Eric, Noah, Veronica, Nadine, Elliott, Will, Minwah, John
Hiking above treeline
Oct 13, 2012
4am – 10pm
~20 miles
Though it was technically October, our presi traverse felt a lot like winter! Mt washington set a new record low of 7F Saturday morning, and it was probably a similar temperature for us on Mt Madison at sunrise. It was cold and very windy most of the day, clouds rolled in and out so we often couldn’t see the cairns, and the snow drifts were up to 2ft deep in places. Surprisingly we met six! other groups also doing the full traverse. We hit all the presidents north to south from Madison to Pierce in a big 18-hour day.
-Eric
Looking across the Great Gulf to Mt Washington
As we probably all know by now, you can always learn something (sometimes for life even) out of a hike. MinWah apperently discovered: “There can be Winter in Fall!” which pretty much hits the nail on the head. On that weekend there was an absolute NEW Hampshire showing up with pretty WHITE mountains and all this in the middle of October!
I had one last weekend in the US before leaving for Germany and MinWah came up with the great idea of a Presidential Traverse. We all assumed that must be beautiful in fall and enthusiastically started planning – simultaneously from Europe, the US Westcoast and Boston. After having some hiking abstinence I was actually so much looking forward to that fun adventure that I almost couldn’t sleep the night before ;).
We all met good-humored Friday night at 7PM at MIT round-about and were prepared with winter gear and lots of warm clothes since it was supposed to have “a few inches of snow” on the top of the mountains. Eric and John finished right before leaving with their personal strategy of dealing with cold temperatures by food-battling each other in Massey Hall.
Hiking up Mt Adams with Mt Madison in the background
Elliott and MinWah fortunately drove all the way up and even arranged the parking of one car at each end of the trail right after arriving. We all camped close to the trailhead at Appalachia underneath an amazing sky and put the alarm to the painful early time of 3AM. More or less awake we started hiking by 4, making our way to Mt. Madison. The higher we got, the more snow we saw. On Madison the wind was super tough and I always had to factor in the wind in order to place my steps. Down again I felt so cold, that I almost couldn’t understand how MITOC people can be doing and even enjoying!!! something hardcore like winter school. At that point I kind of doubted I would be able to do the whole thing. Luckily MinWah’s incredibly cute Panda gloves changed my freezing world and made me getting warmer soon. We put on Microspikes after Mt. Madison and it was really impressive how much more grip these tiny spikes give to your shoes. They also enabled us to looking around and enjoying more of the landscape. The clouds were moving so fast that we got really pretty views that quickly vanished again – it was like: “Hey look at that view … well, it’s gone!”. Whenever we got views (and luckily the weather got better over the day), there was this cool scene of snow powdered wintery mountains, like a black-and-white picture sprinkled with hikers who looked a bit like photoshop-added in contrast to the fall down in the colourful valley – 2 seasons at once, that’s fun!
Descending Mt Washington
Unfortunately Veronica trapped her foot and hit her knee on the descent of Madison. Although in pain she bravely kept her motivation! That impressed all of us! After arriving on Mt. Washington at 2:40 PM we all got good food, exchanged the ice cubes in our bottles to liquid water and finally decided to split the group. In order to avoid the above-treeline-part for Veronica, 3 of us went straight down on the Amonoosuc Ravine Trail and to the AMC Highland Centre, while the rest finished with the remaining 4 mountains as originally planned. The first group made it down without problems until 9PM and Veronica got some post-hiking relaxation at the nice fireplace – yeah hiking probably makes you appreciating the small things in life even more ;).
When reaching Lake of the clouds John and Eric showed me “where we bury all these MITOC people in winter, …
Back at Crawford Notch
ähm build snow shelter” for the fun hockey expedition. The rest of the hike was absolutely beautiful with a nice sunset on the ascent of Mt. Eisenhower. On Mt. Pierce we met another group of 5 people from Montreal who were finishing their Presi traverse as well. We made it back to the Highland Centre at 9:30 PM after the long stretching descent of Crawford Path. We hung out a while at that nice place while Will and MinWah were already arranging the car re-shuttling and eventually we all went for food (and all the way talked about food and calories) to applebees.
Pretty late – 1:30 or 2AM we all fell asleep in the Yurt at Intervale and slept in until 9 the next day. When putting together all our stuff, John suddenly realized something going on and sleepily mumbled: “It’s 3 AM, lets get hiking, PRESI TRAVERSE!” ;).
After a Dunkin-breakfast we headed towards Boston, got entertained by John with bears-attending-human-weddings stories plus “that is real!”-assurances and made it back in time for returning the rental car.
I was actually not expecting to get a foretaste of winter (-hiking) in the Whites (or to say it in Gilbertson-language: it wasn’t even “on the list”) and really enjoyed this cool adventure with all of you. I can definitely tell it’s less suffering if leaving that country with some recent and good hiking memories and the feeling of leaving it from NH ;).
-Nadine
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