Mt. Passaconway Adventure

I have been really bad about posting my hiking adventures here, but since I'm riding in the car back to Boston where the other two participants are driving and I can't think of much to say to the driver, I'm going to recount our adventures today.

This is the fourth weekend (Sunday) of Winter School 2012 and I'm nominally a leader, but I only led one trip this time around. This Sunday I wanted to hike Mt. Washington, but I signed up 3 minutes too late and had to be cut from the trip. So instead I went on my first winter bushwack at Mt. Passaconaway. The group was 9 big - 2 MIT undergrad leaders, 2 MIT undergrads, 1 MEng, 1 Northeastern undergrad, 1 MIT alum, and 1 BU grad student. This was easily the trip with the most undergrads I've ever been on during winter school.

Ben and John, our leaders, had been on an abandonded slide trail on Mt. Passaconaway this past fall that ran through a bunch of waterfalls. Of course they thought this would be awesome to see in the winter! So after leaving Boston at 5am and waiting at Dunkin Donuts for more than an hour while one of the cars dealt with a flat tire, we hit the trail around 9:30am.

We started up the Downes Brook Trail, eventually looking for a drainage that would lead to part of the abandonded trail. We had 4 stream crossing bushwacks we had to go and about 3 miles before we were supposed to hit the slide trail. Fortunately, the Sorel boots are super waterproof and there were no mishaps, so we found the drainage after a beautiful 2-hour hike. And when we started hiking up the drainage we put on our crampons and took out our ice axes to walk up the waterfalls. The view was gorgeous - every 100 feet or so therr would be a 50 degree crampon/scramble and then a small clearing featuring a beautiful frozen waterfall. In most cases, the water underneath the frozen waterfall was still flowing.

We hiked up another few hours, until we hit the split in the drainage. At this point it was 1:30 so we decided to turn around, but wlif we had kept going would have taken the right fork straight up to the summit of Mt. Passaconaway. My first winter bushwack was successful and fun. I definitely want to go back in the winter to bushwack up to the summit!

Liberty Trail

For Winter School 2011 at MIT this winter, I went on a trip to Mount Liberty. Of the 10 people in the group (including 2 winter school leaders), there was 1 doctor, 2 EMTs, 2 WAFA, and 3 WFA. We were easily the trip with the most medical professionals on the trip that weekend.

The trip itself was fantastic - the morning started out cold. Somewhere around 5C. At the peak of Liberty, it was perhaps -10C. Thankfully, the weather was mostly clear. We could see about 270 degrees around the peak. We summited around 1:15pm and thought about doing Flume and coming back down the same trail. Instead, we decided to turn around.

But we were prepared. The ninja turtles that we were, we were each carrying a sled on our packs. Most of us had 2-foot-in-diameter hard green plastic sleds (courtesy of MITOC) that we sat down on as soon as we got below treeline again and slid down the Liberty Trail. It was the best trail to slide down on. I think I hit every single snowbank on my way down, but we easily slid 3 miles downhill on the sleds. No iceaxe was needed - just use your boots and hands!

The entire trip took about 7 hours go to ~8 miles, including spending some time at the summit and sledding down the whole way. I highly recommend this hike - bring at least 2.5 L of water for a winter hike!