Talk:Mount Monadnock

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[edit] M'k Hazards

I included safety warnings, even tho Monadnock is different from Sodium or Florine. As Dennis Hopper's character said, "I know, sometimes he goes too far. He's the first to admit it." Well, probably i haven't left anything out, and hopefully it's easier to edit out than edit in. Have at it. --Jerzy 06:39, 2003 Nov 20 (UTC)


Good add about the Fuji people-carrier ... But I'm not sure warnings belong here - it seems to me, wikipedia could put similar warnings in every article about a mountain or trail or ski area - or almost anything. I'd like to take them all out, I think - maybe reduce it to one sentence along the lines of "Despite the popularity, Monadnock remains dangerous enough to require caution" or something better-written that that. - DavidWBrooks 14:26, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Tnx, David; this is the kind of discussion i was hoping for.
As i indicated, my edit is the maximum i would consider, but my take right now is that if this article ends up with only a warning like your suggestion, i will consider that
  • my contributing at all to that article was a worthwhile but failed experiment, and
  • further articles on WP, intended to aid experiencing of mountains this or more hazardous, would be irresponsible.
I'd be interested in whether you see the warnings text as unsuitable to
  • the respective pages at least 90% of the northern-New-England mtns that are at least that tall, or
  • WP entirely.
I.e., would your concerns be satisfied if this section were linked from the article, on Mountain safety as, e.g., the "three-season" sub-sub-section of "Intermediate-sized northern-New-England mountains"? Probably with the language you were working toward providing the context for the link, e.g. "Despite the popularity, Monadnock remains dangerous enough to require caution." or "Despite the popularity, Monadnock remains dangerous enough to require caution; see Mountain safety."
I'm glad you mentioned "every ... trail or ski area". IMO,
  • it'd be (at least) rare for a non-mountain trail to need a warning, and
  • skiing is a perfect example of what mtn hiking is not, and why mtn hiking may be unique in the degree of need for warnings.
Most dangerous sports ("forms of recreation", to be precise) require a newbie to talk to at least a salesperson before starting. In fact, i've been in a ski-equipment store where i could imagine the owners having a set speech for new employees like
We hired you for your skiing experience, and our business is about repeat customers; don't hesitate to tell a customer "I'm sorry, sir, if you really insist on having the A without getting the B to go with it, you should go see if you can get it at Walmart. I don't want your business, if it means endorsing something unsafe to get it." When they demand to see the manager, i'll probably tell them that you got a little out of hand, and say "The 'no implicit warranty of safety' language the lawyer put on the sales slip for dealing with ignorant punk kids can work in this situation as well, and yes, we'll take your money, uncomfortable as it is to profit from someone else's probable misfortune. And we hope you'll end up seeing it as a plus when our guys try to discourage choices like yours, because they really do know some important stuff."
Eastern Mountain Sports prints on its shopping bags "Not just knowledge, know-how." as another example of the principle. But the problem is that many people get started on mtns w/o buying anything specific to the project. If i see someone on a mtn in tennis shoes, i may well ask without preface whether they have a map. --Jerzy 18:10, 2003 Nov 20 (UTC)

Yeah, but this is an encyclopedia, not a how-to guide. Having said that, I think your mountain safety idea is excellent: Wanna implement it? DavidWBrooks 22:09, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I like that approach if only bcz the repetitive text should be centralized. Yeah, i think i'll put it near the top of my to-do list; i'd expect to do it piecemeal, and leave places i'm ignorant abt to others after creating red links on their mntns. Presumably an incomplete treatment that acks its shortcomings is superior to nothing. Tnx again. --Jerzy 02:14, 2003 Nov 21 (UTC)

An editor summarized the removal of red-font markup by a question abt Monadnock's death and injury rate per year.

[edit] Casualty Rate

There won't of course be any record of injury rate, since the term is ill-defined, and i don't have any annual death- or rescue-rate figures. However:

On busy summer days, at the summit, a uniformed on-duty ranger sits, apparently enjoying the view. "It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it", right? In fact, a similar question has been asked without irony: "It looks like you've got light duty today; is that a matter of seniority, or does every one get a turn at it?"

The answer is that only one person does that duty, bcz no other ranger assigned to M'k is able to climb from the ranger station at the main entrance to the summit several times in the same day, and that is how often, on the high-volume summer days that build the estimates that say M'k is a highly climbed mtn, the ranger at the top is notified that someone (presumably nearly always somewhere down the mtn a ways, on any of a variety of trails) is in trouble. I presume that some of them are already injured, that others have decided they shouldn't continue either up or down and are waiting to be told what to do about it, and that others have lost enuf of their judgement to dehydration and/or low blood sugar that they can't see what is obvious to the person notifying the ranger: they are the scene of a race among discouragement, stubbornness, and the ranger, whose outcome determines where they fit into the statistics.

So IMO the question should not focus on the injuries and deaths, but on

  • the effort invested in routine rescues
  • the effort and risk invested in major rescues and
  • the value of people who have no idea what they are getting into on M'k knowing more, and
  • the value of people who get a major part of their knowledge of M'k, or of their interest in it, from WP, getting NPOV, rather than the PoV from which it is easy to infer the invitation "everybody and their cousin climbs M'k, what's keeping you away?"

[edit] Red Type

As to the red type, i am restoring some of it pending further discussion, in the belief that the removing editor either

  • intended to implicitly state a criterion for use of red type, which the section above IMO meets, or
  • acted in the mistaken belief that "we don't use colored type in WP", whereas the fact is that at least red is used, in a practice dating from at least over a year ago, routinely in highlighting safety information, as with florine, and no doubt many other chemical elements. (I haven't checked compounds and categories, e.g., nitric acid, strong acid, trichlorethylene, and hydrofloric acid (HF).)

