Cold Mountain

Dawn breaks clear and cold over New Hampshire's White Mountains. The temperature is relatively balmy — in the high teens — and the wind calm, considering what January often brings to perhaps the most forbidding region of the Northeast.

Ken Holmes, who lives in Athol and works as a seasonal park ranger at Monadnock State Park, is in his glory as he leaves the Lincoln Woods trailhead off the Kancamagus Highway around 11 a.m. on Monday, January 12, carrying a 62-pound pack and enough provisions, he feels, to take on even the fiercest winter weather during his planned three-day hike.

Andrew Zboray, the manager at Monadnock State Park, has driven Holmes from the park in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, to the trailhead 2 1/2 hours north, and then cross-country skis along Holmes's route, just ahead of him, for much of the day. When they finally part, Zboray can see Holmes is eager to begin his climb up Bondcliff — the first of several 4,000-foot peaks he expects to summit on his hike. "This is what it's all about," Holmes tells Zboray as they part. "This is all I need to make me happy."

Zboray hopes to see Holmes once more before skiing out and heading to Maine to visit relatives, but when Zboray arrives at the Bondcliff Trail junction where he thought they'd cross paths again, he finds a note written with a stick in the snow. "Hi Andrew."

A distance runner who often runs up 3,165-foot Mount Monadnock two or three times a day, Holmes, 37, sees everything as a competition. That's why he loves the mountains. It's him against nature. Zboray is skiing toward the parking lot just as darkness falls and gives one long look back toward Bondcliff. "I could see snow squalls kicking up off the mountain," he says. "But it was still about 10 to 15 degrees above zero, and except for the wind, it was kind of nice. So I really wasn't concerned. But I did think, I hope this wind gets bad enough that it makes Ken turn around sooner than later."

For Melissa Parsons, it was love at first sight. She met Ken Holmes at a pizza parlor in Fitchburg when the two were 17. "He was just passing through town, looking up a friend," says Parsons. "He was kind of flirting with me and one of my friends."

When Holmes couldn't find his friend, he had no place to stay for the night. That wasn't unusual for him, as he had spent much of the previous year on his own, he told her, after walking away from a foster home near Boston. "It was obvious he had no place to go, so I brought him home," Parsons says. She took him to her older sister's house, where she lived at the time. "My sister was furious, because we knew nothing about him. But there was just something about him. He had this sparkle. I was thrilled when he was still there when I woke up in the morning."

The two became close friends, but Parsons says Holmes still had a crush on her friend, and eventually she asked him to leave. "He did for a while, but he came back." And when he did, it was for her. That was 20 years ago. Though they never married, the couple had five children — boys ranging from 19-year-old Chris to 9-year-old twins Jordan and Jonah. Another child died years ago of sudden infant death syndrome. Parsons, who works as a transit bus driver around Athol, says they didn't need a marriage certificate to be husband and wife. "We weren't married," she says, "but we were soul mates."

The Blackhawk helicopter takes off from Concord as soon as John Wimsatt, a conservation officer for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department and a member of the state's Advanced Search and Rescue Team, arrives at the Army National Guard base around 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, January 15. A call came in the night before that a hiker was overdue. No rescue was launched Wednesday night; the weather was too ferocious. In 48 hours, the temperature had plummeted to 44 degrees below zero, with winds gusting to more than 100 mph. The windchill fell off the chart.

"It was the coldest weather we've seen in a decade," says Lieutenant Robert Bryant of the Fish and Game office in New Hampton. "But even so, with overdue hikers who have an itinerary, we always give them until midmorning the next day to walk out on their own."

Wimsatt and the helicopter crew begin their search in the area of 4,698-foot Mount Bond, from where Holmes had called a friend by cellphone two nights before. The helicopter flies along the ridge, and Wimsatt spots tracks heading toward Mount Guyot to the north. "We were able to discern what we felt were tracks in the snow," he says. "They were partially drifted in, but they were headed toward South Twin [beyond Guyot]. They seemed like a normal, standard hiking stride."

