Taking Flight

For this hike, I was supposed to hike with my friend Sylvia and a friend of hers. However, the weather reports were showing extremely cold conditions for this day. Mountain Forecast had wind chills of -20 to -30 degrees at the summit. Sylvia wisely decided that discretion is the better part of valor and backed out. I considered backing out as well, but I had hiked Cabot before, and one thing I knew about Cabot is that it's in tree cover for the entire hike. That means no views, but it also means no wind. I figured that if the trees were blocking the wind, then they would also block the wind chill, and I would only have to deal with the temperatures. The temperatures were cold, in the single digits, but that's well within expectations for a winter hike. Cabot is the northernmost 4000 footer in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It's an uninteresting mountain with the lack of views, but I had to finish it if I wanted to finish my list of winter 4000 footers. I had an inter...

 I always knew that completing the New Hampshire 48 (all the 4000 footers in NH) during winter was going to be a challenge. There were going to be backpacking trips involved for places like the Bonds and Owl's Head. There were going to be tough conditions above tree line for a number of peaks. However, the mountain that always stood foremost in my mind was Mt. Washington. It is the tallest mountain in New England, standing over 6000 feet. Three weather systems converge on top of the mountain, which is why its weather is infamously bad. I knew that there were very few days in an average winter when Mt. Washington was climbable. If I got a chance at one, I had to grab it. Thus, when I saw that January 9 was forecast to have temperatures in the 20s and winds no worse than 30 mph at the Washington summit, I knew I had to take my chance. For most anywhere else, those would be pretty crappy conditions, but for Mt. Washington that's about as good as it gets, especially in winter. Mt. ...

Hi there, and welcome to my hiking blog! My name is Hawk, and let me tell you a little about myself. I live in Maine, and I do most of my hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I started hiking seriously in 2017, and in the time since then I have hiked every 4000 foot mountain in New England, many of them multiple times. I have also hiked every mountain on New Hampshire's 52 With a View list (I actually ended up hiking 57 because they changed the list when I was halfway finished), as well as the entire Belknap Range and most of the Osceola range. Currently I am working on finishing up hiking all forty-eight 4000 foot mountains in New Hampshire in winter, a quest which I am four peaks away from finishing. I have done quite a bit of backpacking over the past few years as well. My first backpacking experience was thru-hiking the Long Trail in Vermont, starting at the southern border and finishing up at the Canadian border in the north. That took me three weeks to do. Since th...