Trip Report

Summary
OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-02-26 22:29:17 UTC-0500
Description


Trip Report

"A skiers' paradise".
After 3 feet of snow-fall earlier in the week, that's how New England was described by the TV weatherman as we sat in the DDs in Glen on Saturday morning.
Our plan was to take the Glen Boulder trail from Pinkham Notch, then climb up and over Boott Spur to camp at Lakes of the Clouds.
The next day we'd climb Mt. Washington from the West and descend to Pinkham via Lion's Head.

We brought along 3 pairs of snowshoes in case of snow drifts, but expected that a relatively popular route such as this would already have been packed out.
It turned out that we were very wrong.
Alarm bells should have begun to ring on Friday night when it took us half an hour to follow Henry's post-holes from the Intervale parking lot to the cabin.
By the time we'd spent 10 exhausting minutes wading across the parking lot to get the the Glen Boulder trail-head on Saturday morning, the bells should have been deafening.

The problem with New England, of course, is the damn trees.
They're everywhere.
And they have a nasty habit of collecting the snow and obscuring your view.
There's no solution but to spend most of your day hiking up through the forest to get to the real fun on top.
(In more advanced parts of the world, such as Real England, the trees have been trained to grow only down in the valleys, leaving huge areas of tree-free playground within a short hike of the road, but not so here.)

Initially, the trail was relatively flat and the going wasn't too bad.
Stephanie, Stella and I wore the snowshoes and took turns at breaking trail, sinking more than a foot into the soft powder.
Behind us, Julien and Mathilde sunk another foot or so in their bare boots.
As the trail got steeper, however, the snow appeared deeper and the first pair of snowshoes would sink several feet.
It was exhausting work for those breaking trail and progress slowed from very slow to a snail's pace.
As we approached tree-line, the snow became firmer and we encountered short stretches of snow on which the snowshoes could float.
This made things much easier for those with snowshoes, but Julien and Mathilde would post-hole to their chests at every step.

All in all it took us 6 hours to cover the mile of trail from the parking lot to tree-line.
We were all tired and the final section had exhausted Julien and Mathilde.
It may well have been a skiers' paradise, but a hikers' paradise it was not.

Above the trees, we moved over the ice and rocks with what seemed like lightening speed, and after negotiating a 100yd stretch of scrub with head deep drifts, we arrived at Glen Boulder just as the sun sank below the horizon.
Half an hour later, we were on the flatter part of the ridge where the trail re-enters the forest.
We dug out a couple of tent spots in the scrub and pitched the tents as darkness fell.

Our location was spectacular, with almost perfectly clear skies and very little wind.
Dinner was noodles with chopped vegetables, cheese and sausage, after which we spent a few hours melting snow for water for the next day.
We watched the stars, drank hot chocolate and headed to bed.

We woke on Sunday to cloudy skies and few inches of new snow.
However, the winds were light and the clouds would occasionally lift, offering great views of Mt. Washinton in the sun.
From our camp ground the trail headed through the forest for a mile before emerging on the ridge leeading to Boott Spur.
From there we'd remain above the trees all day, and we were confident that the going would be good, but we didn't savor the prospect of another mile through the trees like the one that had taken us most of the previous day.

While the others collapsed the tents, I took an exploratory trip to assess conditions in the trees.
Without a pack, the going was relatively easy and I managed to break out the trail for several hundred yards before returning.
Stephanie, Stella and I decided to try our luck in the snow, but Julien's knee was complaining after yesterday's post-holing, so he and Mathilde headed down.

The trek through the trees turned out to be not too bad and we were on the ridge within a couple of hours.
From there we made great progress up to Boott Spur and around the head of Tuckerman's Ravine in thick cloud, arriving at the junction with the Lion's Head trail around 1pm.
Having seen nobody else for the past day and a half it was quite a shock to see a steady stream of hikers making their way up towards the summit of Mt. Washington!
We'd pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that we wouldn't have enough time to make it to the top, and our legs were tired after some strenuous hiking, but this was too great a temptation to resist.
We joined the line on the well-trodden trail up the summit cone and were soon part of the crowd on top.

The descent was uneventful, except for some excellent butt-sliding on the Lion's Head trail and 15 minutes standing in line at the Hillary Step, which was made significantly more difficult by the recent snow.
We continued down to Pinkham, retrieved the car and headed to Pizza Hut to abuse the bottomless salad bar.

Steve