But somewhere near the summit of South Twin, where the trail breaks free of some short, scrubby pines that give hikers a brief respite from the wind, the tracks are erased by drifting snow. The searchers swing west, heading toward the Appalachian Mountain Club's Galehead Hut, which they know is closed, but they wonder if Holmes went anyway to hide from the wind. He's nowhere in sight, and the crew starts backtracking. "It's then," Wimsatt says, "that one of the crew members spotted the body."

When Melissa Parsons met Holmes, he was a high school dropout who smoked and drank too much. "He liked to live on the wild side," she says. But after they began dating, and later when they started a family, Holmes changed. He quit smoking and began running. He passed his GED. "He wanted to know everything," Parsons says. "If he couldn't do something 100 percent, he wouldn't do it."

That came out in his running. Though he was nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed only about 150 pounds. He worked himself into shape by doing thousands of sit-ups and entering road races. In September, he won a 5-kilometer race on Martha's Vineyard. In 2001, he ran the Boston Marathon. "We've got tons and tons of trophies," Parsons says. "I don't think he ever thought he'd become a great runner, but everything he did, he thought he could do better."

Oftentimes, while Holmes was training on Monadnock, Parsons passed the time at yard sales before picking him up. They were still living in Fitchburg in the mid-1990s, driving a well-worn 1983 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. Theirs was a one-car family, because Holmes's own car sat in the driveway in need of repairs. He let it sit, using every spare dime to buy hiking gear and go to races. "He didn't want to spend money on the car," Parsons says. Sometimes, he would ride his bike the 50 miles from Fitchburg to the mountain, just to hike it several times before riding home.

Because of the steep terrain and the trees lining both sides of the trail, the helicopter can't land where Holmes's body is spotted lying facedown in the middle of the Twinway Trail at 10:50 a.m. It hovers instead at the summit of 4,902-foot South Twin, and Wimsatt hops out and heads down the trail toward Galehead. With the temperature at 25 degrees below zero, he knew he was on a recovery mission. "I could see right away that he was frozen."

He finds three of Holmes's gloves frozen into the snow as he hikes down the trail. It's common for hypothermia victims to be found missing articles of clothing, as they often get the sensation they're too warm and begin to peel off layers, when in reality their body temperature is plummeting toward death. Wimsatt also sees a change in Holmes's tracks. "They showed he'd been stumbling from side to side in the trail."

For Wimsatt, it's a struggle to get the body the mile down the trail to Galehead Hut, where the helicopter meets him. A crew member jumps off to help — the helicopter can't touch down — and a cable lifts the body into the copter. Wimsatt and the crew member are hauled aboard, and they take him to Concord Hospital, where Holmes is pronounced dead. "He was found at 4,619 feet," Wimsatt says, "and that's still well up inside the hazardous zone."

The next day, Monadnock State Park ranger David Targan hikes up the Gale River Trail to retrieve Holmes's pack, which Wimsatt left outside Galehead Hut. The pack is in meticulous order, indicating that Holmes had full dexterity when he packed it the night before. But it is found without his snowshoes, which are located the next day near Mount Guyot. It is also missing Holmes's tent, which indicates he may have attempted a hurried exit when he sensed the deadly cold rushing in. "It was so well-packed," Targan says. "That tells me Ken was warm when he packed it."

Thousands of people hike in the White Mountains every winter without incident and perhaps as many as two dozen attempt solo traverses, mostly in the popular Presidential Range or the desolate Pemigewasset Wilderness. "Ken may have been prepared for normal winter conditions, but he was not prepared for the approaching arctic weather which he knew was predicted for that week," says Michael Walsh of the AMC. "I hiked up and saw his pack, and the things you need in order to survive in arctic conditions were not there.

"If you take his preparedness and multiply it by the record low temperatures," Walsh says, "that's what took him to the top of the risk pile. Unfortunately, his number came up."

Andrew Zboray first met Holmes about eight years ago when Holmes showed up one day to hike Mount Monadnock. "I liked Ken and his family from the moment I met them," says Zboray, who has worked at the state park since 1994, the last three years as manager. Zboray was used to hikers arriving at the tollbooth in sparkling new sport utility vehicles, eager to hassle him over the park's $2.50 usage fee. But not Holmes.

