| Summary | |
| Owner | Nadine Mueller-Dittmann |
| Creation Date | 2012-08-09 01:07:44 UTC-0400 |
| Description | 08/04/2012
John Romanishin, Elliott Fray, Susanne Brükner, Angelika Beinert, Nolan Essigman, Nathan Ickes, Roman Feldman, Nadine Mueller-Dittmann „What do you think is a nice place to go for a nighthike?“ – “Franconia Ridge” everyone answered without hesitation. With this clearly significant result for the nighthike survey, I was looking forward for the next fullmoon. And as it turned out, even the weather had decided to be on the hikers side for this night – woohoo! With lots of motivation about hiking at night, having seen shooting stars, the chance of being on the top for sunrise or just the fact of being in the White Mountains, we started our hike at about midnight. The trail up to Franconia Ridge is nice even if you don’t see as much. But you would realize that you hear much more than during the day. I guess some of us were a little scared about wild animals with every sound out of the woods and John wasn’t too sensitive about that by commenting with “No worries, bears only eat Germans!”. The further we got up the more the weather turned misty, windy and cold, so we decided to have some food at a sheltered place once we reached the Ridge. And then, somehow magically the sky totally cleared within seconds (the clouds were moving super fast) and we could see an ocean of clouds below and to our left. That was really amazing to observe! Nathan took some cool group pictures with his great foto equipment (he even brought 2 cameras!) and we went on hiking in the dawn. At about 5:40 AM the sun was rising and that was so beautiful that you can hardly believe this is gonna happen every single day again! We all were quite amazed about it. Germans (with no fear of bears anymore) got a little crazy and started singing the soundtrack of Lord of the rings. On the descent we had to get into and through the clouds again, which was pretty windy. Somewhen after 7 or so, we saw the first hiker, getting up Franconia Ridge. It’s quite weird how the feeling for time shifts after a weekend of nighthiking. All upcoming hikers said “Good morning” and I was about to protest since I felt it must have been 3 PM or so. The same thing happened for the meals. Are we gonna have Breakfast, lunch or dinner now? Let’s just call it Brinner, but it could be Dunch as well… So, we felt very vortexy (that’s the new nerdy vocabulary, I learned and especially experienced during the 2 night-hikes). However, we made it back to the cars at 9 AM and headed to Tilt’n Diner for an incredible breakfast. Both drivers decided to straight going back to Boston and did an awesome job! Susi didn’t have quite enough activity during the hike and went for some Spätzle cooking until late in the night! Now, as I’ve seen those beautiful sunrises, I need to consider for some sunset hikes ;). -Nadine |