of enthusiasm. I’m hoping they all come to fruition, because every one of them will tell a little part of the story of the North Country.

Also, I’m heading to the Coös Symposium in a couple weeks. It’s right at the wrong time, in some respects, as I have to figure out if I want to miss the budget hearing in Berlin or if I’ll be commuting. But I’m excited to hear what people in Coös have to say and what sort of solutions come out of the event. What do people think of it, I wonder? Do you look at it as a worthwhile exercise? I don’t really know what to expect, but I’d love to hear people’s opinions, both from people who have gone and those who have watched it happen for the past few years.

Mornings

Mornings in Coös County are the best. Mondays and Thursdays are my consistent early days in Berlin, with an 8 a.m. meeting police department for the weekly log. In winter my drive over the notch starts before sunrise, but now that the days have grown the sky is usually bright and unspoiled.

The city streets are always still, and all the parking spaces on Main Street are empty. It’s a gift to roll in and watch the city wake up. The mist burns off the river, shops unfurl their open flags, and cars start to roll out of driveways. Morning has always been my favorite time of day, and in the North Country it’s the way always remember it.

I have come up a few times at 6 a.m. or earlier to shoot photographs before dawn. The streets are always eerily quiet. I always wonder if people wonder what the heck I’m doing, as I pull over on the roadside and duck under fences, dragging my camera bag with my tripod under my arm. As of yet no officer has wound up tapping on my shoulder, so I’m guessing people either don’t notice or don’t care.

Between the area’s landscape, architecture and industrial infrastructure there are always ghosts poking out of the darkness. Trying to capture them in interesting light is a fantastic challenge. The mornings, of course, are the time to do it.

When I come up for work, as I’ve said before, it’s like I’m leaving one world for another. I leave a town largely devoid of community, where neighbor is a geographic distinction, not a reference to personal relationships. I come to a city and a region undiluted by fast-paced existence. There is no rat race here. People know each other, and they still attend community suppers and barbecues. Berlin still fosters community, builds it and wrestles with how to preserve it.

The premiere of On the River’s Edge this weekend exemplifies this quality. More than 400 free tickets to the local showing disappeared almost instantly, and the historical society sold more than 200 DVDs of the documentary. It was a remarkable show of local pride for a city constantly on guard against its own demise.

Berlin residents have a sense of pride, however, that grew out of the city’s reputation. They loved Berlin even when others ridiculed it for the smell of the mill and its remoteness. Today the mill is gone but the pride remains. Along with it, however, are the scars left by being the butt of too many jokes. The armpit of the state and Stinktown USA are no longer, but the affects remain.

But today the view of Mount Madison is crystal clear. The river runs clean, and the woods have more trails than loggers. Every morning I come north I marvel at the country Coös County residents live in, and I wonder how it can sustain itself so they can keep living there. The answer is there, I am sure of it, but the recipe hasn’t been discovered yet.

The mornings, however, convince me that recipe is worth searching for.

This morning, after police log, I was driving along Riverside Drive, when I looked over the river and saw a sea of white dots: seagulls, perched on the boom piers, huddled together during a rain shower. The sky and the river were almost black and the birds popped from the background. They were so numerous and so brilliant I had to turn around. I walked to the river’s edge with my camera and tried to capture the moment. Instead I got a few snapshots of birds too far away to make an impact. But they made their impact on me. They woke me once more to the many things northern New Hampshire has that other places lack. A river through town, for instance, that hasn’t been completely overrun with construction. A sense of wildness and life even in the downtown.

It’s hard to appreciate, I think, when you are there all the time. But try leaving and coming back and see what it is you first see. See if you notice the morning sun on the mountains turning the snow shades of gold, or the mist rising off the river in trails. See if you notice the muskrats in Tondreau Park searching for fresh grass, or the birds soaring around Mount Forist. Ordinary? Drab? Not for a moment, particularly in the mornings.

