Mount Monadnock Research Articles

The Jim Croce Question

The Jim Croce Question

Rethinking hiker preparedness: Association of carrying "10 essentials" with adverse events and satisfaction among day-hikers.

Many trusted organizations recommend a particular set of gear for hikers. Termed the "10 essentials," the importance of these items to wilderness preparedness has not been critically evaluated. We sought to better understand the value of these items in day hiker preparedness by assessing the association between carried items, the occurrence of adverse events, and satisfaction. A cross-sectional survey study was conducted at Mount Monadnock (NH) over 4 non-consecutive days. Adults finishing a day hike were invited to participate. The survey assessed items carried, adverse events, satisfaction, and whether hikers felt prepared for the adverse events that occurred. The primary outcome was the occurrence of an adverse event. A total sample of 961 hikers reported 1686 adverse events. Hikers felt prepared for 89% of the events experienced. The most common adverse events reported were thirst (62%), hunger (50%), feeling cold (18%), and needing rain gear (11%). Medical events such as sprains and lacerations made up 18% of all adverse events. Carrying more items was associated with an increased likelihood of reporting an adverse event and a decreased likelihood of adverse events that the hiker was not prepared for, without a change in satisfaction rates. Carrying more items did not translate into improved satisfaction for day hikers, but was associated with fewer events for which the hiker was unprepared. Other than adverse events related to hunger, thirst, weather, and minor medical events, adverse events were unlikely during this day hike. Nutrition, hydration, and insulation were the items reported as most often needed, followed by a kit to treat minor medical events, while the remaining 6 items were infrequently used.

Opera House

Opera House Robert Stothart (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Bill Rand [End Page 42] Everything seemed married to everything else. —Gustave Baumann, printmaker, Santa Fe [End Page 43] Overture A mere 7,918 miles in diameter, Earth, our home together, travels a minuscule distance in relation to all that we see on clear nights, light years away out in the stars. The core of our globe is a mix of iron and nickel, solid like a cherry pit. That solid inner core is wrapped in a liquid outer core, and around that a mantle eighteen hundred miles thick, about the distance from New York to Denver. This mantle—solid in parts, liquid in places, plastic in others—roils in convection currents under a relatively thin fourteen-mile crust, a vulnerable skin of sorts that weathers all seasons while holding on in a tenuous relationship with the globe's deeper workings. That crust beneath our feet is constantly buckling, cracking, spreading, wrinkling, and pouring forth to reveal, as a face reveals, what goes on inside. Earth is face-all-over, and its insides are hot, reaching in places eight thousand degrees Fahrenheit. In a similar way, all of us on Earth are hot under our skins. We stay around ninety-eight degrees inside, like a sultry August afternoon. Besides that, our inner emotional temperatures swing wildly. As with our globe, contained though we are, each of our faces displays what's going on and has gone on inside. Look at photographs of Abraham Lincoln through the course of the Civil War. Look at Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, 1936. No matter our cosmetic preparations or our plastic surgeries, our inner churning will mark us in one way or another, and Earth is our stage. We are held in its gravitational clutches under its shifting atmospheres. Earth takes its toll on our inner burnings as we fashion entrances and exits through scenes, strutting and fretting our hours together on this little stage in cosmic space. Certain places on Earth give dramatic views of the globe's inner life: geysers and chromatic pools in Yellowstone's caldera; Spider Woman's perch eight hundred feet above the floor of Canyon de Chelly; Mount Monadnock's bare metamorphic pinnacle out of New Hampshire's woods. We travel for the sublime perspective gained when we visit geologic wonders, even those that take us to the brink of the cataclysmic. The opera house works in much the same way, by giving stage and voice to plays of our inner lives and the way those lives sing to each other through comedy and tragedy. Against the dark, opera stages construct islands of light for the likes of the Dutchman's ghostly ship or the Paris garret shared by a group of poor Bohemians. Technicians, like acrobats high in the rafters, have set and focused lights while timing and blending colors for a concentrated three hours through which our inner [End Page 44] lives play out before us. In lonely arias, tender duets, contentious trios, and exultant choruses, the opera house brings specimen worlds to life in harmonies and dissonances through a marriage of music and words, voices and instruments, texts and scores, costumes and wigs. We buy tickets to view these skillfully constructed worlds where we witness our own faults and eruptions, our deceptions and jealousies, our weddings, our deaths, even our journeys to the underworld: Otello, Così fan tutte, Carmen, Death in Venice, Orphée et Eurydice. Into Opera Each August when my wife, Margot, and I leave our home in Wyoming for the opera, we drive east on Owl Creek Road out to Wyoming 120, then head for Cheyenne and Denver on our way to Santa Fe. The road west of our house disappears up in the mountains. We live in a sheltered angle where two mountain ranges meet. The Owl Creek foothills descend in smooth alluvial fans down to our back pasture. The Absaroka Mountains stretch north and south along the western horizon, a more distant, jagged, granitic ridge. Our road crosses ranchland—neighbors' holdings, large and small. Some raise sheep, but most run cattle. All around us, the landscape...

