Except that it’s still late winter in the White Mountains, and there was no way of knowing in advance how deep, how soft, and how icy the snow might be on the trail climbing from the notch. There was only one way to find out. So after a quick breakfast with the gang of old-timers at the Littleton McDonald’s, the truck and I climbed up into the notch under a brilliant blue sky.

As I entered the notch between Franconia Ridge and Cannon Mountain, I could see that the rain we’d had in Vermont a couple of days before had been a bit chillier at 1700 feet in the White Mountains; the north sides of the trees and boulders beside the highway were plastered with rime ice and snow. The parking lot was covered with dinner plate-sized blisters of frozen slush – snow that had blown in wet at high speed and formed little billows like infant sastrugi.

But the day and the sun were both warm – T-shirt climbing weather, with probably a sweat band, as well. Our crew was augmented by what has become a delightful annual occurrence: the company of the highest bidder at the station’s fundraiser for the privilege (and I use that word advisedly) of coming with us on the day’s shoot, wherever it may be. We were just trying to decide whether to take snowshoes up the mountain with us, just in case, when a strapping young lady under a heavy backpack clomped into the parking lot wearing ice creepers. She was just returning from a night up at the hut. Don’t bother with the snowshoes, she said; the trail’s packed hard. But creepers would come in handy. We donned ours and set out up the trail.

I’d been here many times before. The hut is the closest to the road of all the AMC huts, so it’s a great place to bring a visitor for either a night or two or just for a random scoot, as the old-timers in the Adirondacks used to call a day hike. The hut’s open all year, but from mid-October to the end of May it’s self-service – meaning anyone can stay in a bunkhouse bed and use the kitchen to cook his own meals; just bring your own food, sleeping bag, and warm clothing. There’s a caretaker staying in the hut, but hanging out inside all day is discouraged a bit by cool temperatures; the heating stove is fired up as little as possible to save on scarce firewood. Summertime, there’s a full crew that feeds two meals a day to hikers staying over. Fresh supplies come up the trail almost every day on the backs of the hut crew (traditionally spelled “croo” for some arcane reason).

Lonesome Lake itself is not a lake, but a pond. Originally it was a glacial tarn, scooped out by the continental ice sheet, and later eutrophying as the climate warmed. When it first became the retreat of a well-known writer back in 1876, it was only a marshy beaver pond. Loggers moved into the Pemigewasset Valley about 25 years later and built a log squirt dam across its outlet, Cascade Brook, to provide bursts of water during the log drives down below. The dam has been augmented in recent years by more nearly permanent materials, so the pond is now pretty stable. There’s a tiny sand beach over on its southwest shore just below the hut. Since the pond is quite shallow, it warms up during the summer, and it’s a great place to swim after a hot day’s hike.

It’s also a chemical anomaly. Most of the surface water in the White Mountains is pretty acidic, owing to the composition of the underlying igneous and metamorphic rock. But Lonesome Lake’s inlet originates in a formation up on the mountainside above called the Kinsman monzonite, a feldspar that releases dissolved calcium silicate, a buffering agent that sweetens the water. So as far as anybody can tell, brook trout have lived here since they were stranded during the last Ice Age. The State of New Hampshire has stocked it with brook trout fingerlings since 1946. If you walk very carefully through the bog surrounding the inlet, you can see them darting about in the crystal water at the edge of the woods.

None of that was relevant today. The snow underfoot was firm and packed, and extended, when we got to the pond, unbroken across the ice. The urge to walk straight across to the hut was strong, but a sign warned us not to. So we “shored it” around the edge on the trail. If any of us stepped even a few inches off the packed snow, he “post-holed” down to about mid-thigh.

The hut was deserted. A note on the kitchen counter said the caretaker was on a walkabout from which he would soon return, and welcomed his replacement. We donned fleece shirts and tuques to avoid getting chilled, took down a sauce pan from the rack above the stove, and heated up some chicken soup. As we dined, other hikers began showing up – there’s nothing lonesome about Lonesome Lake, winter or summer – and we had a few pleasant chats around the tables.

We checked out the renovated bunkhouse, which can accommodate 46 people and now has east-side clerestory windows to let in more morning light. And, of course, we gazed out eastward to the great mass of Franconia Ridge, its gullies clearly limned with snow, and considered the suicidal possibilities of skiing down any of them. Then it was back down the trail, a bit slippery now in the afternoon sun, and the snow in the parking lot completely melted away. I recalled my misgivings of the morning and thanked whatever powers may be for one more perfect day.