“Hey, check it out,” Bayard said. He held up a decent pair of sunglasses he had just found lying in the snow bank. Nobody claimed the shades, and Bay happily added them to the collection on the dashboard of his car. I took it to be a good omen.

An hour later we trudged passed a crooked cairn and onto the summit of Lafayette. The Blackhawk had dropped us off in a slight saddle to the south of the summit. The flight from Route 93 to the ridge, my first ever helicopter ride, was, along with losing my virginity and standing on the summit of Cerro Torre, was one of the greatest 4 minutes of my life. Words won’t do it justice, so I’ll move on to the man of the hour, our friend Brian.  

We were assigned a search zone to the northeast of the summit, a steep, trailess ravine that dropped into Pemigawasset Wilderness. If you were looking at a map of the White Mountains and asked to point to the most remote part of the range, you could very well pick the East side of Mount Lafayette. Not that it’s that remote (this is the northeast, afterall), but anyway you slice it is about twelve miles to 15 miles to a serviceable road.  

I motored past the summit, heading towards on assigned search area.  But Jim, the old White Mountain bloodhound, took his time, poking around some rocks a few feet off the trail. “I think I got something!” he called. A suspicious depression in the snow could have been a boot track. The group halted and began following Jim. A hundred yards below the summit we found a trekking pole, then a water bottle. A quick radio call confirmed the gear as similar to what Brian had been carrying. Jim was on the scent.  

The farther we dropped off the summit, the easier it was follow Brain’s trail.  Bushwacking through the White Mountains in winter is hard work, but once someone’s beaten through waist deep snow and thick krumholtz, following their path is a no brainer. We came to a glade with what appeared to be an improntu bivy spot.  We found discarded food rappers, a pair of hiking crampons, and — most disturbingly — a crumpled map. It was shredded and scorched.  Had the poor lad tried to use his map to start a fire? A round hole was burned through the center of the paper, erasing the exact area where we now stood. Farther down, the trail dropped down a steep streambed, breaking through the ice into running water in several places.