While I am an avid 3-season hiker, I have always been curious about winter hiking in the White Mountains. Winter in New Hampshire can be brutal and unpredictable, especially in the mountains and even moreso above treeline. Temperatures can range from well below freezing to a lucky high 20s and windchill and windspeeds can change base temps in a heartbeat. Furthermore, snowdrift can make trails difficult to follow and losing the trail can be deadly. Many of the White Mountain deaths that I read about in the book Not Without Peril occur during the winter when people start up underprepared, when the trail is lost, or when the weather turns. That being said, I knew I wanted to do my first real winter hiking with at least 1 person who knew what they were doing. Luckily, I was able to go with 2 such seasoned winter hikers.
A fellow running club friend plans and executes a number of hikes year round in a hiking group called Barefoot at the Top. He and Jeremy were my resident experts on this hike and they guided myself and 4 other novices through the hike. The original plan was to climb Mt. Pierce via the Crawford path and then back down, but knowing that trail, I recommended getting Eisenhower as well because Pierce is really easy and together the two would make for a more adventurous day.
So we headed up early yesterday morning– 6am. We took a Brighton car and a Somerville car. As a member of the Brighton car, I got to know some new people who I haven’t really gotten to talk much with before and that was awesome! We made it to the trail head around 9am and after some preparing, we started walking. We ended up heading up Edmunds Rd towards the Eisenhower trailhead which was fine. We would walk 2miles on the road and then head up Eisenhower, over to Pierce, and then back down. This was, after the descent, we would now have a 2 mile walk back to the car since we are knocking it out first. It was a nice warmup, by the time we hit the trails everyone stripped down. It was WARM, unseasonably! But once we made it up high enough, everything looked wonderfully frosted:
The climb up was smooth and a bit fast. We ended up splitting up into 2 groups for a little bit, but we met up again briefly after Eisenhower. After hitting the Crawford trail, we somehow missed the summit trail to Eisenhower but were able to catch it on the far side.
Once we regained our bearings, up we went to Eisenhower! I rather round and bald summit that typically, on a clear day, offers amazing views of approaching trails and the ridge trail to Monroe and the higher Presidentials. However, today we were offered only high winds and a cloud encompassing everything. Nonetheless, it was a fun summit! I imagined it felt like what the surface of Antarctica was like.. almost flat on top with low visibility and high high cold winds.
After summiting, we went back down to the Crawford Path and moseyed on over to Mt. Pierce. From my memory, Mt. Pierce is a rather underwhelming peak so I’m really happy we tagged Eisenhower as well!
We made it to the top of Pierce and it was far less windy so we managed a group shot!
Heading down the Crawford path, 3 miles until we were out of the woods, we ran into a grey jay! Last time I was on Mt. Pierce, I had this type of encounter:
And we made attempts at recreating it– lots of feeding of the bird from our heads and hands.
After hanging with the bird a bit, we hurried down off the mountain. By this time we were pretty hungry and thoughts of beers danced through my head. It was a quick and painless 3 miles down and out. We arrived back at the cars around 3:45, and afterwards headed as a group to Woodstock Inn and Brewery (where I always seem to end up after a long day in the Whites).
As my first winter hiking experience, this was amazing! I couldn’t have asked for better conditions (maybe I could’ve asked for less cloud coverage, but I’m not complaining!) and a better group to take me. I met some new people and one girl in our pack was out on her first ever hike. Pretty badass! With this experience, I’ll hope to try something more intense and maybe something that requires snowshoes (since we only needed microspikes for this hike). Overall, a really good adventure to start 2016 off right.
I didn’t knock any new peaks off my list with this adventure, but I think it’s better that I was on trails I was readily familiar with– this way I could manage to direct people and also know that I was on the right path. The ice kingdom of the White Mountains is majestic and demanding of respect and I look forward to respecting the mountains more and more in all 4 seasons to come.
48 peaks 