Overnight : Playing on Mt. Washington

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OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-02-05 11:50:24 UTC-0500
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Playing on Mt. Washington
February 3rd & 4th 2007
Steve Block, Christiaan Adams, Stephanie Waterman, Erik Deutsch, Kenny Cheung, Maria Banica, Julien Beccherle, Mathilde Lerminiaux, Aaron Yahr & Stella Nordhagen


This was the last weekend of Winter School 2007 and we had grand ambitions.
We had planned to hike up into one of the ravines on Saturday to play in the snow and practice some snow climbing and self-arrest techniques.
We were then to spend the night at the Harvard Cabin before heading up to the summit on Sunday, via Hillman's Highway in Tucks.

Sadly, the weather didn't want to cooperate.
The forecast called for cold air and lots of wind, giving a wind-chill of -60*F on the summit.
Worse still, the recent snowfall, followed by low temperatures and westerly winds had raised avalanche danger in both ravines.
Sitting in the DDs in Geln on Saturday morning, the weather didn't seem to bad, and since playing in the ravines was out, we decided to head up Lion's Head and see how far we could get.

Due to our last-minute change of plan, we started late from Pinkham, but made good time up the Huntingdon Ravine trail.
The wind raged above us, but skies were relatively clear and we were soon at the Harvard cabin.
We dumped our overnight gear, back-tracked to the Lion's Head trail, and started up.
The 'Hillary Step' seemed to be missing a couple of key roots, which made for a couple of exciting moves, but again we made good time.

Given the wind lower down the mountain, conditions on the Alpine Garden were surprisingly pleasant and we pushed on towards Lion's Head.
Here, however, we began to slow, and it soon became clear that we simply didn't have enough hours of daylight to make it to the top.
We reached the split rocks on the summit cone, admired the great views over to Wildcat and down into Tucks, and turned around.

We'd negotiated the steep parts of the Lion's Head trail (with only one long unintentional slide!) by dark and arrived at the Harvard Cabin soon thereafter.
Dinner was pasta with everything in it, followed by a huge tub of cookies.
Delicious.
We spent the evening melting snow and reading old climbing magazines, and headed to bed early.

The next day we were up before the caretaker, cooked breakfast and waited for the avalnche service guys to arrive.
His assessment meant that conditions on Hillman's Highway were still too dangerous for us, so we decided to head up Boott Spur, with the possibility of continuing on to the summit.

The Boott Spur link was steep with deep, unbroken snow, so progress was slow and tiring.
Once at treeline we headed up into the wind.
Just as on Saturday, conditions were exciting, but surprisingly tollerable given the horrendous forecast.
We reached a minor summit on the ridge but decided it was time to turn around: we were simply moving too slowly for safe travel in such conditions.
We slid back down the Boot Spur Link in no time and by 11am were outside the Tucks lodge.
By this point, most people were pretty tired, and satisfied with a great weekend, decided to head down to Pinkham.

Stella, Steph and I were still keen to play with ice axes, so we headed up into Tucks for some non-Winter School fun.
We met the avalanche service dudes in the base of the ravine and discussed some safe options for a snow slope for self-arrest practice.
We settled on a steep patch beneath the butress between Right Gully and Right of Right Gully, which had avoided the recent wind-loading.
The only problem was that the obvious routes to the snowfield was in the runout of the gullies, so a direct approach was called for.
It took an hour of hard work top reach the snowfield - swimming uphill through head-deep powder, and jumping from scrub to scrub.
However, the clouds had now lifted and the views out into the ravine were awesome.

We carved out a run in the soft snow and began sliding down in every position imaginable, with varied success in coming to rest in a controlled fashion.
After a couple of hours we'd managed to get the snow down into all of our layers of clothing, so we slid down to the ravine floor and hiked out.

Steve