My buddy Carl and I had an epic adventure in the White Mountains yesterday. It didn't go as planned, but it's hardly an adventure if it does, right? The plan was to do the Presidential Traverse, a challenging 20-mile run / hike across the tallest mountains in New Hampshire, including the iconic Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet elevation, then descend to the other side of the range. Starting from just 1,300 feet, we knew there would be a lot of climbing. We knew the weather wasn't great, with a forecast of temperatures around freezing and 30-50 mph winds. But it was looking better than the alternative, which was to wait until the next day, when freezing rain was in the forecast, so we started out in the dark at 5 am and hoped for the best.
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| At the trailhead |
From the start, the trail was challenging, rocky, and steep. We shook our heads every time we turned a corner and saw another steep, rocky pitch to ascend. Carl stopped to take a picture of me climbing a typical section of the trail:
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| Oof! |
It wasn't runnable, but we soon climbed up above 4,000 feet and arrived at our first serious challenge, Mount Madison. Now above the treeline, there wasn't really a trail, just a series of cairns in a steep, rocky ascent into the clouds.
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| It was impossible to see how far we had to climb |
As we climbed, the rocks got icier and icier, and the wind got stronger and stronger. I soon found my poles were useless as I needed to grab onto rocks with my hands and pull myself up, so I ditched them, knowing we would descend the same way. Carl stopped to change into warmer clothing but told me to continue on. After 100 yards, I stopped as well, knowing the wind would probably get stronger as we climbed. I took off my gloves and jacket and stowed them on the lee side of a cairn, hoping they wouldn't blow away. Then I stretched and contorted to put my technical running top on over my short-sleeved tee shirt. Then I fought the winds for several minutes to put my jacket back on. Finally there was even more struggling to put on my gloves and mittens. By this time, Carl was well ahead of me. I struggled toward the top, where Carl had stopped to take my photo, which should give you a good idea of the conditions up there.
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| Epic! |
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| At the summit of Mount Madison |
At the top, we experienced our first full blast of wind, easily 50 mph. The descent was even more precarious as it's harder to find something to grab on to on your way down. Finally we made it back to the Madison Hut, which was closed for the season. We sheltered behind the hut and added all the layers we had. Once again, even in the lee of the hut, it was still a struggle to get the additional layers on. Our hands were frozen by the time we finished. We were both in shorts. I had a pair of tights that I could have added but my legs weren't cold and it would have been a pain to get them on and I would have gotten even colder as I did it. On to Mount Adams.
Adams was taller, icier, and rockier than Madison. The climb up was steeper as well. We would be descending a different route, so I stowed my poles on my pack. I hoped the descent would be easier than this! As we climbed, the route got steeper and steeper. It was a full-on, four-limbed scramble, before it finally leveled off a bit near the summit. Here Carl got another photo of me:
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| Even more epic! |
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| The two of us atop Mount Adams |
At the top, once again we were in the full face of the wind, but now we had to descend on an exposed ridge, scrambling across icy, jagged rocks that ranged from 1 to 4 feet in size. My right pole nearly fell off my pack and I struggled to strap it back in place. The wind was blasting me and my glasses fogged up. I was worried my hat would blow off. My nose was dripping incessantly, reminding me that I had forgotten to take my allergy medicine in the morning. A gust of wind blew a strand of mucus onto my glasses, which promptly froze across my field of view. I decided to remove my glasses and hat and plugged on, inching my way forward and downward, guessing at where to place my feet on the now-blurred surface of the icy rocks. After a couple hundred yards I decided it would be easier with poles and foggy glasses, so I put my glasses back on, removed my right pole from the pack and unfolded it. Then I went to get the left pole and saw that it was missing! It must have fallen off in the past hundred yards or so, but progress had been so perilous that I decided not to try to find the missing pole and went ahead with half-fogged glasses and one pole. Finally we made our way to a somewhat less windy spot and regrouped. [If you look back at the selfie from the top of Mount Adams, you will see that my left pole was already missing, so not going back was a very good call; it would have taken as long as an hour to find it!]
Just 5.5 miles in to our planned 20+ mile journey, it seemed unlikely that we would be able to finish. We knew there was a road and a cog railway at the summit of Mount Washington, 5 miles away, so we decided to make our way there and bail out.
Soon after this, we encountered the first hikers we had seen on the trip. They told us Mount Jefferson, ahead of us, was icy. We told them the Madison Hut, where they were headed, was closed, and Mount Adams was really rough. Then we each plunged forward in our respective directions. I was moving slower and slower, and Carl would walk ahead and then wait for me every quarter-mile or so. He was getting cold, and all this stopping wasn't helping the situation. The trail was relentlessly rocky, but thankfully not as icy as it had been on Mount Adams. Meanwhile I wasn't getting anything to eat, because I felt guilty every time Carl had to wait for me and so didn't stop to fuel up.
