Washington and Jefferson (1/9/21)

 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. Jefferson is another peak near Mt. Washington that is no slouch itself (being 5700 feet tall), and I thought about linking them together to save me the separate climb up Jefferson. However, the combined hike would be 12 miles with 5000 feet of elevation gain, so it wasn't likely to be an easy thing. I went back and forth for the entire week about whether to add in Jefferson or just hike Washington.

When I got to the parking lot, it was snowing and I was skeptical about what the conditions were going to be like higher up. At this point I was pretty sure that I was only going to hike Washington, so I made the boneheaded decision to save some weight and leave some food in the car rather than take it up the mountain with me. I needed the extra food to get to Jefferson, but I could handle Washington without it.

The Cog Railway which runs up the west side of Mt. Washington follows the Ammonoosuc Ravine up the mountain. The trail I was taking, the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail (the Ammo), went up the ridge on the south side of the ravine. As I got to hiking, it was certainly cold, but no worse than most of my other winter hikes. As I usually do, I started passing groups of people with some regularity.

What happened next was one of those embarrassing incidents that I am quite frankly surprised that I have never had happen before now, given how much I hike. I came around a corner in the trail, and their was a lady with her pants down, having stopped to relieve herself but not gotten far enough off the trail. I turned my head in the other direction and hiked by as quickly as I could, hoping to preserve some of both of our dignity.

Eventually I came to the pool that I knew from previous experience marks the point where the Ammo turns from relatively pleasant to extremely strenuous. I gritted my teeth and started up. It was hard climbing, but with occasional rest breaks I was able to eventually make it to the Hilde Step.

I should point out that I am probably the only person who uses the Hilde Step as a landmark. Back in the winter of 2018, I was hiking the Ammo with a group of people from the Random Group of Hikers, one of whom was named Hilde, and so we named this particular feature of the Ammo after her. It marks the point where the Ammo starts to ascend up some frozen cascades and becomes quite hard to follow. I was very cautious in this section because my Hillsound spikes weren't biting into the ice as well as I would have hoped, and I was beginning to wonder if I should have brought my full crampons (boot attachments with very heavy spikes).

I made it through the frozen cascades without incident, and got within sight of my first goal, the Lake of the Clouds hut. As I did, I met another hiker who had stopped by the edge of the trail for a moment. I pulled over, and he asked me if I had seen a group of ladies with a dog not too far back. I told him that I had, and I assumed that meant that he was hiking with them, though that turned out not to be the case. Once he got moving again, I fell in line behind him, and we ended up hiking together to the Lake of the Clouds hut.

He was a cool guy, a programmer named Mark, and I was glad that I bumped into him. I always like having a hiking partner if they can keep a decent pace, which Mark certainly could. We complemented each other well with our hiking skills. Mark was a good pace setter, and I knew the terrain and the directions, so I was able to keep him on track. He was also a good conversationalist, and he possessed a skill that is rare in hikers, the ability to project his voice so that he could be heard even if you were hiking behind him. We would end up hiking together the rest of the day.

Once we passed Lake of the Clouds, we started up Washington itself. The going was not super tough, but obviously not super easy either. As we climbed, the clouds started to break up a bit and we actually saw some blue sky, which was beautiful.

Near the summit, we ran into two hikers coming down. They had come from the Gulfside Trail, which is where I would need to go if I wanted to summit Jefferson. They told us that the wind was really howling across Gulfside. That kind of reinforced the idea in my head that this was probably going to be a Washington only day.

Eventually, Mark and I summited Washington. We took the obligatory pictures on top of the summit rock, and we wandered around the summit buildings a bit. Those summit buildings are pretty incredible, covered in stone and lashed down with roof chains. They have to be, as the winds on top of Mt. Washington are no joke. They regularly get up to 100 mph, and the world's wind speed record was recorded on top of Mt. Washington in 1934. The gust was 231 mph! That record stood for almost a century before it was broken by a tropical cyclone off Australia.