Gaining on a year

I’m two weeks away from being with the Reporter for a year. In that time I’ve met a US senator, sat through numerous city council sessions and watched a city change and grow. It introduced me to the North Country, the landscape and its people, which I’ve come to feel connected to because of their willingness to let me in.

I have also come to feel very strongly that this region is ripe for rebirth. It has so much to offer, so much potential, and I feel it isn’t destined to be trapped in the economic condition it is currently.

My wife and I got invited to the Coös Symposium. It will be interesting to visit and talk with other people interested in kick-starting something positive. I don’t really know what to expect, but it should be interesting no matter what.

I’m also working on a side project to raise the profile and the perspective of the region as a destination. I don’t know how it’ll go, but I’m hoping to turn my enthusiasm for the region into tangible economic benefits.

Working in a small city is tough, because the paper is both a critic and a champion of what happens. I am supposed to look over the decisions of the local government and municipality, but I’m also supposed to provide a positive view of the are. It’s a tough balance to strike in a city so small. The year of working has made me feel even more strongly that the time is right for a real push toward change, but at the same time I am trying to watch that change with a critical eye, ready to point out problems so residents can make informed decisions about their self-governance.

I know there are people who read LPJ just for the Laidlaw/CPD debate. That’s only a fraction of the future of this place. In the past year I’ve watched, heard and taken part in hundreds of discussions about the future of the region. There are more forces pushing for success right now than bonds tying the region to failure. Hopefully the last year of LPJ and the Reporter has made more of those positive developments and possibilities clear to residents, who sometimes have more trouble seeing the good than those from away do.

So although it’s a bit premature, thank you for a year, Berlin and Coös County; I don’t see us slowing down anytime soon.

Hopeful Signs and Pigeon Holes

I went up to Milan Village School to check in about their positive outcomes with state testing. They got off the schools in need of improvement list after years on it. Principal David Backler credited technology and good use of data with their success. You’ll be able to read more about the school’s success in next week’s Berlin Reporter.

He also said something else that was intriguing. He said he was preparing students to go to the best colleges in the country, but making sure to instill in them a connection with Milan and the surrounding region. They need to be successful, he said, but some of them hopefully will want to come home afterward to make their lives here.

It’s such a great idea, and I’m not sure it has been employed well enough. I know Berlin residents have a deep-seated pride for their city, but it almost seems in spite of where they come from rather than rooted in it. The Berlin type of pride seems to me more akin to people who leave New Jersey: they’ll fight you if you say something bad about it, but they sure don’t want to live there anymore.

Principal Backler made the point that this area has so much to offer, from hunting to hiking and skiing to snowmobiling. There is something for everyone, he said, and the kids need to be made aware of those opportunities.

Unfortunately, the region has been pigeon-holed. People look to Berlin as a place to go if you like ATVs and sleds, but not if you want cross-country ski trails and road biking. The mountains in Coös County are as spectacular as those in Carroll or Grafton (some would say more), and the opportunity for diverse recreation abounds.

But then I look at a study released a couple months ago by the UNH Carsey Institute that said Coös County youth aren’t engaged enough outside the classroom. They are left idle, the report said, particularly males, which leads to trouble.

Why? Why are kids in northern New Hampshire idle? There is so much here, so much to root them to this place, to make them want to come back, to occupy their time and lead them down the road toward becoming successful young adults. And it doesn’t cost a ton of money; compare buying hiking boots to the cost of a pair of hockey skates.

What the North Country has, most places can’t offer. The region hasn’t figured out how to connect itself to the those assets, and it has trouble connecting others as well.

Coös is selling what it knows, not what it has. It’s assets are greater than just ATV trails, wood and prisons, but those are the economic foundations the region is familiar with. I drive past mountains, trails, cliffs and rivers that if they were in North Conway would be swarmed every weekend. They are almost always empty. And what’s more, I see assets for rooting the region’s youth in their home while teaching them the skills to grow up and be creative, driven, inspired adults. Parents spend thousands to send their children on Outward Bound expeditions just across the border in Newry, Maine. Why is there no capitalization on the exact same assets here in Coös?

