New Hampshire Climbing Guide -- Mountaineering Instructor -- Member of The North Face Climbing Team

My buddy Mats is a sick puppy. Earlier this winter I started getting emails about his plan to try and break the record for climbing all of New Hampshire’s 4000ers in winter. I think the previous record is something like nine days – Mats plan was to get them all done in eight long days. There are 48 peaks over 4000 feet in New Hampshire and all told you’re looking at about 230 miles. Sounds like a lot of fun, huh? The most important thing for Mats was obviously the weather and trail conditions. He initially set the date for mid February but was forced to push it back after the Valentine’s Day nor’easter dropped two feet of snow in the north country. Mats inquired several times whether I’d be able to help and initially I was lucky enough to be booked for ice guiding. Then as fate would have it, Mats pushed back the start date to March 7th and I had a cancellation that day. I was now available and without realizing what I was getting myself into, I emailed Mats to offer my support. He jumped on it, and just like that I was signed up to join him for the first day which he had decided would be the Presidential Traverse. Believe it or not, I had never done a Presi Traverse in summer or winter and I had always dreamed of doing it on a day. As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

I left my house at 3am and met Mats at the parking area at the top of Crawford Notch. We stashed my car to pick up at the end and then continued to the Appalachia trailhead on route 2 in Jefferson. I think we started hiking around 4:18am. I had debated a lot with myself about strategy for the traverse. In fact, my first plan was to do it on skis. Mats was skeptical, but I had myself convinced I could do it. Luckily, I called a fellow guide friend who had done the traverse recently and he convinced me that the ridge itself was severely windblown, icy and rocky. So if not skis, how about snowshoes? Mats was planning to use snowshoes, and in fact his plan was to use a new system from a company called Kahtoola that uses a neoprene overboot, with built in traction, which you wear right over a regular running or hiking shoe. The overboot is designed to lock into a special super lightweight snowshoe. In the end I decided to go kind of old school, with nothing but a lightweight pair of leather ice climbing boots, well broken in pair of La Sportiva Trango’s. I had previously used them in the Canadian Rockies to approach the north face of North Twin, over Whooly Shoulder, and I was relatively confident that they could handle the mileage without giving me blisters. For traction I brought a pair of Kahtoola lightweight aluminum crampons. They don’t have frontpoints, and have a strap system that will work on any hiking boot, sneaker or even rock shoe. I decided not to be bring snowshoes. More on that fateful decision to come.

The trail was nicely packed and Mats and I made good time to the Madison Hut where we stashed our packs and then dashed up to the summit of Adams. It was the first 4000er of the quest and Mats shocked me by getting down and doing 10 pushups. Not sure why, but this was part of his plan: ten pushups on every summit. We then made great time up to Adams and then over to Jefferson. On the summit of Jefferson and I decided to put on the Kahtoolas because the trail was getting heavily rimed and I was starting to waste time trying to find ways around the ice patches. The Kahtoola crampons are great in that I couldn’t even really feel them on my feet.

Up until this point the winds had been mostly mellow. The sun was shining and the temperature was probably somewhere in the 20s. The trail was packed and conditions were perfect. From Jefferson to Clay and then up to the summit of Washington we had to start working for it as the wind got steady at 30-40 mph with the occasional gust up to 50mph. This is not even close to extreme for Mt. Washington but when you’re buffeted by winds like this steady for 1 ½ hours it starts to take it out of you. We straggled our way up onto the summit around noon. It had taken us about eight hours to do the northern Presidentials, a distance of about 11 miles. I think it was lucky that I hadn’t done it before because I kind of figured the rest would be a cruise. Now that I know how far it is from Washington on down it will be harder next time

For food I brought five corned beef sandwiches and two seafood salad sandwiches. In addition I had about eight Clif shots, three quarts of water and a pint size thermos of coffee. I was not suffering. Morale would definitely spike during and shortly after I wolfed down each sandwich.

The bizarre thing is that while the wind had been quite strong between Washington and Jefferson, there was almost nothing for wind as we headed down to the Lake of the Clouds. We never really had a problem with wind for the rest of the trip. Everything went well for us until we got the Pierce. I think this is where most people end the traverse. Just below the summit of Pierce you can jump on the Crawford Path and it is about 3 miles down to Crawford Notch. Mats, because he was trying to do all the 4000ers, needed to add on Mt. Jackson. According to my calculations this adds approximately three miles to the normal 21. The problem is that almost everyone does go down the Crawford Path so the track leading across to Jackson was just a narrow not often trod snowshoe path. I knew something was wrong when Mats asked “if I’d mind” if he put on his snowshoes. He did carry them the whole way and hadn’t put them on yet, so I couldn’t blame him. After a rest at the Mitzpah Hut we set off on the final leg to Jackson and almost immediately I began breaking through the track. If I was lucky and I stepped on just the right spot I could keep myself from going in past the top of my boot. But every so often I’d break through deeper, up to the knee, or even thigh. These were some happy moment for me for sure, to be going in up to my thigh on mile 21 of the day.

There had been a storm brewing all day, we had watched the sheets of rain flowing across the landscape to the north of us. Just as we were summiting Jackson it finally reached us and we soon found ourselves in the fog and rain. We dropped down the Webster Jackson trail which deposited us not 100 yards from the car at about 6:18. We had done 24 miles and nine summits in 14 hours, and Mats had done ten pushups on every one. Now he only had seven more days in a row to go.

I dropped Mats at his car, wished him luck and headed home. The next day I woke up and I was sore. I went skiing at wildcat with my kids that afternoon. While we were there I looked up at the Wildcat Ridge heading over to the Carters and on to Moriah and thought about Mats, who was up there doing another 19 mile day. He continued to crank out the miles and bag peaks for the next four days, but on day six he ran into major flooding on the Kinsmans that turned a small creek into a raging impassable slush river. Here’s an excerpt from the email he sent out that night when he got back to his hotel:

“Had to get up Kinsmans (22,23) today to have a shot at the record. Started to see some bad signs in less than a mile from the hut. Tiny creeks had swollen up and sometimes taken it's own course through the woods causing several feet of slush. Went through some of them but then I hit a main obstacle and decided to turn back since I was alone. I met Bob and Gordon (see winterhiking.org) and decided to join forces with them. We made it passed the portion I turned back at but 300 feet further it looked like the floodgates of hell had opened up. None of us felt like swimming in slush so we called it a day.”

One thing I can say about Mats is that he’s the type of guy who would have kept going if it was at all possible. He is already talking about making this an annual event, including my participation in the first day. I can’t wait.

Otherwise, the main news out of the Mt. Washington Valley is that ice season is basically over. I heard that people are still doing a little bit of climbing in Huntington. Today would have been a decent day actually because the temperature dropped into the single digits last night and as it had been warm the day before everything froze up super solid. Great for climbing, horrible if you want to ski in Tucks. That said, I don’t think I could recommend climbing in Huntington right now. I got a look at it from Wildcat recently and it looked like it had taken a severe beating. In late season the ice can be kind of dangerous up there with ice dams, unbonded ice, falling rocks, etc. And that’s about it for the valley. You could maybe have a look at Standard Route at Frankenstein if you were really desperate, but again, I think this would be a mistake. The ice season is over. Grab your rock shoes instead and head for the crags. Sundown is always dry early season, and there are certainly many spots at Cathedral and Whitehorse where you can find dry rock early season. If the temps are in the 40 or 50s and the sun is out, there is good cragging to be had in this valley. I’m heading out in the morning to check it out myself.

More news on the conditions at Cathedral to follow….