Freezing hikers stuck in waist-deep snow rescued during Mount Washington whiteout
The two friends had hiked New Hampshire’s challenging Mount Washington trail a month ago.
The two friends had hiked New Hampshire’s challenging Mount Washington trail a month ago. They returned and did it again Sunday after trekking through neighboring peaks in the White Mountains. Both veteran hikers, the women were an hour behind schedule on their descent and losing daylight, but they had warm clothing, headlamps and other gear.
Then the wind kicked in. The temperature dropped. They were in waist-deep snow and whiteout conditions. They were lost on the tallest mountain in the Northeast, known for its extreme, changeable weather.
“That snow has nothing to stick to,” said Amy Cotter, a weather observer and education specialist with the Mount Washington Observatory at the peak at 6,288 feet (1,916 meters). “That snow gets whipped up very easily.”
One of Kathyrn McKee’s snowshoes became stuck in a “spruce trap,” a hole created in the snow underneath trees.
“It took like 20 minutes to get out of that,” she recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. “And that kept happening. And so we got to a point where we were literally, like crawling on our bellies to try to get to the next point and just struggling so much that it wasn’t working.”
Rating: 5