There's about three days worth of hiking until we hit the Whites (the promised land) and these days are filled with insanely huge elevation gains and losses, 90 degree weather, 100 percent humidity, night hiking, episodes of intestinal distress, and in one case, a wild college party that kept me up all night (shouldn't have slept so close to the road).
But on the third day, I feel pretty decent and we get to climb Mount Moosilauke, the first of our challenges in the Whites. I'm supposed to meet my dad at the top at 4:00 pm (weird I know, but he's hiking through the Whites with us), but there's seventeen miles of ups and downs before I can even start my 4000 foot ascent, so I'm honestly pretty concerned that I won't make it.
But like always, I remember that I'm a total badass and basically run to the top, passing northbounders all the way, yelling, "The promised land! We did it! We made it!"
I'm so enthusiastic that I don't really notice the time passing and I'm up at summit by 1:30. I feel so good that I even summit the south peak, just for the heck of it.
The weather wasn't the greatness. The visibility was total shit and the wind gusts were insane, strong enough to knock me over even. So I headed back down into treeline on the other side.
Round about 4:00 my dad still hasn't showed up and the weather is becoming increasingly bad, so before we get rained on at 5000 feet, I decide to head down and see if I can find my dad. At the very best he got lost, at the very worst he's dead.
Little did I know that the descent would be twenty thousand times worse than the climb.
Let me paint you a picture, 2000 feet down in less than a mile down wet boulders with rebar and wooden steps (also wet) hammered into the sides of them. Why is everything wet? Oh, the trail goes down the side of a massive cascade called "Beaver Brook". Ask anyone in New Hampshire, they'll tell you how scary that shit is.
It takes us more than two hours to go the one mile, wow, but my dad is just chillin' at the bottom, smiling all crazy with a brand new set of super white veneers (we Bransons have bad teeth, my future is in veneers as well). I'm relieved to see him, on the way down I had decided that he for sure was dead. Lo and behold, he found us a hitch into town, a nice older lady that was slack packing her daughter (also a nouthbounder), and I have more than a small inkling as to why she's willing to drive all us smelly hikers in to town (and it has to do with bright white veneers and my dad's ironman triathlete status).
We end up at a really nice hostel (where they force you to take a shower before you can do anything else) and pass out thinking that tomorrow will probably be a zero.
No comments:
Post a Comment