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| Working our way along the trail |
At the base of Mount Jefferson, Carl figured out that there was a trail around the summit. It took us all of 5 seconds to decide we weren't going to summit Jefferson, so we went around it on a mercifully less-rocky trail (and by "less rocky" I mean "rockier than nearly any other trail I've been on").
Finally we started the climb up Mount Washington. The trail got rockier again, and we were concerned that it would get even icier than the others since it was 700 feet taller. It was definitely icier, and the winds were probably stronger than any we had experienced previously, but it was thankfully not as steep as Madison or Adams. The was some semblance of a trail through the rocks, and we saw some other hikers descending through the blasting wind. We could hear the sound of the cog railway chugging up the mountain, seemingly right next to us, but we couldn't see anything. Finally a train emerged out of the fog, less than 40 yards away! It was slowly chugging its way upward through the cloud, puffing a ribbon of smoke that was instantly transported away by the wind. More importantly, this mean the train was actually running that day, which meant we would have a way to get down off the mountain!
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| The steam train blasting up the tracks |
The trail went right under the train tracks, which didn't seem right. I consulted the map I'd loaded onto my watch and saw that we had followed the wrong trail, which indeed did go under the tracks, but not to the top of the mountain. But we weren't far from the right trail, and I saw that if we hiked alongside the tracks, we'd soon rejoin the summit trail. Mercifully, the ground was soft and footing was firm next to the tracks; we guessed this was from the cinders spewed out by the steam engine. Eventually we regained the correct trail, which got icier with every step. Then this trail too crossed the tracks. I double-checked with my watch and saw that we were on the right trail, and so we stepped across. I was halfway across when I saw the lights of a train coming down the tracks toward me. I had visions of a Wile E. Coyote-style collision and hustled across. It was only when I was safely on the other side of the tracks that I saw the train was probably moving about 3 miles per hour! We waved to the passengers in the steamy coach, hoping we'd join them soon.
Finally we made our way to the top. I headed straight for the summit building, leaving Carl to take a summit selfie by himself. I was completely spent. We had climbed a total of over 7,000 feet, much of it in icy, windy conditions while scrambling over rocks. Suddenly we were in a world of tourists and tchotchkes. They looked at us like we were crazy, and I suppose we were, a little bit. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Besides, my bowl of clam chowder and cup of hot chocolate purchased at the summit cafe tasted SOOOO much better to me having worked my way [halfway] across the Presidential Traverse.
I knew there was a van service that took passengers up the road to the top as well as the cog railway, so Carl inquired as to which would be the better option for us to get to the bottom. As it turned out, there was only one, the railway; the road had been closed due to the extreme weather conditions. The weather had been even worse than forecast, with an AVERAGE wind speed of 49.2 mph. We had felt it on the hike but convinced ourselves that it couldn't have been that bad, even though we felt like the wind could blow our form-fitting beanies off our heads, and our poles nearly got blown out from under us before we could plant them on the ground. The maximum wind speed for the day according to the Mount Washington Observatory was 77 mph. Carl found out we could ride the railway down on a space-available basis; we'd have to ask the operator if there was room. Then we'd be on our own to figure out how to get from the bottom of the railway to our car 10 miles away. There were no taxi services and Uber seemed unlikely in this remote spot.
As we lined up for the railway, we noticed two women who looked to be in a similar predicament to us. They heard us talking about getting to our car and offered to give us a ride.
"Really!?!" we said! "That would be awesome!"
"Well, we'll see how far it is when we get to the bottom and let you know."
On the ride down we chatted with some of the other passengers, and were amazed at how quickly the train descended below the wind and fog, despite its lethargic 3-mph pace. Soon we were in an autumnal wonderland, with stunning fall colors all around us. I only managed to take a quick selfie on the train.
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| Happy to be warm! |
As we paid our fares, the two women told us they could definitely drive us, and we thanked them probably too many times to count. "We're Sarah and Sarah," they told us [names may have been changed to protect the innocent]. We introduced ourselves and chattered away. When we got to their car, they offered us beers, but we were too cold and sore (and old) to partake. They happily poured themselves some hard selzers (carefully disguised in thermal mugs), and we drove down the road to our waiting car. As we arrived at our car, we saw two women in hiking gear, hitchhiking. Sarah and Sarah told us we should pay it forward and give those women a ride. So we did. Turns out they had carefully dropped a car at the end of their planned point-to-point hike, but forgot to take their keys! Unlike us, they had actually completed the hike as planned; they just couldn't get into their car when they arrived!
All this goodwill left us with a nice feeling after what was technically an unsuccessful trip. We had planned to run 20.5 miles and climb 8 peaks. We ended up running not one step and only summiting 3 peaks, taking 8 hours and 45 minutes for half a trip when the whole trip should have taken 12 hours. Somehow none of that mattered. We had summited Mount Washington in freezing temperatures and near-hurricane-force winds. We had done something epic; just not the epic something we thought we were going to do. It was a very good day.
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