Tuckerman Ravine — The Cirque That Became a Cathedral

Tuckerman Ravine is a glacially carved cirque on the southeastern flank of Mount Washington, a headwall of ice and rock that holds snow into May and June while the valleys below have been bare for two months. The headwall rises roughly eight hundred feet at angles that reach sixty degrees in places, and people have been skiing it since the nineteen twenties, long before ski lifts existed anywhere in North America.

The tradition they established has not changed in its essentials. You earn the descent by hiking to it. The trailhead at Pinkham Notch is about two miles from the headwall's base. Skiers carry their equipment up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail on their backs, gaining roughly two thousand three hundred feet of elevation, and then they stand at the lip of the headwall and go down. No lift tickets. No snowmaking. No grooming. The terrain is whatever the snowpack and the freeze-thaw cycle have produced.

The headwall can produce avalanches, and it does. The ravine has killed people, and it continues to. The Forest Service posts warnings each spring about snowpack stability, and each spring people ignore some portion of those warnings. What draws them is partly the skiing and partly something harder to name: the idea that a particular kind of experience is available here that cannot be purchased anywhere, only earned by hiking to it and then choosing to go down.

Dartmouth skiers John Carleton and Charles Proctor made the first recorded descent of the headwall on April eleventh, nineteen thirty-one, several years before the first major New England ski resort opened. The lower approach is still called the Sherburne Trail. The mountain was indifferent to the naming. It still is.