On this day, however, the winds were relatively calm on top of Washington. As Mark and I stopped for a snack, we debated what to do. The conditions on top of Washington weren't nearly as bad as I expected, and so I was learning towards going to Jefferson. Mark was a bit more cautious, but he wanted to get Jefferson too, so we ultimately decided to go for it. One of the things that helped our decision was that I knew that we had a bailout point at the Jewell Trail if we needed it.

We descended from the summit of Washington and headed towards the Gulfside Trail. There was no blue sky here. We couldn't see down into the Great Gulf at all because it was all covered in fog. That might have been a good thing, though, because walking along the Gulfside Trail can be a little like standing on top of a tall building. You know you're not going to fall, but it still kicks the fear of heights in a little bit.

The guys we had met on the way up Washington weren't lying to us, though. The winds were fierce across Gulfside. I tried to make sure that I always had at least three points of contact with the ground between my feet and my poles. There was at least one point where I thought about crouching down to reduce my profile against some of the gusts. Once we made it across the Great Gulf, the winds died down a bit, thankfully.

Mark was dressed in appropriate gear for being above treeline, with goggles and a face covering above winter layers. Me? I had a headband, and I was wearing a rain jacket on top of a base layer on top, and then summer hiking pants above a base layer on bottom. Mark was amazed that I wasn't freezing, but I really can't cover up much more than that or I start to overheat quickly. I have what I call The Furnace, which is a metabolism that runs so hot and burns calories so fast that it can actually cause problems when I am summer hiking. It can be a serious advantage for winter hiking, though.

Mark and I were treated to some great views whenever the clouds broke as we traversed the Gulfside trail, though we did run into a problem. Apparently no one else had come this way to Jefferson in a while, and so the trail wasn't broken out. That meant that we were post-holing in the snow more often than we would like to. Unfortunately, the brunt of this fell on Mark, as he was in the lead, and so I was able to work around his missteps.

We made it through, though, and eventually found our way to Jefferson. The mountain was a series of false summits, as we kept thinking we were almost there, only to find that we still had a ways to go. Mark eventually made the wise decision to drop his pack and then pick it up on the way back down. I didn't do that only because I thought that one of us should have a pack available if we ran into trouble in the conditions. We did eventually summit Jefferson, and we were both ecstatic. We both had a lot of doubts as the day went on as to whether we would be able to get there, but there we were, sharing in the joy of having summited two of the three highest mountains in New Hampshire on the same (winter) day.

Once we finished at Jefferson, we needed to double back to the Jewell Trail. The Jewell runs down the north side of Ammonoosuc Ravine, and so it would take us right back to the same parking lot that we both started from. I'm not going to lie, the beginning of the Jewell was difficult, for two reasons. First of all, the trail was rocky and hard to follow. Second, the boneheaded decision I made earlier in the day came back to haunt me. I hadn't taken enough food, and so even though I was rationing it, I was out. I needed to make it down the rest of the way using whatever energy I had. There would be no recharge. Given how fast The Furnace burns calories, that was potentially a big problem. On the plus side, we were going downhill, so The Furnace wasn't running nearly as hot.

We were both moving quickly, hoping to make it below tree line and get to better trail. We had another reason for moving quickly. We were running out of light. We knew that we weren't going to beat sunset, and we both had headlamps if we needed them, but we hoped to make the daylight last as long as possible. Of course, once we got below tree line, that inherently made it darker, so it was something of a double edged sword.

By the time we got to the point where we only had less than a mile to go, we were basically out of light and we were just using the glow of the snow to navigate. I suggested to Mark that we should use the headlamps, but he wasn't crazy about the idea of stopping to fish them out. I pointed out that we would be able to hike much faster if we had the headlamps and we could see obstacles clearly, and he saw the wisdom in my idea. From that point on, we were able to make good time. There was one last uphill that annoyed us both, but it wasn't anything serious and we conquered it. Before long, we were back at our cars. I said goodbye to Mark. I did get Mark's number, and I hope to get the chance to hike with him again someday.

Thanks for reading, and always remember, you can't take flight until you spread your wings.