Guy Waterman had climbed every peak in the Northeast high country—in winter, and from all the cardinal directions. With his wife, he had co-authored four scrupulously principled books on New England wilderness, and he was revered as the conscience of the mountains, a beloved teacher and friend, a paragon of Yankee self-reliance. Why, then, did he hike to the top of his favorite peak on the coldest day of the year and lie down to die?

Ned Therrien

Waterman tramps New Hampshire's Franconia Ridge in the early 1990s

It was February 6, a Sunday. A low-pressure system that had squatted over the White Mountains for the better part of a week was finally lumbering out to sea, and a bitter Arctic high was racing down from Canada to fill the vacuum. The forecast for the Upper Valley region of east-central Vermont and western New Hampshire called for flurries and ice crystals giving way to clear skies, highs of five to ten degrees above zero, and northwest winds of 15 to 25 miles per hour.

At 8:30 a.m., Guy Waterman handed his wife a few typewritten pages, the coda to a not-for-publication "memoir" he had begun several years earlier. ("He didn't like to call it an autobiography," Laura Waterman would explain later. "It sounded too pretentious.") As she wept, he stepped out the door and began the mile-long tromp through the snow to the road where they parked their Subaru Impreza. The car was their biggest concession to modern technology, and they liked to keep it at a healthy distance.

After he left, Guy Waterman mailed several letters at his home post office in East Corinth, Vermont. He then drove 65 miles east to the Appalachian Mountain Club hostel in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, where, he had told a friend, he planned to check the latest weather update from the Mount Washington Summit Observatory. Finally, he looped back west to Franconia Notch and parked his car on the east side of the highway, opposite the sheer face of Cannon Cliff. Above him, slopes of dark timber swept up 3,600 vertical feet to the gothic ramparts of Franconia Ridge and the rocky summit cone of Mount Lafayette, at 5,260 feet the sixth-highest mountain in New Hampshire. Carrying a small pack and his father's ancient, wood-shafted ice ax, Waterman set off up the Old Bridle Path Trail.

"I think calling Mount Lafayette a 'favorite' place might not be quite the right word," Laura would write to me later. "The connection Guy felt to that mountain and to the Franconia Ridge went deeper than that." Lafayette was the first mountain Waterman climbed when, as a New Yorker in his midthirties, burning out on the corporate world, he began to rediscover his childhood passion for the outdoors. He climbed this mountain again with his three sons, and after his second son, Johnny, was killed while solo mountaineering in Alaska, Guy chose a secluded spot on a nearby ridge to memorialize him, burying an old pair of Johnny's boots beneath a cairn of stones. For 18 years, he and Laura "adopted"the Ridge Trail, which runs south from the summit of Lafayette, painstakingly maintaining one of the most scenic stretches of the entire Appalachian Trail. The two of them had "probably touched every rock with our feet and hands," Laura wrote. "It felt like an extension of our backyard; it felt like home."

The Watermans were not alone in their affection for the spot. Mount Lafayette has always been one of the most popular destinations in the Whites. On summer weekends it's not unusual to see 100 to 200 people on the trail. A bustling AMC hut is situated just below the tree line. Winter is less crowded, but even so, being on Lafayette is rarely a solitary experience anymore. And so when Marty Sample, a hiker from Milford, New Hampshire, arrived at the summit around noon on February 6, he found half a dozen others huddling out of the wind. "It was one of those days when you could see all the way across Vermont," Sample recalled.

Around two o'clock, as Sample was descending a steep section of the Old Bridle Path known as Agony Ridge, he was surprised to meet a lone hiker heading up the hill. "He was a real Old Man of the Mountain," Sample said. "He had a thick, heavy beard, and some pretty old gear, but the thing I remember most is this wooden alpenstock he was carrying. It had to be close to a meter long."

The older man nodded hello and kept climbing. It was late in the day to be only halfway up Mount Lafayette, but Sample didn't give it much thought. "He looked like he knew what he was doing," he said. "And he had such a small pack, I just figured he was going to go to the hut and then turn around." But Waterman did not plan to turn around at the hut. He was heading to the top, and not coming back.

He probably arrived at the summit of Mount Lafayette not long before sunset. How long he lasted is anybody's guess. He was a small, sinewy man, 67 years old. He wore a layer of wool, with nylon shell pants and a weathered 60-40 coat. The section of ridge where Waterman finally planted his ice ax and lay down was as exposed as the wing of an airplane.

That night the Mount Washington Observatory, some 15 miles away, recorded a low temperature of minus 16. Average hourly wind speeds ranged from 70 to 90 miles per hour. One wonders if, as the life drained from his body, Guy Waterman's mind might finally have filled with something like contentment.