Therapeutic Beauty

The subject of female purity constituted a dominant theme for American artists in the late nineteenth century. Artists such as Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Dewing and others depicted women—whether in domestic interiors, outdoor settings or in more indeterminate spaces—as wholesome, refined, and chaste. But these pictures were created within a context that seems utterly at odds with the theme they represent. Late‐nineteenth‐century America was characterized by massive immigration, working‐class violence, overcrowded housing for the poor, garbage‐filled streets, industrial pollution, and the spread of epidemic disease. For the most part, scholars have assumed that this process of modernization unfolded independently of artists’ imagery of ideal white women. This essay argues, however, that the pictures may not have been as disengaged as their subjects or manner of painting suggest. In Thayer’s case, persistent references in his letters and other writings to disease, prostitution, garbage, and germs indicate that the chaste, angelic surfaces of his figures cloak profound concerns. In his depictions of female purity and raw nature, Thayer used paint to work through his fears, which only increased with the illness and subsequent death of his first wife, Kate. Thayer sought to protect himself and his family from bodily disintegration by adopting a therapeutic, outdoors‐oriented life in the shadow of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock, which became a shrine to the pursuit of good health. His art was motivated by similar concerns: disease becomes an organizing topos through which his paintings take shape.

High‐latitude paleomagnetic poles from Middle Jurassic Plutons and moat volcanics in New England and the controversy regarding Jurassic Apparent Polar Wander for North America

A paleomagnetic study of Middle Jurassic plutonic and volcanic rocks in New England (White Mountains Magma Series) yields high‐latitude pole positions for North America. High unblocking temperature, moderate to high coercivity magnetizations of normal polarity have been isolated in three plutons (White Mountains batholith, Mount Monadnock, and the Belknap Mountains; mean age ∼169 Ma), but the mean pole (88.4°N, 82.1°E, A95 = 6.1°) is not distinguishable from the geographic axis and therefore the hypothesis that the plutons have been contaminated by recent field overprints can not be rejected. However, a dual polarity, high unblocking temperature, and high coercivity magnetization isolated from the Moat volcanics (169 Ma, Rb‐Sr age) was apparently acquired soon after caldera collapse and tilting, at about the time of intrusion and cooling of the Conway granite (reported ages K‐Ar biotite, 168 Ma; zircon fission track, 163 Ma). The Moat volcanics pole position (78.7°N, 90.3°E, dp = 7.1°, dm = 10.2°) calculated using the mean magnetization direction of reversed polarity (the Cr component) falls at high latitude but is distinguishable from the spin axis. Moreover, published Middle Jurassic paleomagnetic poles from Gondwana (Africa, Australia, and East Antarctica) transferred to the North American reference frame also suggest a high‐latitude Middle Jurassic pole position for North America, in agreement with the Moat volcanics pole. The new evidence for a Middle Jurassic loop to high latitudes in the North American apparent polar wander path conflicts by 15°–20° with some key published Jurassic reference poles (e.g., the Newark Trend N2 and the Corral Canyon poles) used to constrain current paleomagnetic Euler pole (PEP) apparent polar wander paths for the Jurassic. We suggest that a plausible explanation for the discrepancy is that the N2 and Corral Canyon magnetizations are in fact secondary and were acquired after tilting. The hypothesis that the North American apparent polar wander path ventured to high latitude in the Middle Jurassic requires further testing, however the results of this study already suggest that the path may be more complicated than that proposed by recently published PEP studies.

Winter Water Relations of Red Spruce on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

With the pressure chamber, the water potential of red spruce stems (Picea rubens) was measured in four altitudinal zones, including timberline, on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire, during two winters. Average water potential over all zones and dates was —1.14 (sd @= 0.57, range —0.1 to —4.0) MPa for 545 stems from 91 trees. More variation in water potential occurred within single trees than between juvenile and adult trees, and than among altitudinal zones or among seasons. Temperature data from maximum—minimum thermometers and from thermistors implanted into trunks and soil show that bulk water flow periodically occurs in winter. The slow decline in water potential of branches excised in winter, and scanning electron micrographs of plugged stomates, indicate that high diffusion resistances maintain needles within the relatively high levels of water potential measured in this study. Our results disagree with traditional concepts, support the conclusions of Slatyer (1976) and Marchand and Chabot (1978), and indicate that the mechanisms behind the variability in water status of modular parts of single trees must be understood before the causes, timing, and consequences of winter death in timberline trees can be unraveled.

The Induced Timberline of Mount Monadnock, N. H.

The Induced Timberline of Mount Monadnock, N. H.

