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

I have been trooping around in the hills pretty much non-stop since my last dispatch and have just been too tired to crank one of these things out. Today was my first day of hanging out at home in weeks so I figured I should finally motivate. What a wild winter it has been. The big news right now is that as I write this it is -30F on the top of Mt. Washington. This morning we bottomed out at -37F. And today was March 6th. I think they said on the their web site that it was the coldest day they’ve had up there since 2004 – not exactly what you’d expect for March. And all this stands in such stark contrast to what it was like earlier in the winter.

Look back to my first dispatch. We actually hit 69 degrees in NH the first week of January. It was so warm around Christmas that every single patch of ice in the valley fell down. At that point I was seriously wondering if this winter was even going to happen. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the jet stream took a shift to the south. Earlier in the winter the jet stream had been pushed further north than normal which was blocking out all the cold canadian air and letting in all the warm southern air. I’m not sure but I believe that the course of the jet stream has something to do with ocean currents and things like El Nino. Could the shift of the jet stram have to do with the switch from El Nino to La Nina? I wish I knew. The bottom line is that once the jet stream moved south, all the cold air from Canada came pouring in and it got cold and stayed cold. I don’t think we went above freezing for close to six weeks. And the best part was that I was out there pretty much every day either climbing or skiing. There were some memorable moments for sure.

Right after the big noreaster on Valentine’s Day my friend Brian and I hiked in to Way in the Wilderness. Yep, we’re the ones who broke that trail. Even with snow shoes we were post holing up to our knees and the trip up took about 1 ½ hours. Brian is a soldier in Iraq and crazy enough that he decided to spend his entire vacation climbing with Synnott Mountain Guides. We joked about the fact that SMG has a 100% dissatisfaction guarantee. If you have even a slight amount of fun, we’ll give you a full refund. Brian liked that one. We had even funner day a little later up at Lake Willoughby. When we got there at 8am the temperature with the wind chill was somwhere between -25 to -30F. I had to laugh when I stepped out of the car and the cold hit my face. I had to wear a neoprene face mask and goggles in the parking lot to get my pack ready. And we were there to climb steep ice. We managed to climb The Glass Menagerie and at the top I think Brian’s comment was: “F--- this sport!” I couldn’t have agreed more.

Brian and I also made a winter ascent of the Whitney-Gilman which was by far the funnest thing we did. I think Brian got his money back that day. Everything went so well on the way up that I was kind of thinking something would have to go wrong. It did. Whoever had packed out the trail down the south side after the storm didn’t know the way and we ended up getting sucked down their bootpack all the way to the Lafayette Campground, about 1 ½ miles from where we parked the car. It was a long slog back.

Recently we go a bunch of new snow, especially up on Mt. Washington. On Saturday I got first tracks on the Little Headwall and it is not an exaggeration to say that the powder was up to my chest. On Sunday I was up in the Gulf of Slides and there was about two feet of fresh snow at the top. We decided not to ski any of the gullies, but we got first tracks down the ski trail and for the first time I checked out the Black Circle Trail which branches off the Gulf of Slides trail about half way down. It mostly traverses, and is more of a tour than a ski, but it takes you some beautiful patches of forest I’d never been through before. It eventually drops you off on the Avalanche Brook trail which we followed back to Pinkham.

There is now enough snow on Mt. Washington that I think we can count on a decent spring season. I have some time off over the next couple weeks and my plan is to get in as much skiing as possible up on the rock pile. FYI: the ice conditions are still really good too so if you want to get in some late season ice you are still good to go. There is still plenty of good climbing available at Frankenstein and elsewhere. After all, it's -3F here at my house right now.

I have a couple of big adventures coming up in the next few days but I’ll hold off on saying anything more about them for now. If things go according to plan I should have some good stories early next week.