Galehead

Pemi Loop

Eric and John on the summit

9.21.2008
Eric Gilbertson, Matthew Gilbertson, Jon Hanselman, Dave Wentzlaff

36.1 miles
11,342 ft elevation gain
15 hours 37 minutes 6.2 seconds

Author: Eric

Jon’s just starting on his 4,000 footer list and what better to knock off 12 mountains in a day
then a Pemi loop? The plan for the weekend was logistically difficult but worked out in the end.
Dave and Jon planned to drive up to NH saturday night and do the hike sunday, but Matthew and
I wanted to take full advantage of both days. So we rode up to Pinkham notch with Dana Friday
and climbed washington via huntington’s ravine. It was pretty awesome climbing in the moonlight
and we had the summit to ourselves at 3:04am.

We slept in Saturday morning and then biked 50-something miles to the lincoln woods trailhead to
meet Dave and Jon. The bikes had just barely fit in Dana’s car on the way up, and Dave brought a rack
for his car to transport them back.

We all four met up at the Lincoln Woods trailhead saturday night and, after some stealth camping,
started our hike at 6:16 sunday morning. Jon made it clear his goal was to be completely exhausted
at the end of the day, and though I was pretty sure that he had nothing to worry about, we still
started off running the wilderness trail.

Jon kept splits on his stopwatch at every peak, and we were averaging just over 3mph up to and crossing
franconia ridge. We figured at that pace we had time to add some side trails to galehead, north twin, zealand
and west bond. Since dave had already finished his 4000 footer list and matthew wasn’t too concerned about
it, Jon and I split off and ran ahead to bag the side peaks. We hit galehead and north twin and then
met back up with matthew and dave around 3pm. We decided to skip the extra 2.6 miles to zealand
because jon’s hip muscle started cramping and he could hardly walk. That didn’t stop us from doing
west bond though (only .5 mile side trail).

We all met up again at Bondcliff to see the sun setting and got some cool cliff pictures. It was
funny to think we were almost done when we still had 9 miles left. That was the end of our climbing, though,
so the rest was easy. We ended up descending in the dark and got back to the car around 10pm. Jon’s leg
got better so he ran the last mile to ensure he was completely exhausted.

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