"Here was a man of limited means, driving a beat-up car, being dropped off by his family and he had to dig around for spare change to come up with the $2.50," Zboray says."

Holmes was smart enough to do almost any job, but without much education, he had to take mostly menial work. He had worked at a cemetery doing everything from mowing grass to digging graves, and went from part-time laborer to the supervisor of five employees. But he lost the job last spring and grew depressed.

As luck would have it, Zboray had been in need of a part-time park ranger, as spring means the return of the hordes of hikers that earn Monadnock its label as the most-climbed mountain in North America. "I asked him if he wanted to work here, and he thought I was kidding," Zboray remembers. In May 2003, Holmes took the job, even though it created a hardship on his family. They had only one car — now a '91 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser wagon with about 200,000 miles on it — so Holmes often stayed at the park during the week and slept in the hiker's cabin next to the campground. "I knew Ken was meant for this," Zboray says. "He said he now had the best job in the world." Zboray urged Holmes to apply for a full-time position, which he did. "He had a future here."

While at Monadnock, Holmes got to know Targan, an associate professor of physics at Brown University who works weekends at the park as a ranger. Targan, 48, who is a wilderness emergency medical technician trained in advanced life support, has big-mountain experience, having been along as an EMT on expeditions in both South America and most recently on Everest last spring. Picking Targan's brain became one of Holmes's favorite activities. He wanted to know everything about Everest.

"Ken said he was going to climb Everest someday," Parsons says. "He said, 'I know I'm probably going to lose some toes doing it, but . . .' The things he did scared me. But the things he talked about doing scared me even more."

Targan had the same fear. Once last fall, after a rescue on Monadnock of a hiker suffering from hypothermia, Holmes refused to accept Targan's assertion that the victim was a marathoner. "He refused to believe it could happen to someone as fit as himself," Targan says, "and that warned me that Ken might get himself into trouble someday."

It wouldn't have been the first time. Holmes twice was hit by vehicles while biking, once ending up with a broken leg, broken arm, and collapsed lung after being hit by a truck. That was in '94, when Parsons was pregnant with their twins. They had just moved into a new apartment, and after returning a rented U-Haul, Holmes planned to bike home. He got hit by a truck and was airlifted to the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester. Instead of slowing him down, however, each ordeal seemed to make Holmes feel more invincible. "After he got hit by the truck," Parsons says, "he once said, 'God himself couldn't kill me.' "

His final hike was a second attempt at the same route he tried two winters ago; freezing rain forced him to abandon that effort when he realized he wouldn't be out of the mountains at the time he had prearranged with Parsons. That time, Holmes hiked out cold and wet — but unscathed. He had to smash ice off a pay phone in order to call home. Holmes was getting antsy to do the hike again, especially after his seasonal job at the state park ended on New Year's Day. He wasn't to return to work until spring.

"He kept putting it off because of me," Parsons says. "But I knew he was getting restless not working. I finally gave in, because I knew if I didn't let him go, he'd go anyway."

Holmes packed his backpack and was

dropped off at Monadnock State Park on a Sunday afternoon. He was planning to hitchhike to the White Mountains — something he had done many times before — but Zboray offered to drive him if he'd wait a day. That was fine, Holmes figured, because the weather forecast was not bad. "I printed out the forecast and handed it to him," Zboray says, "and he looked at it and said, 'It looks like the weather's not going to get bad again until Thursday,' and he had expected to be done before then. So I didn't question him further."

Holmes was equipped for the cold, but he never expected the severity of the weather that descended upon the Whites by late in the day on Tuesday. By then, he was miles from safety. "It was almost like the perfect storm," Targan says of the weather recorded at the nearby Mount Washington Observatory that night. The dew point and the air temperature dropped to the same level, resulting in 100 percent humidity, meaning Holmes's clothes could no longer wick the moisture away from his body. Everything above 3,700 feet was blanketed in dense fog, a condition that happens often in the Whites in the winter, but seldom for such an extended period and at such cold temperatures.

