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| Volunteers with the Androscoggin Valley Search and Rescue
brave high winds and frigid temperatures as they search for signs of Kate
Matrosova. Matt Bowman |
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Subscribe to Appalachia now to get this and other issues of America’s longest-running journal of mountaineering and conservation, published twice per year.
Commitment
Coming in the Winter/Spring issue of Appalachia journal,
available December 1:
Too Cold: The death of Kate Matrosova. A New York city
resident and BNP Paribas trader froze to death near Star Lake between New
Hampshire’s Mounts Madison and Adams sometime on February 15 or 16, 2015. The
winds blew at 80 mph, and the temperature was 30 below 0 F. Her tragedy became
international news. Appalachia’s Accidents department editor Sandy Stott looks
deep into what happened, and finds something that was missing from many of the
reports: love. “It may seem odd to begin parsing a tragedy by talking about
love,” Sandy Stott writes, “but without some sense of Kate Matrosova’s passion,
this story becomes too simple, becomes simply a record of error that can be
recounted and tutted about. It is more than that.”
Distance: How far have you come? They sat inside Mizpah
Spring Hut watching a July storm, passing gingerbread. Three long-distance
hikers showed up at the door. “There were three of them,” remembers Elissa Ely,
a Boston psychiatrist and writer, in her third in a series of White Mountain
essays. One of them “looked like an ascetic, hovering in some Himalayan cave,
pared down to essence on a diet of air.” She was in awe but had to consider:
“Distance should have nothing to do with personal worth. A longer hike is not
supposed to mean a superior species of hiker, and a shorter hike is not
supposed to mean a failure of character. Still, if an end-point exists (and one
always does), am I only half-accomplished until I reach it?”
Subscribe now and get this and other issues of America’s
longest-running journal of mountaineering and conservation, twice a year.
