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fter only two months of weekend hiking, Alex and I have ascended nine peaks on the Four Thousand Footer list. We are checking off mountains much faster than I had originally anticipated. When I first envisioned the two of us tackling this quest, I figured it would take us at least four or five years to finish. If we keep to our current pace, however, we may reach our forty-eighth summit before Alex turns seven.

My daughter's consistent fortitude, determination, and enthusiasm lead me to believe that she will turn into quite the outdoorswoman. Her love for hiking is obvious. She describes her adventures to anyone who will listen, she molds mountains in her sandbox, she draws pictures of smiling stick figures standing on pointed summits.

Unfortunately, her gusto has become coupled with a dangerous sense of invincibility. During our last
descent, Alex completely relaxed all her previous standards of caution. To my great concern, she continually skipped over rocks and jumped over slippery roots. She turned her head to talk to me while descending boulders. She twirled her hiking poles through the air with no concern as to who or what was behind her (I got whacked twice). Worst of all, she brushed aside my admonishments with the air of a doctor dismissing a hypochondriac's imagined symptoms.

I've never been one to hover over my children while they play. If they want to jump off rocks in the park, fine. If they want to climb trees and dangle from the branches, fine. If they want to run down a steep sidewalk, fine. I'm of the philosophy that kids need to define their own physical boundaries and develop their own gross motor skills. While at a playground, I allow them to do whatever they want, as long as they're mindful of the children around them.

In the Whites, however, things are very different. Little skips and jumps that are perfectly acceptable on a sidewalk are absolutely verboten on the trail. If Alex falls and injures herself, I will need to carry her for miles over extremely rough terrain. It will be, at best, a long, painful, and very unhappy experience.

Little kids don't usually have a sense of drastic consequences, especially when they're feeling strong and powerful. You can say, “Mind what you do or some awful thing might happen,” but their brains won't really comprehend what you're telling them. It's finally
beginning to dawn on young Alex that her abilities far surpass those of most others her age, and, unfortunately, she seems to think she must therefore be superhuman.

I'm happy she's proud of herself, but I want her to understand that she can break a leg just as easily as any other kid. She needs to speak with someone who has been in her position. Someone who was also a strong athlete at an incredibly young age. Someone who, in his youth, also thought he was indestructible—and ended up paying an enormous price for his overconfidence. She needs to see, with her own eyes, the potential consequences of split-second mistakes.

She needs to speak with her father. It's time for him to explain to his children exactly how he lost his legs.

I sit the girls down on the living room couch one evening and ask Hugh to tell them the story of his 1982 accident on Mount Washington. The same story he has told numerous times to journalists, nightly news reporters, and TV/film directors. The story that is well documented in Alison Osius's book,
Second Ascent
. He has told this story so many times and relived this tragedy for so many people … but tonight, the recounting will be unique. His audience won't be some stranger from NBC News, NPR, or ESPN. Instead, it will be his own beloved and adoring daughters.

The girls, being very young, have never inquired about the artificial limbs they sometimes help their father attach each morning. I suppose they've viewed
his residual limbs as completely normal—some people have biological legs, and some don't. I'm not sure they've ever even realized that their father used to have human legs. They've just accepted what they've seen as the way things are and the way things always have been.

But now it's time. It will be upsetting, sure. But it's time. Alex needs to understand that she must take these mountains very, very seriously.

The girls sit on either side of Hugh and listen as he begins to talk in a quiet and gentle tone.

“When I was seventeen years old—” he begins.

“How old is that?” Alex interrupts.

“The girl across the street is seventeen,” I say.

Alex thinks for a moment, apparently trying to visualize her father as young as our neighbor, then says, “Okay.”

“When I was seventeen, a friend and I climbed Mount Washington in the wintertime.”

“What month?” Alex asks.

“January,” Hugh patiently answers. Neither of us discourages her interruptions, as we know she is only trying to create a more complete mental picture so that she might better understand.