CRITERIA FOR THE MODE OF EMPLACEMENT OF THE ALKALINE STOCK AT MOUNT MONADNOCK, VERMONT

The alkaline stock at Mount Monadnock, Vermont, described briefly by Wolff (1929), has been restudied in detail. Its petrography and structure are discussed here and conclusions are drawn as to its mode of emplacement. The stock consists of plutonic and hypabyssal rocks which intrude folded Ordovician (?) schist and quartzite. The longer axis, trending north-northwest across the strike of the country rock, is 3 miles long, and the shorter one about 2½ miles. Essentially the stock consists of quartz syenite, but it encloses a long arcuate mass of older essexite and transition rock, and along its eastern edge are later intrusions of granite. Late dikes of various compositions cut the plutonics and surrounding metamorphic rocks. The following facts have been established: (1) The igneous rocks are typical representatives of the White Mountain magma series (Mississippian?), quite lacking in foliation and lineation. (2) The stock is discordant and has an elliptical ground plan. (3) In detail the boundary is irregular and characterized by abundant dikes and xenoliths. (4) The igneous rocks make sharp contacts with the metamorphosed country rock. (5) The arcuate mass of older essexite is undoubtedly a screen. (6) The small bodies of late granite resemble ring dikes. (7) The stock is cut by prominent sets of steeply dipping radial and tangential joints. (8) The late dikes show radial and tangential patterns. (9) Along the northern and southern margins of the stock the country rock shows strikes and dips which differ from the regional ones. From these criteria it is concluded that the plutonic rocks have invaded the crust by cauldron subsidence accompanied by the stoping of large arcuate slabs and smaller blocks from the walls of the magma reservoir

A Collecting Trip on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

A Collecting Trip on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

A Collecting Trip on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

A Collecting Trip on Mount Monadnock, New Hampshire

Notes on the Syrphidae Collected atJaffrey and Mount Monadnock, N. H.,With a Description of a New Species

Notes on the Syrphidae Collected atJaffrey and Mount Monadnock, N. H.,With a Description of a New Species

Mount Monadnock, Vermont: A Syenite Hill

Mount Monadnock, Vermont (circa 3,200 feet), is the northernmost stock of alkali-syenite known in New England, and therefore the first in the southerly continuation of the eight similar "Monteregian Hills" of Canada-in all, nineteen such hills or mountains are marked on Figure 1, extending from Montreal, 215 miles, to Mount Agamenticus, Maine. Monadnock is a stock of quartz-nordmarkite, with an interior, older mass of essexite and with associated bostonite and camptonite dikes, intrusive into schists and quartzites of the upper Connecticut Valley, of probably lower Paleozoic age-the igneous rock much later, possibly Carboniferous. Descriptions of the minerals and rocks follow, including analyses of the hornblende, syenite, and essexite; an original topographic and geologic map; and two views of the mountain. Attention is called to the consanguinity shown by the minerals, and their combinations in the rocks, with those of the other hills.

Bay-Breasted Warbler a Regular Summer Resident on Mount Monadnock, N. H.

Bay-Breasted Warbler a Regular Summer Resident on Mount Monadnock, N. H.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 6

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 6

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 6

Porotrichum cavifolium Broth. sp. n. Dioicum; robustiusculum, viride, aetate lutescenti-viride, nitidiusculum; caulis primarius elongatus, caules secundarii inter se remoti, usque ad 5 cm. longi, brevistipitati, densiuscule foliosi, dense pinnatim ramosi ramis patentibus, infimis usque ad 2 cm. longi, dein descrescentibus, vix complanatis, subpinnatimn ramulosis vel simplicibus; folia concavo, stipitis erecto-patentia accrescentia, caulina patentia, oblongo-ligulata, obtusissima, apiculata, superne argute et inaequaliter serrata, nervo longe infra apicem folii evanido, cellulis superioribus hexagono-rhombeis, dein sensim longioribus, alaribus sat numerosis, ovalibus, minutis, ramea conformia, sed minora. Caetera ignota. Paraguay, sine loco designato (Alfred Russell Wallace, in Herb. Mitten). Species ob folia concavo speciebus nonnullus americanis Porotrichodendri, ex. gr. P. superbo similis, sed foliis obtusissimis, superne argute et inaequaliter serratis, cellulis superioribus laxioribus facillime dignoscenda. Porothamnium parvirete Broth. sp. n. Dioicum; gracile, viride, vix nitidiusculum; caulis primarius elongatus, caules secundarii inter se remoti, usque ad 5 cm. longi, brevistipitati, densiuscula foliosi, obtusi, raro flagelliformi-attenuati, dense pinnatim ramosi, ramis patentibus, usque ad cm. longis, complanatis, subpinnatim ramulosis vel simplicibus; folio stipitis destructa, caulina sicca indistincte plicatula, humida patentia oblongo-ligulata, obtusissima apiculata, margine inferiore inflexo, superne argute et inaequaliter serrata, nervo longe infra apicem folii evanido, cellulis superioribus minutis, rhombeis, dein sensim longioribus, oblongo-hexagonis, basilaribus linearibus, apice papillose exstante, ramea conformia, sed minora. Caetera ignota. Paraguay, sine loco designato (Herb. Mitten). Species P. porrectulo (C. Mill.) habitu simillima, sed ab hac ut etiam a caeteris speciebus generi cellulis folii superioribus minutis dignoscenda.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H., no. 5.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H., no. 5.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H., no. 5.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H., no. 5.

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Regions, N. H. No. 4

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Regions, N. H. No. 4

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 3

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 3

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 3

Lichens of the Mount Monadnock Region, N. H. No. 3