gwax's rumblings

Before I get into the meat of this post, right now I’m eat­ing a Beef Stick and sharp ched­dar omelette and let me tell you, it’s fan­tas­tic. I’m mak­ing this stuff for break­fast next time I go camp­ing with the guys.

Anyway, yes­ter­day, I decided I’d set out to climb one of the White Mountains today. Taking a hike struck me as a good way to spend some time and try out my new snow­shoes (Xmas loot, kind of). I was look­ing through my list of good hikes that I want to take and I decided to try to get up Mount Moosilauke (there’s debate between whether it’s pro­nounced to rhyme with rock or rocky, but I pre­fer ponounc­ing it as though it ends in uh). The plan was to set out around 7a today, get to trail­head around 10a, reach sum­mit before 5p, turn around, camp at sun­set and fin­ish up tomor­row. That I’m writ­ing this now means I obvi­ously didn’t succeed.

The prob­lems began when I pressed snooze until 6:40a, then I had to go get some food for my trip so I ended up with set­ting out at the equiv­a­lent of 8a which put me at the trail­head around 11a. 11a was still a pretty rea­son­able start time by my fig­ur­ing but then between there being a whole bunch of snow, the trail up Moosilauke being really steep and me being plenty out of shape, I hiked woe­fully behind sched­ule. By 2:00p, I had made it up 2/3 of the ele­va­tion and 3/8 of the dis­tance, which gave me 3 hours to make it the rest of the way and find shel­ter. Figuring I wouldn’t make sum­mit before sun­down, I fig­ured I’d turn around, so as to be able to sleep in a proper bed tonight. Also, it was really cold up there (def­i­nitely <20°F, maybe <10°F but cer­tainly >0°F), which had me a lit­tle con­cerned that my 0°F sleep­ing bag might not cut it. So I took the safer approach and turned back.

Coming down, as is always the case, was mighty quick, tak­ing under an hour to cover the pre­vi­ous three’s dis­tance. Seeing as there was a whole ton and a half of snow, going down was a mix­ture of glis­sad­ing and ass slid­ing almost the whole way. Also, the steep­ness that had been a bother on the ascent made the descent fan­tas­ti­cally keen. I almost wish I’d brought a sled with me, though that’s prob­a­bly the sort of bad idea that would have tossed me off a cliff.

In sum­ma­tion: I’m fat and slow; Moosilauke is really steep; I like my new snowshoes.

Afternote: The high­light of the hike was the won­der­fully amus­ing sign on a privy by the shel­ters where I took lunch that read some­thing very nearly, ‘THERE IS NO “P” IN THIS RIVY USE THE WOODS’.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 9:43 pm and is filed under mountains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.