Because it’s been pigeon-holed. The region sees itself in one way, and it has hard time seeing anything else. The assets are there, waiting to be plucked. A few people are starting to use them to their advantage, like Principal Backler. He makes for hopeful signs, despite the pigeon holes.

Grand Adventure

If  Coös is selling adventure, it can deliver.

Recognize this view? It’s not from Mount Forist or Mount Jasper, but you can see Berlin in the distance. It’s from a 350 foot tall cliff—clean, steep and beautiful—that’s just part of the adventure available in the North Country.

I convinced my friend Bayard to come check it out with me to see what kind of Grand Adventure we could get into. Bayard is a climbing guide who lives in Madison. He is really strong (check out his blog to see what I mean), owns Cathedral Mountain Guides, is sponsored by Outdoor Research and well known within the Northeast climbing community. I had been telling him for months about this beautiful cliff in Coös, and the other day he agreed to go have a look.

The cliff is an hour and a half from the road, so we met early. At 7:30 a.m. we stood in my driveway sorting our gear for the day. I’d figured out how to get to the cliff a week or so before so I knew where we were going, but what we would need to climb once we got there was another matter. We opted to go light, taking the bare minimum of equipment to avoid carrying heavy loads for hours. We hoped we would find solid clean rock that would take protection, but really we had no idea. We packed up the car and headed off, the sun still low against the mountains.

We started walking on a logging road but soon turned onto a hiking trail. It was still early, and we were moving fast, happy to have the light packs. About the time we got our first view of the cliff the trail degraded into a bog, and we began hopping from moss hummock to moss hummock. We could still make out the outline of the trail, but we had to weave around it to keep our feet dry. The trail plunged into underbrush, and we crawled over downed trees and danced from rock to rock to avoid the marshy spots.

The marsh and the trail ended at a stream, and surveyors tape marked the next half mile. We groped from tree to tree looking for the next piece of flagging tape while bushes pulled at our legs. We kept barreling forward, hoping the climbing at the end would be worth it.

The tape ended in another bog, with a clear view of the cliff. I pulled out my compass and took a bearing. Bayard said he’d never gone through such shenanigans to climb at a cliff in New Hampshire before. We hopped across the bog, crossed another stream, and followed the compass for another 20 minutes to a field of boulders below the cliff.

The view from the base was spectacular—the cliff was covered corners, flakes, cracks, roofs. Climbers use features like these to get up steep walls, and this one was almost vertical. Luckily it looked like there would be just enough to move upward; it was going to be a good day.

We walked up to the center of the cliff, picked out a crack system in a corner and roped up. I got the first lead, so I pulled on my rock shoes, chalk bag, rack of gear and started up. The rock was sharp, with big crystals that bit into the back of my hands as I jammed. The crack was wider than I wanted but not wide enough to quit, so I grabbed hold of one side and walked my feet up the other, climbing toward the sky.

“Looks awesome,” Bayard yelled as I inched upward. One of my pieces of gear was behind a hollow-sounding flake, but it was the best thing I had. I leaned back and punched it to the next roof, where I found a good crack that took two pieces of rock protection.

The last 40 feet of the pitch eased up, with small holds on the right wall to grab hold of and a flake on the left for gear. I got to a ledge the size of a dinner table and built an anchor. “Off belay,” I yelled to Bayard below. He could barely hear me through the wind.

Bayard raced up to my anchor, removing the gear as he climbed. We exchanged brief smiles on the belay ledge, and then he kept going to the top of the cliff. He made short work of the second pitch, and soon I was climbing up to meet him.

Up top we found some old bolts and pitons, evidence someone else had come this way before. They were old, worn and covered with rust; it’d probably been a decade since they went in.

We could just see Mount Washington between Adams and Jefferson, the trio rising above the surrounding mountains. But we didn’t pause long to admire them; we still had work to do. We rappelled to the ground and traversed the base to see if there was another obvious line.

