Midway up the staggeringly steep Wildcat Ridge Trail in New Hampshire’s White Mountains earlier this week, after my son, Tom, and I had postholed up to our knees 487 times through rotten snow despite wearing snowshoes, we began reciting favorite mountaineering quotes to pass the time.

I started with George Mallory, who uttered the three most celebrated words in climbing lore to a New York Times reporter in 1923 — “Because it’s there” — when asked why anyone would try to scale the world’s tallest mountain. A year later Mallory, making his third attempt to conquer Mount Everest, disappeared from view 800 vertical feet from the peak; his frozen remains were not found until 1999.

“Maybe that’s not such an inspirational quotation after all,” I reflected. “How about Edmund Hillary’s comment to Tenzig Norgay, after they became the first to summit Everest in 1953 …”

Tom, climbing a few yards ahead of me, looked over his shoulder and finished Hillary’s line: “We knocked the bastard off.”

Tom took a moment to reposition his trekking poles and recalled a passage from “Eiger Dreams,” written by another Everest veteran, Jon Krakauer.

The book recounts Krakauer’s conversation with Howard Donner, a physician at Alaska’s Mount Denali Base Camp. Shivering in a blizzard, reeling from nausea and a blinding headache while attempting to repair a broken radio antenna, Donner remarked: “It's sort of like having fun, only different.”

Technically, Tom and I were having fun, but appreciated the experience more fully while talking about it later as we huddled next to a wood stove at Carter Notch Hut.

The hut, a wood and stone structure maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club, is a popular hikers’ destination year-round, but mid-April is decidedly the offseason – not cold or snowy enough for the hard-core winter crowd but too chilly for fair-weather backpackers. On our visit it was occupied by only one other hiker and a caretaker.

“I can’t believe it’s been 14 years since I’ve been here,” Tom said as we stomped up the steps in late afternoon.

In late fall of 2001 Tom and I were on a mission to complete hiking all 67 of New England’s mountains that rise higher than 4,000 feet, and chose a route that first took us over Wildcat’s D,C,B and A snow-covered summits before we glissaded down the ridge and arrived at the hut after dark. We then spent the night and crested Carter Dome and Mount Hight the next day before returning to Pinkham Notch.

On this week’s abbreviated hike before Tom had to return to his job in Minnesota we settled on a 7.6-mile ramble out and back on the Nineteen Mile Brook Trail, with a 1.4-mile side trip up and down Wildcat A, the highest of Wildcat’s four peaks at 4,422 feet.

Nineteen Mile Brook, still covered in parts with ice, tumbled and glittered alongside us as we tramped through a spruce-lined forest. Crampons affixed to our snowshoes gripped the frozen trail in early morning, but after the sun had been up a couple hours the temperature rose into the 40s and we began plunging through collapsing crust.

“You have to stay on the ‘monorail,’” an Appalachian Mountain Club staffer advised us shortly before we set out, referring to a narrow band of path packed hard by previous hikers. If we strayed more than a few inches we risked postholing, an exhausting and exasperating experience.

The trail from Route 16 northeast of Mount Washington rises steadily and then steeply over Height of Land before skirting two small ponds – partially frozen and shimmering green and blue in bright sunlight during our visit. The trail ends at the hut, a welcome haven with cooking facilities and nearby bunkhouses.

Overshadowed by the Wildcat Ridge to the west and Carter Dome and Mount Hight to the east, the hut abuts a stunningly exquisite jumble of boulders called The Ramparts. Peering skyward, you can see where this talus broke off from towering cliffs.

Tom and I listened to wind whistling through evergreens while we sautéed garlic and broccoli on a cast iron skillet over a wood stove. We then added couscous to the mixture – a meal fit for kings of the mountain after a day’s hike through the snow.

Darkness descended like a blanket over the notch, and our headlamps guided us to the unheated bunkhouse, where sleeping bags beckoned.

I drifted to sleep thinking about one of my favorite authors, Edward Abbey, who penned, “May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”