I've now been on Cannon four times, and can officially state that there is a pattern of some sort of failure. Jeremiah and I were lucky enough to have a guide and client climbing below us the first time we tackled the great alpine mountain of the northeast. Route finding was an issue that day, and the guide was instrumental in getting us up the proper pitches even though we hadn't hired him. When we got to the top we confidently asked him how long it would take for us to hike to the summit.
"Oh, about a half hour," he said. We ditched our gear beside the thick, rusted cables that used to hold the Old Man together and headed up the slabs to the top, by-passing the thick, stiff-branched pockets of wind-resistant spruce trees on the way up. By the time we crossed our fourth false summit after about forty-five minutes of easy hiking, we saw the real summit, where the lookout tower and the ski lift are, and realized that not only was the summit still a good forty-five minutes away from where we stood, but also that there was an enormous black cloud speeding our way. Within minutes the slabs turned to waterfalls and we were forced into bushwhacking through the spruce trees, sometimes dangling our bodies ten feet above the floor, with water pouring over the lips of the edges of the slabs and down our shirts and pants, while we dared to let go and drop straight down through the sharp branches to the ground below. Where the dry slabs had saved us from certain impalement by the sharp branches on the way up, they now presented more of a danger than the knife-like branches on the way down. It took us over an hour in the fog and pouring rain to find the Old Man again. It was a wonder we hadn't been struck by lightening, and a miracle we hadn't slid all the way down the slabs and over the edge, plummeting over a 1000 feet to the crumbly talus field at the base.
Happy to be on the trail, we suffered the hour-long hike down to find our car alone in the wet, dark parking lot. Jeremiah had forgotten a spare set of clothes (and his sleeping bag, and a jacket, and his sleeping pad, and I accidentally smashed his cellphone charger in the car door earlier in the day, and he accidentally dropped my radio from the bottom of the last pitch before we topped out), but I had an extra set of clothes he could try on. Still we wondered, do we wait until we get to the tent or change in the parking lot?
"Fuck it," I said. "I'm wet now and I'm changing here. Besides, there's no one here to see us change." He agreed, and we both stripped out of our wet clothes and stood there, completely naked, in the middle of a dark and empty parking lot, ready to pull on the dry clothes that sit in the trunk of the car...when a car of sightseers drove in with their headlights unfortunately aimed directly at us.
But it doesn't end there. No, the next time Jeremiah and decided to climb Cannon, we (read: he) were determined to hike to the top come rain or shine. This time we were prepared. We weren't going fast and light this time, not if the weather was going to suddenly rise in vengeance from the west where we could not see it coming (Cannon is east-facing). We packed my bag with our gear, our rope, a stove, some food, and the rain fly and poles off my tent for shelter in case we got dumped on again. This time we were going to wait out any storm and stay dry. We weren't stupid. Golly no we weren't.
We headed up the classic Whitney-Gilman Ridge with relative ease (well, at one point, on the last pitch, Jeremiah had difficulty pulling the final crux with the 20lb pack on his back, but we got through that debacle no problem) and sat on the top to catch a breather and pack up before heading up to the summit. We walked a bit up the summit trail looking for the obvious path that would take us to the upper slabs. We walked some more, following the descent trail down to the left all the while keeping the wall of thick spruce trees to our right. There had to be a trail up to the slabs, right? We weren't going to have to bushwhack through the spruce trees again, right? Fuck. Despite there being absolutely no trail leading from the WG descent trail up to the upper slabs, we (read: he) were determined to get to the top. Eleven hours after we left the car we returned with more bruises and scratches than the previous time. We were wiped and swore that we'd never do something so dumb again.
Oh-ho!, but you say that's nothing eh? Well, I returned to Cannon last year with Jen. We wanted to tackle another classic that has a classic within the classic: Reppy's Crack and Moby Grape (Reppy's being the first pitch of Moby). But when we got to the parking lot it was obvious that the mountain was still fresh with the previous day's rain. A friend of ours who knows the climbing in New England well, said that Whitney-Gilman would be good and that Moby would be too scary. We had both done Whitney before, but we didn't want to drive all the way within an hour of the Canadian border without getting at least some climbing in, so we racked up and headed to do the Ridge one more time. This time, however, with two pitches to go, we and another party found ourselves watching black clouds form over head and hearing the rumble of thunder off in the distance. Whitney-Gilman is no place to be in an electrical storm, but we all figured that rapping down to the talus field below was just as dangerous as getting under cover at the top (because there was still going to be a wet, exposed hike of about an hour in the rain across the massive fallen boulders at the bottom before reaching the lower tree line). Both teams essentially climbed the same pitches at the same time, with the leaders only a few feet away from each other until we let the other party top-out first and take off. Jen and I felt relieved to have reached the top without getting soaked, but that was spoken too soon. Within 15 minutes of topping out and hiking down the descent trail (yes, this time, I was much happier to be following the steep, muddy, and loose trail back to the bottom) the rain started to trickle down through the trees. Still, we felt good that the darkest clouds seemed to be to the south and we were only catching the edge of the storm. But again, we had spoken too soon. First it sprinkled. Then it sprinkled harder. Then it rained. And then it rained harder before the rain turned into a healthy downpour; and the trail became a waterfall, the roots became as slick as ice, the mud as loose as the screws in our brains; and our self-confidence crashed to the point where we thought we were finished, destined to be rescued, freezing, wet, and nearly unconscious until our attitudes reached the depths of darkness that we had never knew existed; and then we were convincing ourselves that if we willed the rain away it would stop; and then we convinced ourselves that if we believed the rain would never stop then it would; and then when we got back to the paved bike path we walked in pain, with our shoes sloshing beneath us; and when we were close to the parking lot we called to it as if it were a dog (come on parking lot, come here, come on! you can do it, yes, you can do it, good parking lot); and then, completely soaked to the core, with a fair amount of daylight under the late breaking sunshine still around us, in the middle of the still-crowded parking lot, we each got naked and changed into dry clothes, neither of us caring that everyone was watching us.
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