On Tuesday night, Holmes is undaunted despite the cold. He calls home and tells Parsons he's cold but otherwise OK. "He said it was worse than he thought it would be and that the wind was so bad that he couldn't stand up," she says. "He said he was exhausted and just wanted to get into his sleeping bag and rest. He'd get up later and eat."

Holmes has faced harsh conditions before and has always prevailed, but Parsons is particularly worried this time. "I told him I had had a bad dream [about his safety] the night before, and I wanted him to come home," she says. "He said he would hike out the next day and call me like he always did."

At 9 p.m., Holmes makes another call, to Bob Gaylord, his former neighbor in Fitchburg whom he had met one day climbing Monadnock. Holmes tells him he's camping near the summit of Mount Bond and the conditions are bitterly cold. But Gaylord insists the call is anything but a distress call. "He was very excited," Gaylord says. "He said it was very cold, but he said he had just had some hot chocolate and coffee. He wanted to discuss which route would be best to come down, and I got out my [AMC] guidebook."

Gaylord gives Holmes three options. First is to come back the way he went in, a hike of 11 miles, which includes going over the exposed Bondcliff, where Holmes tells him he had been briefly pinned down by wind earlier that day. But that also signifies retreat, and Holmes's goal of bagging 4,000-footers in winter means continuing north — and into further danger. Gaylord tells him the shortest distance to safety is the open Zealand Falls Hut — 4.2 miles from the top of Guyot — "but Ken was nervous about finding that trail in those conditions, and he didn't want to come down a particularly steep spot above Zeacliff. So he felt going toward Galehead Hut and out would be better. He was more familiar with that route," Gaylord says, even though it is about 9 miles to Gale River Road. Heading that way, however, would force Holmes to go over both Guyot and South Twin, each of which have bare summits where he would be exposed to the full force of the brutal winds.

Hypothermia is an "insidious" condition, Targan says, because it creeps upon you unaware, especially when hiking alone. "The second you're aware of it, it's almost too late," Targan says. "You have to act so quickly. It dulls your mind. You start getting the 'umbles' — stumbling, fumbling, mumbling, and bumbling. It's almost like you're drunk."

Complicating his situation was that Holmes had no partner and had no insulated parka — perhaps the one critical piece of equipment he didn't own.

"He had a quality winter pack," Wimsatt says of Holmes's equipment. "We often look for people who are far less-prepared than he was." Parsons, too, defends Holmes's pack: "He definitely had the proper equipment. Everyone thought his pack was too heavy, but it wasn't for him."

No one knows what happened to Ken Holmes after his 9 p.m. call to Bob Gaylord. "I told him I thought it was too cold to be out there, but he knew the route and said he was OK," Gaylord says. "I was worried about him camping, not hiking."

Targan believes that Holmes got so cold during the night that he decided to break camp before dawn and go for it. He was found wearing his headlamp, an indication he started out while it was still dark. Holmes was probably so cold that he couldn't put away his tent, which may have been yanked out of his freezing hands by the wind and blown into the darkness over the ridge. Wimsatt says he believes Holmes may have made it to the summit of South Twin in good shape but got pinned down by high winds. "I know people want answers, and I've tried to piece it together in my mind, too," Wimsatt says. "The wind might have been too much."

All Parsons knows is that she didn't get the call from Holmes at the prearranged time. "By 7 o'clock, he hadn't called and I just knew," she says. "I called Bob, and he tried to tell me everything was OK, that he'd hike out, but I knew this time was different." Just like that day she was standing on the porch when he'd gotten hit by the truck. "I could just feel it." But she has no regrets about letting him go. "It was in his soul, as much a part of him as I was. To deny him that, you couldn't do it. It was so exhilarating for him. He savored every moment of it, every moment of his life."

Later this year, Parsons says, she will have Holmes's ashes cast into the wind off the summit of Monadnock.

Garry Harrington, a freelance writer and hiker who lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, knew Ken Holmes from the trails of Mount Monadnock.