"Since 1990, it has been suggested that so many of Fuji's climbers have shifted to new public transportation that Monadnock's annual total of foot traffic now exceeds Fuji's."

I keep hearing claims along those lines, mostly from New Hamphire tourism committees. But I can't find any sign of such a transport system in, say, maps or photos of Mt Fuji. There's a choice of buses to get to a "fifth station" at about 2400 meters on a few different sides, but from any of those you still have to hike about a thousand meters(comparable to the total elevation of Mt Monadnock) [I edited this sentence after having originally pulled a NASA and mixed feet and meters] to reach the summit - not the kind of thing that would disqualify Fuji as "most hiked mountain in the world" based on "annual total of foot traffic." Has anybody SEEN this supposed 'new public transportation' on Fuji??

BTW, the NH parks department compiles estimates of Monadnock traffic as part of their budget projection process. I'll post a link in a minute.

And on a third topic, I don't think any warning is justified. Yes, there are plenty of injuries in terms of annual numbers, but that's because Monadnock is a very crowded place. Would you include a warning in an article about a movie theater, a sports stadium, or a city sidewalk?

I have moved your comments to the bottom of the Talk page, where new discussions usually start, and removed the lines between paragraphs, which made it confusing to read. Also, don't indent - in wikipedia that makes it print your text in a weird bos
like this
The safety warning discussion is a couple years old and, as you'll see from the article, the consensus agreed with you: There are no warnings in it. The Mt. Fuji public transportation does refer to direct buses to several of the so-called 5th stations, which otherwise are estimated to take from 5 to 10 hours to reach by foot. Whether that has had the discussed effect on foot traffic is debatable. It depends on whether they count people who only hike partway up the mountain as having hiked it.
Why not start an account and sign your messages? You can stay completely anonymous, but it makes it easier to figure out who is saying what in discussions like this, and it makes it easier to include a time stamp. - DavidWBrooks 21:54, 2 February 2006 (UTC)


I found it: http://www.nhstateparks.org/ParksPages/Monadnock/MMP040103/monadnockmasterplanch1Final.pdf "Today, approximately 95,000 visitors come to the state park annually." This report was written in 2003. The state park includes the summit, nearly all the hiking trails, the parking lots, a picnic area, and cross-country-ski trails. Some hikers use trails that start outside the state park and may be harder to count, but this is a very small percentage of the total: the non-park trailheads don't have any parking! So where did the 125,000 figure come from??

I've answered my own question: that figure came from a web page http://www.tmclark.com/monadnock.html quoting "Grand Monadnock: Exploring The Most Popular Mountain In America" By Julia Older and Steve Sherman, Appledore Books, Hancock, N.H., 1990. That same quotation was plagiarized for the whole paragraph mentioning Fuji in the Wikipedia article (I've since edited it). I have my doubts about the reliability of this source, since it takes one I consider a one-sided view of the Fuji question.

Back to the Fuji bus question: I made an edit that makes it clear that Fuji's buses don't go all the way to the top and removes the deceptive and plagiarized phrase "total foot traffic". I originally included the following sentence, but decided it came too close to taking a position and is too detailed for the top of the article: "Whether it's fair to disqualify a hiker who starts from Fuji's highest bus station at 2,380 meters, and gains 1,396 meters on foot, compared to hikers on Mt Monadnock who experience under 600 meters of elevation gain but have climbed "the whole mountain", is debatable." Would it be worthwhile to devote some kind of sidebar to this question?

I think what you put in was good; leaves the question open without being windy. I tweaked it all very slightly and put in the 2003 year for the NH parks figure. - DavidWBrooks 19:09, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

you wrote: "..state park authority estimates that 95,000 people climbed to the top in 2003". That's not precisely what they said. I'm editing that sentence so as not to put words in their mouths.

Quite correct - my error. - DavidWBrooks 22:14, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

ν

I am a huge fan of Mount Monadnock, and I actually grew up in the next town over, but having spent a large chunk of time in China, I have to say I really doubt that Mount Monadnock surpasses any of the important Chinese mountains (Tai Shan, Wutai Shan, Huang Shan, Hua Shan even Changbai Shan etc...)in terms of numbers of climbers per year. Is there any hard numbers on this? I feel like the NH Tourist Bureau has really strung people along. It's a bit irresponsible. W. Little August 22 2006

You may well be correct. Do you know of any numbers for Chinese mountains? - DavidWBrooks 20:19, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The Cave

I've climbed Monadnock maybe 100 times in my life, mostly without much meandering off the trails. I've heard locals talk about a large cave on the mountain. Many people have told me it's in such and such a place or such and such another place but I never seem to be able to find it.

Is it just some local folklore or is there actually a significantly sized cave on the mountain? And would anyone care to describe where it is for us discussion page lurkers? Perhaps a photo? Glippy00 11:46, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

New Hampshire has very little in the way of caves because of our geology. All that igneous rock, you know - cave-rich areas tend to be made of limestone, a softer rock that wears away from moisture. So my guess would be no, although that's far from certain. - DavidWBrooks 13:16, 24 December 2006 (UTC)
In New Hampshire, "cave" often means a man-sized gap left behind when a block of granite has slipped, or the gap beneath two or more large boulders jumbled together. (example: http://www.polarcaves.com/areas/caves.html) I don't recall seeing one on Monadnock (or ever hearing of one), but it wouldn't surprise me if one existed, especially off-trail. "Significantly sized"? That'd surprise me. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.45.242.3 (talk) 21:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC).
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