MT. CHOCORUA, New Hampshire. For Weldon Allman, hiking this 3,475 foot mountain is comparatively speaking, a walk in the park. “In the summer it’s easy, but I like to challenge myself in the winter because you meet the hardier souls who take the White Mountains seriously.”
But as familiar as Allman is with the two routes up to the peak, he wasn’t prepared for what he discovered yesterday as emerged from the treeline to the dramatic treeless summit. “I reached down to get some trail mix and got a handful of air,” he says with a wry smile on his face. “It was then I realized I’d stumbled upon a hitherto-unmapped pocket on my L.L. Bean Men’s Mountain Classic Down Parka, which came advertised with two zippered hand pockets with snap closure and an internal zippered chest pocket, but came with two cave-like pockets behind the hand pockets.”
The view from inside.
Legend has it that Mt. Chocura is named after a Native American who left his son in the care of a settler named Cornelius Campbell. The boy drank poison that Campbell kept to kill foxes, fell sick and died, and Chocura retaliated by killing Campbell’s wife and children and switching his health insurance from an HMO to a fee-for-service plan.
Inside the newly-discovered pocket Allman found silica gel and a note saying “Inspected by no. 9”–setting him off in a quest for answers to two new mysteries. “Who the hell is no. 9” he asks as he gazes off into the clear-blue February sky, “and can I eat what’s in these little packets?”