| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2007-01-20 13:31:43 UTC-0500 |
| Description | After spending a full zero day at the Highland center waiting out dangerous above-treeline weather (and working on internship applications), we decided we had to keep hiking, even if it wasn't exactly following the Appalachian Trail. Instead of hiking over the exposed southern presidentials we planned to cut through the dry-river wilderness below treeline and end up near pinkham notch. That morning's weather report vindicated our decision - Washington was at -31F with -80F windchill. It was about -15F down where we were hiking but that was no problem below treeline out of the wind. What proved to be most difficult about the day was breaking trail. I bet no one had touched that trail since the first snow fell last month, so we were slogging through 3 feet of it. To make matters worse, the trails were so unmaintained we were crawling over or under a downed tree at least every 5 minutes. Luckily we had only planned on going 8 or 9 miles that day, to a level sheltered spot just below boot spur, and finished hiking around 2:30pm.
Now we had seen the forecast and knew it would probably drop to -10 or -20 that night at our elevation, so we had to find some way to stay really warm. We both knew exactly what to do - build a snow shelter! With so many hours left in the day and 3 ft of snow on the ground it was no problem, even using our snowshoes as makeshift shovels. Building the shelter also kept us warm by keeping us active, and was a lot more fun than just doing jumping jacks all night. We even develpoded a highly-efficient technique for digging out the shelter: the person inside piles the snow on a sleeping pad, and then the outside person pulls out the pad and removes the snow. Inside the relatively warm snow shelter we then listened to our weather radio and planned out a possible summit attempt on washington the next morning. |