A mountain of lamentations

Brooding on Connecticut's iconic traprock ridgelines

Of all the paintings and drawings inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the one that seems to pop up again and again is the silhouette of the fellowship; the consortium of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men, setting off into the mountains on their dangerous foot journey to Mordor, to chuck the evil, all-powerful ring into the lava pits of Mount Doom. And what I love about this illustration isn’t its sweeping quality—it’s the sense of ambiguity that hovers over it. Depending on how you read the picture, you might see it as the embodiment of adventure. But reducing these characters to silhouettes gives the illustration an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. Are they striding through the mountains with a sense of noble purpose, chests out and guns in the sun?
Or are they contemplating the darkness that’s encroaching upon Middle Earth? Are they thinking of how the fate of the world rests in their hands, as the ringbearers?

Mountains and high windswept lands are among our greatest venues for ruminations of the darker kind. Heathcliff roamed the moors in Wuthering Heights. Bud Cort sent his car off the edge of a cliff at the end of Harold and Maude, having found the will to live and resisting the urge to plummet into the abyss with the vehicle. Last summer, I wrote about how there are several mountains in New England dubbed “Mount Misery” and that one of the finest examples is located on the eastern edge of Connecticut, in the middle of the Pachaug State Forest. By my estimation, the Nutmeg State might just be the regional leader for mountains whose monikers invite visitors to brood. A few months ago, I did exactly that upon one of the state’s iconic traprock ridgelines.

Traprock cliffs on Mount Carmel | US Dept. of State CC BY 2.0

Traprock, for those of you who are just now joining the party, is a dark, fine-grained igneous rock that’s pretty much the end result of lava flows cooling and hardening, millions of years ago. And Connecticut is chock full of the stuff. These bounteous deposits of traprock extrude from the earth, running south to north across the west half of the state in the form of ridgelines and even small mountain ranges. (In fact, these traprock ranges extend into the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.) From a scenic perspective, the traprock reveals itself in two ways. On lots of Connecticut trails, you’ll find shards of it underfoot. And when you’re standing at the base of a traprock ridge or mountain, you’re greeted by immense and sheer traprock cliffs. These cliffs are also visible from trails that run along their dodgy upper ledges. And the promise ofsuch a hair-raising saunter is what drew me to Lamentation Mountain.

I’m not making this up. On the town line between Berlin and Meriden, there’s a little state park with a raised traprock formation that’s called Lamentation Mountain. The cross-state Mattabesett Trail, which runs 65 miles across the center of the state, is the gateway to the upper reaches of the mountain, where the trail ambles past a long sequence of precipices before reaching the summit at 720 feet above sea level. And before any of you snort at this seemingly pithy elevation figure, let’s remember that a drop of anything over 100 feet is almost guaranteed to turn you into forest pulp. The prominence of the cliffs and ledges on the hike to Lamentation Mountain’s summit is more than enough to imbue the hike with a sense of exposure and rigor. In fact, one could argue that a mountain of small scale and angular severity gives you the best of both worlds; you get the thrill of climbing Mount Pierce and less huffing and puffing.

The trailhead for Lamentation Mountain is deceptively docile. When I pulled into the sun-splashed parking lot, I was greeted by a view of the cerulean Bradley Hubbard Reservoir and the cliffsides of another neighboring peak (Chauncey Mountain.) For many visitors, this is probably enough to justify motoring over to the park. But the presence of a blue Mattabesett Trail blaze on a tree next to the reservoir offered a whiff of what visitors who venture into the adjacent woods can get themselves into.

Which brings us to the name of Lamentation Mountain and its roots. According to multiple sources, the name was coined in the mid-1600s when a man from one of the early colonies decided to have himself a bushwhack, only to find himself seriously out of his element and lost on the traprock mountain’s haunches. It took the search party nearly three days to find the guy, and when they did, he was vocally lamenting his predicament. Also, as day faded into the night and so on, the rescuers may have been pre-emptively lamenting the presumed death of their comrade. I find both of these possibilities highly relatable. Even when I’m not lost on a mountain, I always take at least two minutes to curse my decision to climb the mountain, heaping pity upon myself and muttering words that you don’t expect to hear on a flowering ridge. And on the rare occasions when I’ve been hiking with a friend and we’ve managed to get prolongedly separated, the worst outcome has occasionally crossed my mind.

Awhile ago, my friend Tom and I went for a run around a pond in New Hampshire’s Great North Woods. We went in opposite directions, with the notion that we’d cross paths in the middle. When we didn’t cross paths, I kept running. By the time I finished the pond loop, still not having encountered Tom, I started to get seriously worried. And that’s because I’m prone to premature anixety about the uncertain. Since I hadn’t seen Tom anywhere along the pond run, there were two logical possibilities. He had taken a wrong turn, or he had changed his mind and followed in my footsteps. Either way, it would have made sense to stay put by the car and wait for him to get back. Instead, I fired up the vehicle, not really sure where I was going but feeling compelled to take action, and that’s when I saw Tom emerge from the woods. He had mistakenly veered onto a spur path that took him into a nearby bogland. Once he realized this, he just retraced his steps. And yet, my face was redder than his and my hair looked crazier.

