I’m currently on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, where they are expecting a heat wave, with temperatures in the mid thirties (in the nineties if you speak foreign degrees). So it seems appropriate to write about the opposite end of the scale, which we encountered in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, and the Adirondacks in New York State.
I mentioned foreign degrees, which I have slowly been getting used to. New York has been mostly high fifties and early sixties, which is mid teens in non-gibberish. 32 foreign degrees buys you a flat zero degrees outside the States.
We had intended some hiking in the mountain trails in New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, hopefully through autumn foliage. As it turned out, the foliage up north had definitely turned a lot earlier than in Maine, and most of the vivid colour was gone. Instead, we had an unusually early snow storm, with a foot of snow falling and daytime temperatures around 25 in the mountains.
In normal person degrees, that’s… well, it’s cold. Less than zero just fits in one category: cold. Definitely cold when you’re not skiing.
We were driving through low mountain passes that were being repeatedly plowed as the snow fell. We mostly kept to the car, it wasn’t the most pleasant weather for hiking. The White Mountains and Adirondacks are popular holiday spots for the locals, especially in summer and the fall. They have old covered bridges, which I never did find out the story behind, but they’re a nice sight:
In winter, people come to ski. Lake Placid in the Adirondacks has been host to the winter olympics twice. Of course, if we’d known this, we might have been prepared for the snow…
We arrived in Old Forge in the Adirondacks on Halloween. We coughed up a few dollars more for a room with a view, and we got a lovely one:
We headed into town, which was small and sleepy. But even here, people were out in costume everywhere. We spent the evening doing our washing and swimming in the pool…
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