Traversing
The Mountains of the East Coast are a different beast compared to the West. When you hike, climb, or doing anything outside in the east, weather is going to smack you down. It held true in the Presidential (home to the worst weather in America).
(pending photos from others camera)
Sneaking into New England with Nick was it is own type of adventure. We drove through the night from Pittsburgh to Cape Cod. The long drive caused us to have a couple forced stops to nap. Pulling into the start of Cape Cod, we met up with Bruce and Eric. In the parking lot of a tourist information center, we donned ceremonial spandex for the kidnapping of Ben.
Stealing Ben away from Amanda (she gladly wanted rid of him), we threw him in the car and drove up to the White Mountains. We made camped for the night at Crawford Notch and broke out some special brew that Nick came into possession of. We had a general game plan for hikes, but the main goal was to have fun this weekend and with the weather being as fickle as expected, we would choose the adventure as it comes.
Saturday, we went for a nice warmup hike in preparation for the Presidential Traverse, wildcat mountain(~8 miles). It was one of the more steeper trails in NH, but it wasn’t too bad. The wet weather and dense cloud cover made it pretty interesting. When we reached the top, we scared a lot of other hikers because us 5 dudes in bright spandex were a little shocking. From the top, went down via backside skitrail. The trail was a mossy tropical carpet. Everything was very intensively green and watery. It didn’t seem like the Northeast at all.
At night, we had some beers and decided to give the traverse a shot depending on the weather. In the morning, Eric and Bruce went and stashed the second car at daybreak. They had some issues and we got a late start. The weather picked up and started to light rain in the valley floor where we started. We decided to just go for a hike anyways and could turn around and do something else after awhile. As we got about 1 mile into the hike, the sky burst free and dumped a torrent on to us. All of us were soaked in seconds. We continued up the trail to at-least bag one summit in the rain. As we were breaking treeline, the rain lessened but the wind picked up. Then we top one of the subpeaks and feeling good we decided to try and get Eisenhower, since it was pouring and only spitting.
Pushing on we got the peak, and that’s how the hike continued to go until we got to the point of no return and we just pushed on in the terrible weather. We hiked past Monroe, Lake of the Cloud, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, Madison Springs Hut, Madison, and the down-trail out.
- 22 miles
- ~8800 ft of elevation gain
- Soaked to Bone
- 1 pair of blown out spandex
