The hail and wind-driven rain arrive just after I finish a lunch of hot tea and a bagel and start preparing for a dash to the summit of Mount Mansfield.

Standing inside a rustic log cabin called Taft Lodge, I stop what I’m doing with the realization that there is a new sound in my ears: a hard patter on the roof and windows. When I poke my head out the cabin door, hailstones are already accumulating on the ground.

The summit will wait.

Not five minutes earlier, I had stood outside this shelter along Vermont’s Long Trail, calling upon all my meager meteorological skills while watching a gray curtain of sky slowly lower itself over the rocky summit. I figured I could make the half-mile hike to the summit and back before the storm.

This is why I’m not on the television newscast.

I have backpacked solo up Vermont’s highest peak to spend the night in this shelter and – hopefully – hike to the summit. I passed just two other people on the way up from Smuggler’s Notch this morning, day-hikers heading down, and will see no one else for the next 24 hours.

Despite the antisocial undertones, solo treks into the mountains are not strictly for friendless recluses and people with compelling legal reasons to hide. Without a companion to talk to on the trail, you see and hear much more: every creak of a tree, every flush of wings when birds flee at your approach.

The forest silence grows profoundly deeper, the wind gains dimension, distances multiply. Seeing an expansive mountain view alone enhances the adventure – as does the knowledge that, no matter what happens, you are on your own.

The truth is, though, that I’m going solo today because I failed to find a friend available to join me. The lack of company can make time drag somewhat while waiting out a storm in a cold shelter.

When the storm rolls in with all the wind-fired fury of early winter on a mountain, I do what any mountain adventurer does in such circumstances: read the book I brought along and try to convince my body that, even though it’s nearly dark outside, it’s just midafternoon and I don’t need to sleep.

The wind outside these drafty walls builds and recedes in waves, rising to an intensity that bends the tops of the low spruce trees and rattles the cabin.

Through a window, I watch swirling fog like the condensed breath of Old Man Winter tumble from the white-out and roll over the ground. About 50 feet beyond the cabin, the landscape evaporates into gray.

The afternoon passes in a weird semi-darkness. Then night extinguishes even that faint light like a draft reaching a single candle. Reading by the window, my legs stuffed into my sleeping bag to warm my cold feet, I look up at a suddenly dark cabin. I know it’s not even 5 p.m.

The storm rages late into the night, rain and hail revisiting periodically like abrupt bursts of automatic-weapon fire upon the cabin.

Mostly, though, the wind vents some inexplicable rage, buffeting the door so hard at times that I look up, expecting to see someone walk in. But no one would be walking up here on a night like this.

By dawn, the clouds lift to reveal the mountain again. The storm has temporarily expended its stores of rain and hail, but the wind continues its angry onslaught. Leaving most of my gear in the cabin, I grab a water bottle and my camera and head for the summit.

Patches of thin ice make footing a bit tricky on the rocky trail. As I get higher, the wind gathers strength. On the summit, it gusts strongly enough to knock me off balance and bite into my face.

Walking becomes a formidable task, so I don’t wander far, aware of what something as normally harmless as turning an ankle might mean here, alone. At the brink of cliffs falling away to forested slopes above Smuggler’s Notch, I pause to take in the view to the north.

The sun slices around the edges of clouds, beaming shafts of yellow light into the valley, where a nice late-autumn day takes shape.

But the clouds keep their stranglehold on the mountain, hovering just overhead, breathing ice. Before long, the relentless wind becomes too much to tolerate, so I begin the solitary hike back down.

Michael Lanza is a syndicated columnist. Letters can be sent to 9 South Street, Suite 2, Lebanon, NH 03766, or e-mail to michael.a.lanza@valley.net.