Zealand Mountain

24 Hour Hut Traverse

Matthew Gilbertson, Eric Gilbertson, Mike Kokko

45.39mi

22,045ft total ascent

24h17m

10:45am 9/22/07 — 11:02am 9/23/07

We needed some way to express ourselves. We weren’t that big into sculpture, or painting, or dance, so we instead decided to express ourselves through pain and suffering. We did it with an awesome hike.

We were planning to do a full Hut Traverse from Lonesome Lake to Carter Notch, but plans changed and we decided to end a Pinkham instead. We started at Lafayette Campground in Franconia notch on Saturday, but let me back up a little bit first. We planned to park a car at 19mi Trailhead, then catch the 8:05am AMC hiker shuttle to Lafayette Campground. But left Cambridge at around 4:55am and knew it was going to be close. Our GPS projected our ETA at between 8:04-8:05am. As we raced through the fog past Pinkham, we had to slow down behind a slow-moving bus. It was the shuttle. We flagged him down at at 19mile trailhead and hopped on for a long trip to Franconia Notch.

10:45am: We ran up to Lonesome Lake and tagged the first AMC Hut on the 10 Hut list. We grabbed out packs on the way back and headed up Old Bridle Path to Greenleaf Hut. On the way up Lafayette we were drenched with sweat from the humidity and lack of wind. It was about 60 degrees. There were hundreds of people on the ridge now, but we knew that in about 10 hrs we’d have all the trails to ourselves.

We filled up some water and grabbed a couple of brownies at Galehead, then started the steep climb up South Twin. We were all doing pretty good at this point. We still liked the food we brought and weren’t too sore yet.

We made it to Zealand around sunset and rested for a while. The clouds seemed to be rolling in and pretty soon we heard a rumble of thunder off to our west. Oh great, here comes the cold front, we thought. We got about 5 seconds of sprinkles, and that was it. The wind picked up and the temps started to decrease a little bit.

Since the Higland Center was also a hut, we had to hit it too. We got into Crawford Notch around 9:30pm, and grapped some water and a little snack. We sat on the lawn chairs and watched the clouds roll over the gibbous moon. The night was so tranquil, and we were pumped to see what treeline was like at night.

We got to Mizpah hut around midnight and needed some rest. We huddled next to the building and wrapped ourselves in whatever we had. Despite the cool breeze we fell asleep pretty quick and got probably 5mins of total nap. We had a schedule to keep, and wanted to finish the hike in 24hrs.

Once we poked our noses above treeline at Pierce we knew we were going to have a windy night. The diminishing coulds were racing over the Presidentials and nearly knocked us over at we dashed for cover in the trees below Pierce. We were starting to get into a tricky situation. Our bodies we having trouble digesting the food because of all the exertion, so we had no appetite. It was hard to force down any more crackers or m&m’s. We had brought a good mix of sugary and salty foods, but by now we didn’t want to see them anymore. Nevertheless, we forced down whatever we had left.
We also had trouble staying warm. Even though it was probably only in the 40’s, it felt like 15 degrees as we were raked by the cold wind. Our bodies weren’t producing as much heat as they had been before, so we had to keep moving.

we braced ourselves against the 40mph wind on Eisenhower and ducked once again into the trees. Mike had hit the wall. We found some little alpine bushes and crawled into them to escape the wind. Matthew curled into a ball and covered himself with his pack cover. Eric and Mike shivered nearby. Mike didn’t know how much farther he could make it. He was out of energy and needed to get down. We skirted Monroe and jumped into the emergency shelter at Lake of the clouds at about 2:45am. Eric and I were still feeling pretty good, but Mike needed to take the quickest way down. So, we split up: Mike went down Lion’s Head, and Eric and I continued north.

We got to the top of Washington around 3:50am and hung out a little bit in the somewhat sheltered entrance to the visitor’s center. Unfortunately our stay was pretty short because none of the buildings were open. We scarfed down some more trail mix and looked around a little bit. It felt like we had the Mountain to ourselves. There weren’t any crowds, no people anywhere, and just a couple of lights on from the Observatory. It was a Mt. Washington that not too many people get to see. We decided to skip the webcam this time because all you could probably see in the picture would be two white dots from our headlamps. Besides, probably not too many of our friends were awake at 4am. So we headed down the Gulfside Trail and kept moving.

We stumbled over the boulders in the dark and braced ourselves against the ever-stronger wind. The sky started to get redder and redder to the east, and we were looking forward to some awesome alpenglow. Maybe we’d even be able to see the ocean, 75miles away. But the clouds rolled in just in time to block the sunrise. We decided to skip Jefferson, because I felt like I was going to fall asleep while I was walking.
I felt like a hiking zombie. I’ve never experienced such a strong desire to sleep. It was an interesting type of fatigue. It wasn’t that our muscles were worn out, or that we had no energy left, we were just so sleepy that we felt like we could go to sleep anywhere. I think I could have laid upside down on a rock with a tree jabbing me in the side and still fallen asleep. If I hiked for much longer I’d probably be sleepwalking instead. Maybe I already was.

So we decided to take a quick break in a sheltered area. We forced down some more snacks. Our bodies were tired, but our stomachs were getting even more rebellious. They had had enough of the calorie-packed food we were trying to force down. They wanted something different…they wanted icecream.
But we couldn’t stop to rest now. We were rapidly cooling off and had to keep moving. We were looking forward to some below-treeline action pretty soon. We made it to Madison Hut around 7:30am and finally saw our first human being in quite a while. To think, you could do almost an entire Presidential Traverse on a weekend in the Summer, and not see anyone else. Then again, we weren’t exactly there during the most popular time of day.

We spent a couple minutes snacking and pumping ourselves up for the last steep climb up Madison. By now my GPS had recorded 19,167ft of elev gain. We were excited to put that above 20,000 with Madison.

Now we were getting into some new trail. Eric and I still had a couple of piece of the AT to finish in New Hampshire, and the Osgood Trail down from Madison was one of them. The trail was twice as hard as we had imagined. In absolute terms, it wasn’t the hardest trail we had ever hiked, but after 21hrs of extreme exertion and no sleep, it wasn’t the type of terrain we were looking for. We carefully picked our way over large, loose talus on the way down the ridge. Our tennis shoes that had served us well on the dirt and smooth rock surfaces so far provided about as much support as socks as we painfully tip toed over the sharp rocks that made up the trail. That wasn’t all. We struggled against 60mph+ gusts that raced over the Great Gulf wilderness and roared over the ridge. After walking on tricky terrain since yesterday morning, we sometimes had to catch ourselves from falling as a strong gust came through. That was probably the hardest part of the hike.

we dropped below treeline in a hurry, at the rate of about 1500ft/mile and made it into the Great Gulf by 9:40am. We knew we wouldn’t make it to Carter Notch Hut by the 24hr mark, so we aimed for Pinkham instead. We stayed below an all-out sprint because we wanted to save some energy for the other 10miles to Carter Notch via Wildcat. We planned on grabbing a bite to eat at Pinkham, then heading across the road to knock off the last Hut on our list.

We cruised into Pinkham around 11:02, 17mins above 24hrs. We got Mike Kokko’s note in the Hiker Room, and learned that he had gotten down at 6:23am, then walked 4mi down the road to grab the car at the 19 Mile trailhead. He got a little bit of sleep before we met curled up next to the car in the Pinkham lot. We had some lunch upstairs and decided to head back to Boston. Mike had some stuff to finish up in town.

You can check out the elevation profile in the pictures below.

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