Day 1: May 31, 2007

Plan: Meet somewhere in Concord, NH and take one car from there up into the white Mountains. Ascend Mt. Lafayette via the Greenleaf Trail, and then continue along the ridge, via the Garfield Ridge Trail/AT. Make camp as far along the ridge as possible. As it turned out, that was just to the Garfield Ridge Campsite, and we still barely made it there before pitch blackness set in!

The day's walk: 7.5 miles (over rocky terrain with over 4300 vertical feet upward and 1800 downward)

Given that the total elevation change seemed less than last year's trip, overall, I didn't think 10-11 miles a day would be unreasonable. Looking back now at my packed trunk before the trip, it seems so naïve!

The parking lot at Canon Mountain was cold, grey, and rainy, so I wisely decided to abandon my fleece sleeping bag for my warmer 0° bag, even though it is considerably heavier. Dan put on a sweatshirt and I put on my rain jacket and new pack cover. It was going to be a wet day.

We roamed across the parking lot and bike path for about five minutes in the wrong direction before I decided to pull out the guidebook from my pack and check the actual route to the trailhead. That was the first, minor I lesson learned about planning! We had hoped to hit the trail by 10am, but it was actually more like 11:00.

First photo of the trip: a tree whose core seemed to have slipped out of the bark and fallen.

I hung with Dan for about half an hour or 45 minutes, chatting enthusiastically while hiking up the mountain. After a little while, though, my muscles started to wear out, so I slowed down and fell behind.

I always used to think that my issues with hiking UP mountains simply had to do with my being very out of shape. Recently, though, I learned that I have Thalassemia Minor—a genetic form of anemia that causes my body to produce slightly small, low-density red blood cells, which thus makes me less efficient at supplying my muscles with oxygen. That might explain why I have relatively low endurance, even taking into account my fitness. So that just means that I should be in even better shape than most people would need to be to keep a certain pace.

And that was lesson #2 in planning.

Because I had slowed down so much, I came upon this beautiful scene by myself

As you can tell, I didn't stop to take very careful photos. My camera has (I learned on this trip) excellent weather sealing, so wetness was not my main concern. More importantly, when you stop while hiking, it takes a LOT of energy to get started again, and you often end up being stopped a lot longer than you'd hoped. I didn't want to lose momentum, and thus fall even more behind!

I had to take a moment to photograph this tree, though.

I think this is part of Eagle Cliff, and I'm sure the view would be much more dramatic if the weather had been nicer!

At about 2.7 miles (see map) of the 3.8 to the peak, there is the AMC Greenleaf Hut. Having no idea how close I might be to the hut, I eventually stopped due to exhaustion and had some lunch: trail mix, cheese, crispbread, dried papaya, chocolate chips, and water. After about 20 minutes of sitting there, I was getting very cold, since I'd been sweating while hiking even though the temperature was probably somewhere in the low 50s.

Within five minutes of starting again, I saw Dan coming down the trail toward me. Apparently I was only about 10 minutes from the Hut when I stopped! Inside there was hot chocolate, fresh water, benches, and perhaps most importantly, shelter from the weather.

What amazes me most about these huts is the amount of convenience that has been made possible with NO ROADS. While we were resting here, two of the hut crew walked in with building materials strapped to their backs. All the supplies are hiked in from the road (though I'd bet the giant stoves and ovens were at one point delivered by helicopter... though since these huts have been around for 70 years or more, who knows!).

After the hut, we continued to ascend, and got closer to the tree line. Here's a sample of the alpine vegetation:

And eventually we were past the tree-line, in fact well up over 5000 feet!

Being in the clouds, sometimes I could barely see to the next cairn to follow the trail. I was drawn a bit off-course by this rock formation and spring as I neared the top of Lafayette.

At some point while traversing the exposed rock, my pack cover had come off most of the way and was just clinging onto my sleeping bag at the top of the pack, whipping in the wind. Not wanting to stop, unmount the pack, fix it, lift the pack back up, and get up momentum again, I ignored it and just kept walking.

I was sad to notice a bunch of trash along the way: a bread bag tie, a piece of string, a tiny bit of wrapper from a granola bar, several small pieces of white gum... a flip-flop. Wait... that's Dan's flip-flop! It had come loose a while ago when we were hiking together, so it must have fallen off without him noticing. I picked it up for him and kept going.

Eventually I saw the sign at the summit, and saw Dan's pack sitting there, but with no trace of Dan.

He heard my pack cover flapping in the wind, though, and called up to me from a crevasse below. We sat down there, out of the wind, for a few minutes. Dan pointed out that my hands were all white and yellow from poor circulation and cold. It was already 3:30 and we'd only gone 3.8 miles, so we had to get moving right away. Fortunately, going down is much easier for me because the anemia doesn't seem to be much of a factor, and I'm lucky enough to have decent joints. So Dan and I hiked together again for the next couple miles as we climbed back down 1500 feet.

We saw a LOT of snow up in the mountains. It was great to walk on, actually—much softer than the intensely rocky terrain that dominates the white mountains (which slowed both of us down and took a bigger toll on our feet than we'd anticipated... as you'll see more of later!).

Shortly after this picture, I started getting VERY tired. As we continued up and down along the rocky ridge between Lafayette and Garfield I began talking a lot less, and generally feeling not quite there mentally; I just sort of slowly and quietly plodded on. It was also gradually getting darker and darker. I kept wishing we could find a place to camp just off the trail, and not try to push on over Mt. Garfield to the next campsite because I was worried I'd either collapse from exhaustion, or we'd be hiking until long past dark. But there was NO decent place to make camp. Fortunately, Dan stuck back with me and told me when to stop and eat, what to eat, and when to get up and keep moving. He also kept me distracted from worrying, by finding things to talk about even though I mostly just had the energy to listen. He pushed me on to the top of Mt. Garfield, where I celebrated for all of three seconds before turning and heading down the other side. Without Dan's help, I don't know how or even if I would have made it to the campsite that night.

But we did make it, around 9pm, just as visibility was nearing zero. There were two large groups of hikers who had been held up here since the day before, and they were using the shelter and most of the tent platforms. We found a nice large platform, though, and hung our stuff in the shelter in the hopes that it would dry out a little.

We cooked dinner over our soda-can stoves (which we had made the previous weekend when we were both at my in-laws' house) by flashlight. I boiled up some rice pasta, and drained the water into a cup of instant mashed potatoes. I seasoned the pasta and potatoes with lots of shredded parmesan, a little garlic salt, and some oregano. The pasta came out a little undercooked, but after what I'd just come through to get there, it tasted like the best meal I've had in a long, long time.

Immediately after washing our dishes, we went to bed. It rained hard and thundered—sometimes violently—all night, but we stayed mostly dry in the tent—though a little water did leak in near the foot and dampen Dan's down sleeping bag, because a tiny corner of the tarp was left poking out from beneath the tent.