| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2006-07-24 16:50:26 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Northern Presidentials
Christiaan Adams + Dan Walker 7.15.06 We get up too early at 7am, and head up to Conway. 93 is fine. some traffic through merideth and those guys, but not bad. then 2 miles from conway, the road is dead packed for an hour. holy crap. it took us 45 minutes to get from the kanc to west side road. holy tourist season. funny towny joke: if it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them? anyway, this gives us some time to figure out where we are going for the afternoon. we decide on a madison to washington thing. We park at the Dolly Copp campground. free parking by the Webster Scout trailhead! we head up for a while. then some more. a bit easier without the thigh-height postholing. eventually we get up to treeline. can't quite get all the features alligned in my head, I guess it just looks different without all the snow and blood and screaming. (long story). well, onto brighter things, we head up to to the ridge on a diagonal line. nice views all around. we head up the ridge to madison. some alpine bouldering en route. lots of weird bugs on and only on the summit. then down to madison hut. what a zoo. but fresh water, so we're not complaining. next up adams. we take the right side up since we've never gone up that way. it takes a while to get up there. but the coulds always make it seem like its much farther away, so it sneaks up on you really quick. Now down down down and back up to Jefferson. Same thing with this one. it looked pretty bad, until we were standing on it all of a sudden. down to clay, and a super pleasant hike over throught the meadows on a dirt trail. it was suddenly 65F out, breezy, and sunny. We miss the junction to the Clay summit loop, so we just head up when we are under the summit. very few alpine dudes were crushed in the process, we promise. Then on to Washington. the nice trail kept up for a while too. once we were on washington proper, the clouds came in. jerk. we kept on the trail, which did a surprisingly good job of hiding the cog railway, even though it was only a few hundred meters away. then we got on the summit cone. then we were really socked in. at one point, I had no clue how much left we had to go, and just barely saw a microwave tower about 50 feet away. I guess we made it. some minor relaxation at the summit, with a hostess lemon pie (490 calories, $0.99) and about 10 minutes of christiaan trying to use his cell phone. we think the microwaves were either scrambling the cell signal waves or the operator brain waves. Then down to Lion Head. Definately different without the snow. The top part is pretty fast, but that nice flat snowfield from the split rock to the bottom is actually a tree-covered boulder field. and the stuff at the bottom is full of trees. weird. then out onto Lion Head and the barren rockiness we love. down some more to the summer route. not as exciting as the winter route, but very circuitous. then down the Tuckerman road, which was less rocky than expected. Down at Pinkham we were lucky enough to find some people leaving, and hitched a ride back to the car. then home to Boston. |