I must recommend a new book, Where You’ll Find Me by Ty Gagne of Holderness.
This account of the last hike of Kate Matrosova in February 2015 is sad, for the loss of her life, but is also laced through with risk assessment teaching. I think of it as a save-your-life read. I read it once and two weeks later read it again, picking up on things I hadn’t noticed during the first read. So many undertakings have risks that I may or may not consider; the book’s ordeal is a metaphor. How Kate began her one-day, light-and-fast hike that ended with her death is Gagne’s subject, but included are specifics about choices she had to have made. It’s not a Monday-morning quarterback accounting, but a well-researched and sympathetic look at what weather can do to a planned hike in our White Mountains. He includes the work it takes to pull together a rescue party, the time involved. He parallels her hike with two guide-led hikes the same day, out of Conway.
I am so taken with the urgent message of the book that I’ve now bought 18 copies to give away to family and friends, local library, etc. I’ve never done that before. I just spent a week in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where my older daughter Geneva needed help while she had her ACL surgically repaired (ski accident), and I took three copies there. She and her husband, Dave, are avid users of the outdoors, year-round. As I met friends who came to their home, I gave out the copies of Where You’ll Find Me. I sent one to nephew Dan in Vancouver, who with his wife, Alice, is outdoors on mountains year-round.
Overall, it’s a book by a local author, my copies coming from Gibson’s Book Store in Concord, but Ty has told me, “They can’t keep it on the shelves in Conway.” Make sure to tuck up in your favorite and safe easy chair while it’s winter and read this, then pass it on. Where You’ll Find Me should be read and reread.
Lynn Rudmin Chong
Sanbornton