| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2007-01-28 21:22:05 UTC-0500 |
| Description |
Mt. Washington 1/27/2007 Up: Tuckerman's Ravine Trail to Right Gully Down: Lion's Head Chris Glazner, Mike Whitson, Mike Scharfstein Trip Report: After a day where temperatures on the summit reached -30*F with wind chills of -75*F, we were happy to wake up to a calm, balmy day with temps in the negative singles, reaching the positive teens during the day. After stopping at DD and redistributing gear at Pinkham, we started on the trail around 8am. We decided to keep a pretty relaxed pace to stay dry. The original plan was to circumnavigate the Gulf of Slides, but because of the beautiful day we decided to make an attempt at the summit. We were planning to take Lion's Head up, but when we got to Tuckerman's Ravine it beckoned and we could not resist. There were plenty of hikers on the trails by this point. One of them, Sam Patterson, befriended us and stuck with use for most of the trip. He took some of the nice photos below. There was a good amount of snow in the ravine, but Chris's skiing habits clearly hoped for more. We decided to ascend Right Gully and seemed to be the first ones up it in a while since there were no tracks to be seen. We had to carefully choose our path, since avalanche danger was on the upper end of moderate. Chris dug a several small snow pits and found a few slab instabilities to avoid. We crossed the entrance to the gully one at a time to minimize our exposure, and then moved onto the far right side of the gully in the vegetation. Other parties took extremely risky ascents up the sluice in the center of the gully, and were extremely close together. Fortunately for those parties, nothing slid that day. As we topped out over the ridge, winds increased, but it was still great weather by Washington standards. We made our way up to the summit by around 2pm to find it in the clouds. Due to a temperature inversion it was actually warmer there than at the base, but the winds sure didn't make that obvious. After some mandatory summit pictures and a quick snack we headed back down via Lion's Head since it was already getting late. On our way down the sun peaked out of the clouds for some great views of the spurs and Wildcat. The trail was very well traveled above and below treeline by this time of day so we were able to haul ass. We arrived at Pinkham Notch a little after 4pm tired and happy. |