It took me awhile to realize that in that moment, I was lamenting Tom’s possible fate, without even having done much to investigate what had become of him. A lot of us can’t help but do this, and when I learned that Lamentation Mountain may have been named for this affliction, I found it strangely touching. In fact, I experienced a more granular version of that affliction on my ascent to the clifftop portion of the hike. As I hauled ass past deciduous trees and laurel plants, the trail grew crumbly and I nearly face-planted into the dirt after losing my footing on some loose shards of traprock. I immediately jumped ahead to the return journey, imagining what might happen on my next pass through the traprock crumble zone. A rolled ankle? Some bad lacerations? I didn’t exactly lament this presumed outcome, but I dwelled upon it for long enough to consider bushwhacking around that one piece of the trail, once I came back through.

I’m not quite sure why I became so anxious about a bunch of loose rocks; especially on a hike featuring much more high-stakes territory, like clifftop paths. And to be sure, the views of the nearby hills and hollows that I took in from the cliffs of Lamentation Mountain were equal parts gorgeous and gut-churning. But the exposure of walking on those clifftop paths was something I had prepared myself before; I knew what I was getting into, once I reached the higher places on the mountain. I had time to mentally acclimate, on the drive to the hike. Usually my method for doing this is a combination of deep breathing, positive thinking, and blasting Rammstein songs on my car stereo system. But you can’t plan for every contingency when hiking, whether you’re in a wild space or a built environment like a city, and the challenge of being fine with that (or at least accepting the uncertainty) is something that can be very useful beyond the trails.

At the very least, here’s what I recommend trying, the next time you find yourself in a situation where you’re outdoors and not loving it. Whether you’re stuck in a sudden thunderstorm that came out of nowhere, wincing after realizing that you just made skin-on-skin contact with a bushel of poison ivy, or feeling exhausted miles before you’ve reached the end of your hike, give yourself the indulgence of stewing about it. But also, try to remember that in all likelihood, you’re doing your best to deal with it. I should add that there are certain scenarios to which this doesn’t apply: like finding yourself pursued by an angry, charging moose (run faster and get behind a fucking tree!) or trying to escape a fast and frothing river that you fell into, which is carrying you toward the top of a waterfall (swim harder and aim for the rocks on the banks!) But when things do go south mid-hike, your odds of pulling through unscathed will be a lot higher if you’re not too hard on yourself and the decisions that led you here.

I’m sometimes haunted by something that Anthony Hopkins said in the 1997 thriller The Edge (which was penned by David Mamet.) The characters have just survived a Cessna crash in Alaska. There’s evidence of bear activity in the vicinity. And spirits are fraying quickly. “You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame,” Hopkins says to his fellow survivors. “'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' So they sit there and they...die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.”

I don’t know if shame really is the top catalyst of backcountry doom. (And I’ve done some research on this question.) But it’s a plausible idea, and eerily understandable too. Who knows? If the lost hiker for whom Lamentation Mountain is named hadn’t been rescued, or if the rescuers had succumbed to their own ghastly projections, the mountain might have a darker moniker. “Lost Mountain,” perhaps. Or maybe “Mount Quietus.” There’s a precedent for natural spaces with elegaic and mournful vibes in New England. And you really don’t want to become the namesake for the next one.

Lamentation Mountain
Hike distance: 4.5 miles out-and-back
Elevation gain: 538 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

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Some of you might have heard this story, given that it’s gone viral with local and even some national news outlets, but the situation with bears in the White Mountains is becoming both scary and sad. This summer, there’s been a major uptick of hiker-bear encounters in the White Mountain National Forest; specifically around Lincoln Woods, which is the main gateway to the Pemigewasset Wilderness, the home of landmarks like Thirteen Falls, Bondcliff, and Black Pond. The reason why so many visitors have been running into bears around here is because the bears are becoming conditioned to think of hikers as a reliable source of food—not in an “I will chew your femur” way, but in a “hey, these guys have snacks” manner. Some hikers have even reported being followed by peckish bears in the WMNF this summer, which is the kind of sentence that you never want to write because it forces you to imagine what it would be like to experience being followed by a hungry bear. (I’m pretty sure I would experience a new form of incontinence.) Worse yet, this is the predictable result of hikers and campers visiting the Whites and either neglecting to take basic precautions in bear-proofing their food or in some cases, deliberately feeding the bears. The end result is bad for everyone, but especially for the bears, who become dependent and more vulnerable.

All of which is a meandering way of saying that if the thought of food-conditioned bears roaming around the White Mountains gives you the willies, you might want to avoid this area for near-term hikes. And wherever you end up hiking, now is a good time to review the Bear FAQ section of the U.S. Forest Service website, which offers advice on everything from keeping your food safe from bears to what you should do if you stumble upon a bear on a hike. It’s happened to me a few times, and I will say that the shock for seeing any bear on a trail can induce a temporary amnesia, when it comes to the best practices. But the more time you have to absorb and review those practices, the more likely you are to recall them when it matters. Be careful out there.