“Why did you climb Mount Washington in January? Weren't you cold?” Alex asks.

“I did a lot of ice climbing back then. I started climbing ice when I was just a bit older than you are right
now. I spent most of my childhood climbing mountains and ice.”

Hugh is drastically understating his experience, but for the sake of our kids, it doesn't matter. They won't be able to comprehend the number of climbs and hikes he did before the age of seventeen. Hugh was considered a child prodigy in the rock and ice climbing community. He had his first set of crampons at age seven, and by age eight he had hiked 11,624-foot Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies and attempted 14,411-foot Mount Rainier with his father and two older brothers. The weather on Mount Rainier forced them to turn back, but Hugh returned to the peak when he was eleven and reached the summit. During his childhood summer vacations to various mountain ranges, he pioneered climbs that precious few adults could handle. By the time he was sixteen, Hugh was the first to ascend some of the most difficult routes on the East Coast. The climbing community assumed he would go on to have a very famous and fruitful mountaineering career.

Then came the fateful trip up 6,288-foot Mount Washington. In January 1982, at the age of seventeen, Hugh and a friend, Jeff Batzer, decided to do an ice climb up O'Dell's Gully in Huntington Ravine. To minimize the risk of being struck by an avalanche, they dropped their packs at the base of the climb so they could ascend lightly and quickly. Their intent was
to reach the top of the ice climb and then immediately descend.

“After my friend and I climbed the ice, we decided to walk a short distance toward the summit. It was windy and snowy, but we figured we'd just go a few hundred feet.”

Hugh continues to speak in a measured voice, but I know this can't be easy for him. The decision to head toward Mount Washington's summit was a spontaneous one. Hugh is not and never has been a peakbagger. He's a climber. He likes to get to the top of a particular rock or ice climbing route, but he doesn't care all that much about touching the actual summit. It was such a casual decision on that cold and fateful day in 1982. So what if they didn't have all their gear? What could possibly happen? Why not walk for just a bit, even if the wind was starting to really blow?

Unfortunately, both boys failed to remember that they were not carrying compasses. Since their original plan was to ascend an ice gulley, they had left their compasses at home. After all, to turn back during a vertical climb, one simply goes down. Navigation isn't much of an issue. Once a person tops out from a climb and starts walking above tree line, however, the importance of a compass becomes paramount. The choices for movement now extend well beyond the simple up-down dichotomy. There are too many flat or moderately graded surfaces, and without clear visibility, it's easy to lose one's sense of direction. Up above
the ice climb, in the region known as Mount Washington's Alpine Garden, they had only their eyesight to depend on. In the moment, this didn't seem like too much of a problem. They weren't trying to go all the way to the top, after all. Just a few minutes of hiking, maybe a few tenths of a mile at most. The risk appeared minimal.

“It was a cold and snowy day, and while we were walking, the wind became so strong that it almost knocked us over.”

Sage and Alex's eyes grow wide.

“We decided to turn around—”

“Good thinking, Papa,” Alex interrupts. She and Sage both look relieved. Odd, how the minds of children work. It's as though they expect him to tell us that all turned out well, that they came back down, went to a coffee shop, and drank some hot tea. Even as Hugh sits there with the bottom part of his sweatpants empty and dangling toward the floor.

“But we got into trouble,” Hugh begins, and his voice becomes even more measured. “When we turned around, the wind was so bad that it blew snow all around us. We couldn't see where we were going. We almost couldn't see each other, even though we were walking side by side. We thought we went the right way, but we didn't. We ended up going down the wrong side of the mountain by accident.”

Sage looks horrified. Tears well up in her eyes, and she asks in a very shaky voice, “Did you die, Papa?”

Hugh smiles reassuringly at her and answers, “No, honey.”

Both girls relax a bit as they look their father over and verify that yes, he is right in front of them, and no, he did not die on that miserable winter day.

“How did you get back?” Alex asks.

