gwax's rumblings

Our camp­ing trip ended up being two days long instead of three and while parts of me are dis­ap­pointed, other parts are sore and glad to have woken up in a real bed. All in all, it doesn’t really mat­ter too much to me whether we went for one night or two, it just mat­ters that we went; I was glad to have some time rough­ing it and hang­ing out with some good friends.

The trip went pretty much like this: We left Sunday morn­ing at around 8:30a from MIT’s Random Hall. Taking I-93N to Ashland where we got onto US-3, which took us to NH-113, which in turn led to NH-113A, which led to Whiteface Intervale Road, off of which we found trail­head park­ing. Incidentally, the frost heaves on NH-113A are atro­cious (go too fast and you will likely kill your car). From trail­head, we took Flat Mountain Pond Trail up and into the Sandwich Range Wilderness. Hiking in was mod­er­ate at first with a packed trail but as the trail split, with one fork head­ing to Mount Whiteface and the other head­ing to Flat Mountain Pond, we were left with untouched snow. Snowshoeing on the unpacked snow is not bad at all but the trail started to gain in incli­na­tion and was mod­er­ately steep for a long while. At the end of day one, we were exhausted and camped a few hun­dred feet from the trail, near the north­east­ern shore of Flat Mountain Pond. After a night that got colder each of the three times I woke up, I found myself to be the first one awake after sun­rise. Being the first one awake, I decided to go about mak­ing a fire, which was fun and I man­aged with one match. Smalltime was the sec­ond per­son awake and he helped me gather some fire­wood. Eventually, every­one woke up, we gath­ered our stuff and set out. We were plan­ning to con­tinue along the Flat Mountain Pond Trail until what point as we felt like stop­ping, camp and fin­ish the next day but we ended up mak­ing it all the way back down on the sec­ond day. Making it down, we hopped in our vehi­cles and headed back, stop­ping at the Burger King in Ashland, NH as is tra­di­tional for these trips (and any­time I do any hik­ing in north­ern New Hampshire). Such was how the third annual spring break camp­ing trip went.

Now for the rest of spring break, I will spend a few days at home and then some time work­ing on my thesis.

This spring break will mark the Third Annual Misogynistic Camping Trip. Sam, Max, Hippo, Ian and I are going up to New Hampshire to be cold and “be men”. We will leave late Saturday, spend the night at Sam’s grand­par­ents’ place in North Conway and begin our hike early Sunday morn­ing. We will be in the moun­tains through late Tuesday and should be back in Massachusetts before Wednesday.

The rest of y’all can plan your lives (or vaca­tions) around that (or not).