| Summary | 32 mi hiked, 40 mi biked, 4.5 hrs slept in 22 hrs |
| Owner | Matthew Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2014-07-02 07:08:45 UTC-0400 |
| Description | 6pm Friday 6/27/14 - 4pm Saturday 6/28/14
Matthew and Eric Gilbertson 32.2 miles hiked 40 miles biked 4.5 hrs of sleep Eric: "It'd be nice to get out of town this weekend, get into the wilderness, and burn a lot of calories." Matthew: "I agree, but the constraints are that we can't leave Boston before noon Friday and we've gotta be back by 7pm Saturday. What do we have time for?" Eric: "Well, there's a lot of options, how about a Mahoosuc Traverse with a bike plant?" Matthew: "Sounds good to me. The timing might be tight but if we push it we can do it." --- Mahoosuc Notch is one of the most challenging and interesting sections of the Appalachian Trail. It's challenging because it involves scrambling through a half mile boulder field, followed by an ascent of Mahoosuc Arm - the steepest section of the AT (1500ft/1.6 mi, including one stretch of 1100ft/0.8 mi). And it's interesting because there is snow/ice in the Notch year-round - one of few such locations in the East. A cool way to hike the Notch is to hike it from the US-2 road crossing near Gorham, NH to the next road crossing, 31.8 mi away at ME-26 in Grafton Notch. Of course, that involves either two cars or, in our case, a car and some bikes. After finishing up a couple of meetings, we left Boston at 12:35pm on Friday and drove north in the trusty ’01 Subaru Forester. We headed first to Grafton Notch, in Maine, where we stashed our bikes just off the AT. Then we drove 40 miles southwest to Gorham and parked the Subaru at the AT trailhead. The plan was to start hiking immediately, sleep along the way at Gentian Pond shelter, continue the hike early the next morning, return to the bikes around noon, bike back to the car and arrive about 3:30pm, then drive back to Boston and arrive by the 7pm cutoff time. A couple of years ago, we had intended to do a similar trip, but a hazardous train derailment near Shelburne, NH meant that we had to shuffle things around a bit. We ended up driving an extra hour around Errol, NH, and biked along gravelly Success Pond Road, where we got a couple of flat tires. That night, we slept for a bit at the trailhead near Gorham, then hiked the whole 32 miles to Grafton Notch in one shot. The trip was successful, but we wanted to switch things up a bit. This trip, we figured that we could save some time by biking back along the smooth, flat-ish ME-26/US-2, even though it was 40 miles rather than 28. We hit the trail by 6pm and started ascending. We hiked for about 3hrs before finally busting out the headlamps near Trident Pass. Soon, we began to hear the sound of frogs in the distance. The chorus grew louder until eventually Eric and I had to shout to talk to each other, and by then we had reached the beautiful little Page Pond. The calm pond reflected the fading twilight, and lily pads covered 50% of the pond from one end of the other. “It’s nice that there are so many frogs,” Eric said, “because otherwise there’d be a lot more mosquitoes and black flies.” We continued hiking until about 10:30pm, when we reached Gentian Pond shelter. In order to arrive back in Boston at 7pm, by our calculations, we could sleep for 4.5 hours, although we knew that there was a huge amount of uncertainty associated with the next 20 miles of rugged hiking and 40 miles of biking. We brought minimal overnight gear – each just thin sleeping bag – but nevertheless, we had a restful nap in the shelter. Our alarms woke us up at 4am and we soon hit the trail. We only needed the headlamps for about half an hour. “Man, hiking in the winter makes you appreciate how pleasant it is to hike in the summer,” I said to Eric. “You’ve got plenty of daylight, it’s warm and you can comfortably rest for a while, and you don’t need much gear.” Throughout the morning, we encountered a considerable number of south-bound hikers. It turned out that many of them were actually thru hikers; they had started at Katahdin when it had opened for the summer on June 4, and we headed all the way to Georgia. They’re definitely a minority compared with north-bound thru hikers, but we encountered about 15 of them in all. Around 9:30am, we arrived at the long-awaited Mahoosuc Notch. The air was already about 10F degrees cooler, so we were on the lookout for what we knew was the source of the natural A/C. We peeked down between some boulders and, sure enough, there was a ton of ice. We each picked up a fragment and munched on it. In our philosophy, you can’t really say that you’ve seen snow until you’ve tasted it. You need both forms of sensory stimulus. As we traversed the notch, we tried to breathe in as much cold air as possible in preparation for the big climb ahead. We climbed the ultra-steep Mahoosuc Arm in about 45 minutes and took at quick rest just beyond the top at Speck Pond. It was awfully tempting to go for a swim in Speck Pond, but we were on the clock and would have to defer the swim to next time. As we made the final climb up Old Speck, we met a couple of south-bound thru hikers (“SOBOs”). Being well-acquainted with their quest, we felt it necessary to convey to them the single most important piece of information about the journey ahead. “Do you guys know about the Chinese buffet in Gorham?” I asked. “Oh my god!! I heard about that! I can’t wait!” the hiker said. “Yeah, they’ve got pizza and ice cream there too. It’s called the Dynasty Buffet,” Eric said. “We’ve gotta stop there!” the hiker yelled to his friend, exploding with enthusiasm and seemingly re-energized for the next 25 rugged trail miles between him and the buffet. “Thanks for the tip, guys!” After descending Old Speck, we reached the bikes at the Grafton Notch trailhead by 12:35pm, suited up, and started biking by 1:14pm. The road was mostly downhill to Newry, then basically flat after that. We stopped at a gas station in Bethel and scarfed down some chocolate milk and ice cream. For us, the "fuel" at the gas station was not clear and flammable, but rather cold and sugary. By 4pm, we finally reached the car. Despite all of the uncertainty, the plan had been executed nearly flawlessly, and we were just a half hour behind schedule. We hopped in the car and made it back to Boston at 7:30pm. |