“We didn't,” Hugh says. “My friend and I were lost for three and a half days out in the cold woods. The temperatures were below zero—”

“Is that cold?” Alex asks.

“Yes, it's very cold. When it's that cold out, we don't let you play outside.”

The girls look amazed. We almost never keep them indoors. On the contrary, they're usually the only kids in the neighborhood playing in the yard when the temperature dips below the freezing point.

“The snow went up to our waists and we didn't have any food or water with us.”

“What about a tent?” Alex asks.

“No. We had left our backpacks at the bottom of the ice climb, since we thought we would come right back down. We didn't have anything with us.”

“Were you scared?” Sage asks in a small voice.

“Yes,” Hugh answers. “We were both terrified.”

Hugh and Jeff had turned around within minutes of trying to walk toward the summit. However, in the very short amount of time it took for them to walk a couple of tenths of a mile, the wind speed had increased enough to create whiteout conditions. They
could not see more than five feet in front of them, and they had to keep hold of each other so as not to become separated in the blinding, blowing snow. In Hugh's decade-plus of experience, he had never been on such a flat expanse while ascending a mountain. The whiteout conditions were impossible to navigate. Without the aid of a map or compass, the two boys did what most lost hikers tend to do: they turned their backs to the wind and began walking downward, toward where they thought they had ascended.

Their path of descent felt right at first, for the immediate gulley seemed similar in shape to the one they had climbed earlier. However, once below tree line, it was obvious they had gone the wrong way. Going back up was out of the question, however—they would most likely have ended up wandering about blindly in the whiteout with no idea of which direction to go, and the windchill would have quickly brought on frostbite and hypothermia. No, they had to keep descending through the trees. It was much safer this way, as the trees blocked most of the wind and therefore at least enabled the boys to see where they were headed. They were just going to have to try to walk out from where they were—which was, unfortunately, Mount Washington's extremely remote Great Gulf region.

“There was so much snow on the ground that we couldn't tell whether we were walking over a river or over land. Twice, I walked over a river by accident and my legs broke through the snow and sank into the
water. My legs and feet got wet, and I didn't have any dry clothing to change into. Jeff helped me out of the river, and then we both tried to keep moving on.”

Hugh is sugarcoating this a bit for the girls, and I don't blame him. Sage already looks aghast, and Alex's eyes are very wide indeed. The truth is, when Hugh punched through the river, he sank into fast-flowing, ice-cold water and barely avoided being swept under the ice by the river's current. Jeff extended his ice ax and saved Hugh, gradually pulling him out and away from the water.

“Where did you sleep?” Alex asks.

“We dug into the snow and made caves. We gathered fallen branches and lay down on top of them, to keep our bodies off the snow. Then we slept cuddled together, to try to keep each other warm.”

The boys spent three nights in subzero temperatures and suffered through a blizzard. Their boots and socks became frozen clumps of ice, and pulling them on in the mornings became a severe challenge. Trying to fit rock-hard, frozen boots onto swollen, frostbitten feet was a torturous enterprise, and Hugh eventually gave up. Instead of boots, he wore his waterproof mittens over his toes. Though both boys did their best to keep moving, Hugh could take only one or two steps before falling over. The bones in his feet had frozen.

“How did you get home?” Sage asks, her knees drawn up underneath her chin, her arms around her ankles.

“We were lost for almost four days. On the last day, a lady was out snowshoeing and saw some tracks we had made in the snow. She followed them and found us. She went to get help, and we were taken to the hospital. My legs were so frozen that the doctors had to cut them off.”

Sage, who has seen her father put on his artificial legs a countless number of times, gasps. Alex's eyes are full of tears, and she asks, “Did it hurt?”

“Yes,” Hugh answers. “It didn't hurt during the operation, because I was asleep. But it hurt very badly for weeks and months afterward. Sometimes it still hurts, even now. Sometimes I feel like a part of my leg is still there, and it's painful.”