| Summary | None |
| Owner | Eric Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2011-04-12 22:35:01 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Eric Gilbertson
Aaron Yahr 4.7.11 Aaron and I had been trying to do a route in huntington's all winter but were thwarted four times by bad weather, high avy danger, or sickness. Finally the stars aligned the forecast was sunny skies, low wind, warm temps, and low avy danger. Perfect! except it was for a thursday. We decided to go for it anyway - I could sneak away from lab for a day and nobody would really notice. We stayed at Intervale the wednesday night and got an early start thursday. It was amazing to see pinkham with hardly a car in the lot and such a perfect weather day. We passed by the avy forecast at the harvard cabin and all routes were low danger. With nobody else in huntingtons we had our pick of any route we wanted. Yale looked like a fun, long route with a lot of ice so we went for it. Aaron took the first lead and we swung leads all the way to the top - about 4 official pitches of moderate ice. I even managed to find an old piton on the side of the route to clip. We finally saw one more party entering the ravine as we were topping out, but I'm not complaining. We essentially had the whole place to ourselves all day. Unfortunately we forgot sunscreen and got pretty burned, but that was the only injury. When we poked our noses into the Alpine Garden we were hit with about 20mph winds (compared to zero wind in the ravine). It was only 3pm so we decided to make it official and go tag Washington. We had the summit to ourselves and only saw one other person (a skier going into tuckerman ravine) on our way down. We made it back to pinkham before dark and headed back to boston. I hear the conditions were just as good on washington the following saturday, and the snow ranger estimated 2000 people were on the mountain that day! |