Bayard had his eye on one of the low roofs on the south end of the cliff. It looked like it had a perfect handcrack above it, and he wanted to take it all the way to the top. The roof itself looked hard, but things would probably ease up once you made it over it.

I led first, up a slab past two old bolts from the 1970s. I stopped just below the roof and set up a belay to bring Bayard up to me. He grabbed the gear and headed left, towards the handcrack at the lip of the roof.

He placed a piece in the corner and then felt for the edge. It was six feet to the lip. He rearranged his feet, trying to reach the crack, and pushed his palm into the roof for stability. He was placing gear blind so he couldn’t evaluate it; if it wasn’t good and he fell it could rip and send him into the slab below, hard. He backed his first piece up with a second and looked over at me. “One of them has to hold,” he said with a shrug, and launched out for the crack.

His feet cut and his hands groped holds. He curled in, rolling up like a hedgehog, with his feet inches from his elbows. A hand popped, and then another, and he shot downwards toward the slab. The rope came tight at my waist, pulling at my harness and yanking me into the air. Bayard hung inches above from the slab, suspended from his gear at the lip. “They held,” he said with a smile.

He stood up and shook his hands out like he was shaking water off them, and then he started climbing again. He grabbed the hold at the lip, this time with determination. He curled in again, like he cannon-balling into a pool, and stuck his feet to the roof. A hand shot out and grabbed the next hold up, then his other hand bounced up the edge of the crack. His left toe hooked up over the lip, and he pulled himself up into the crack.

(I would love to have a picture of this sequence, but I was engrossed in belaying. I’m sure he preferred me paying attention to his life rather than my camera.)

He climbed another 40 feet and built an anchor. He shouted down, “Off belay!”

I went through a similar sequence, falling once and then climbing over the lip second try. I met Bayard at the belay, and then continued on to the summit, leading the clean, beautiful handcrack above. We topped out at the same anchor as the first route and quickly rappelled to the ground.

It was getting late, and following the tape, much less the compass, would be a challenge in the dark. We loaded our packs, pulled on our boots, and turned our backs to the cliff. With the south needle sitting where the north had been we made our way back through the woods. At the hiking trail, after the tape and the bog, we sat down to drink some water and eat. The orange sunlight splashed over the cliff, the last view we got of the day.

We made it back to the car an hour later, exhausted. I pulled off my boots and put on my flipflops, while Bayard went barefoot in the passenger seat.

“Not a bad adventure,” Bayard said as I fired up the car. I hurt all over, from my hands to my feet to my back to my shoulders. I looked over at him and laughed. Yes, I had to concur, it was not a bad adventure at all.

Note: This is a taste of a side project I’m working on launching. I see Coös as the frontier of outdoor adventure; it simply hasn’t been tapped. I had a great day out there, and I think other people with similar interests will be doing the same thing someday soon. Hopefully it will be part of the new economic mix the region is looking for.

Also, in the second photo I took some errant twigs and branches out of the sky with Photoshop to give a clearer view of the cliff. It’s not something I would normally do on LPJ, and never in the paper, but here the goal is to make people understand the asset they have in their back yard. Hopefully it helped. In journalism such things are unacceptable, but this doesn’t fall into my journalism category. Regardless, I felt the need for full disclosure. Thus enduth my disclaimer.

Update: I found the history of the two bolts I passed on the first pitch of The Pikey. I spoke with Tad Pfeffer, who said he and Dwight Bradley climbed something matching the description of the first pitch of the route back in 1971. He said they climbed partway up but didn’t continue to the top of the cliff. We didn’t see any evidence anyone had climbed higher than the second bolt (which had webbing threaded through it in the style of a rappel anchor and was a little below our first belay), so I’m pretty confident we were the first climbers to do the route. I’ve changed the text in the photo from FRA (First Recorded Ascent) to FA (First Ascent) to reflect my research. I’m hoping to do many more FAs out there.