Category Archives: Hiking

The Mysterious Great Gully and King Ravine

My latest obsession is King Ravine, off the northwest flank of Mt. Adams in the northern Presidentials of New Hampshire.  Here’s why:

View Great Gully in a larger map

Hopefully this requires no additional explanation, but in case it does:

  • nearly a dozen routes down
  • all in the vicinity of 50°
  • all in excess of 1000 feet of vertical no including the runout!!!!!
To me this seems like Tuckerman Ravine only better in all possible aspects: more varied and technical descents, bigger, steeper, less crowded, etc…  The only thing that concerns me is the avalanche risk.  I have to imagine that it gets tons of snow, and I hope that its northwesterly aspect cuts down on wind-loading.  I guess the remaining variables would be temperature and pitch.  Either way, more research needs to be done here…
My thoughts on the approach:

View Great Gully in a larger map

Parking is on Rte. 2 at the green push pin.  The approach is definitely longer than the hike up the Tuckerman Ravine Trail to get to the bowl, but I think it’s easier.  I’ve never done it in the snow, but it’s straight and mellow.  It can be done in just over an hour in the summer.  The two blue thumb tacks denote spots which seemed suitable for bivouacs or small camp sites; away from any avy run-out, out of the wind, flat.

IMHO, the ideal format for the excursion would be a three day weekend.  Head up to the area on a Thursday night, crash some place, and hit the trail ASAP on Friday morning.  I imagine the slog to the Ravine floor would take around 2 hours in good conditions.  Another hour or two take set up camp and make lunch puts you getting some turns in some time after noon – plenty of time for a few runs in the bowl especially given the lack of a 4 hour car ride home and the presence of a presumably awesome campsite less than a mile away.

Enough logistics, lets get to the skiing!

The bowl, from the floor.

A watery crevasse which I did not fall into.

My thumb, but more importantly a good look at the May snowpack.  Yes May.
Clearly, there are numerous routes.  The mellowest of them, had the most snow and is probably the first thing I’ll try is called The Great Gully.  It is highlighted in red in the satellite map at the top of the post.  The bottom is pretty steep, punctuated by a waterfall which you probably have to huck depending on the snowpack.  Fortunately there is an extensive and mellow runout.  The midsection is highlighted by a weird fall line sloping to lookers right, toward a huge mess of rock and undermined snowpack.  Still pretty darn steep.  Above that, it opens up quite a bit and offers at least two spots from which to drop in providing some options.  This portion is the steepest – just in time for the narrow technical sections.  Sounds sick, right?  The rest of the aspects only get steeper and more technical.  Cannot wait.

My Latest Gear…


…Is a handkerchief. Unremarkable, I know, but here’s how this all got started…

I usually wear a baseball cap of some sort, because it’s comfortable, you don’t have to comb your hair and keeps the sun out of your eyes. However, in any temperatures above 60 it just makes my head unnecessarily hot. The hat had to go, and those who know me will understand that this was a tough concession to make. With no hat to shade my eyes, sunglasses became a necessity.

Quick tangent: I usually get $10 sunglasses because I know i’m just going to break them. For reason I decided to get a real pair of shades for the first time ever: Oakleys. For anyone wondering if they are worth the money, listen to this… On the second day I had them I accidentally dropped them off a 3 story building into a pile of gravel – not a scratch. Then I brought them on the Long Trail for 5 days during which time I managed to ruin all sorts of heartier-looking gear. Again, not a scratch. I break practically everything I own eventually but these things are resilient! Anyhow…

The problem that cropped up instantly sans hat was that sweat was constantly getting into my eyes and all over my new shades rendering them sub-optimal optics. This is where the bandanna comes in. You wrap that sucker up Axl Rose style, and next thing you know, no sun in your eyes, no sweat on your face, the top of head gets some air and lets off some steam (literally) and as an added bonus you get to look like a rock star whilst on the trail.

Stratton Pond

Tripp has wanted to hit the Stratton Pond loop for a while now. I, on the other hand, was just there; or perhaps more accurately, just escaping from there with my broken water filter and bruised ego. In our haste Alex and I totally skipped the summit of Stratton and about 10 miles leading up to in favor of a short walk down a road. Allegedly, the Stratton Pond loop served as the inspiration for the construction of the entire AT. I hadn’t summited and Tripp needed to see what the hype was all about. These seemed like good enough reasons to return and take another stab at it.


We road out to Arlington, VT on a Saturday night and stayed at the Grout Pond Recreation Area. The rec area consists of a boat launch, a cabin and a number of tent and RV sites. Getting to the place involved a number side roads, each more obscure than the last, culminating in a winding dirt road which apparently was ‘unfit for winter travel’. Thankfully it was not winter. We rolled into the Rec Area at around 10 or 11 and pitched our tents. The skies are overcast but the weather is great otherwise – mid 50s, low humidity and wind. We killed a few beers and retired to our respective tents.
We got up at 6:50 AM, packed up the tents and headed down the road for the trail head – about 2 miles from the Rec Area. We were definitely the last people to arrive and the first people to wake up and leave. I note that sleeping within a mile of the trailhead is a way better strategy for getting an early start than our usual approach of setting some highly improbable wake-up goal and assuming that we won’t need to stop for gas, food, coffee, the bathroom, traffic or otherwise be any less than 100% efficient on the way to the hike.
We hit the trail at the unprecedented (for us anyhow) time of 8 AM. It’s still overcast but it’s also still pleasantly cool. The loop is just under 12 miles including a brief 1 mile stroll down the dirt road. We get this out of the way first for two reasons: A) It’ll get us off to a fast start, and B) We’ll be able to end the hike on a more pleasant trail.

View Stratton in a larger map

The first few miles of the trail are over gently upward sloping terrain. We manage a moving average of 4mph here. Before we know it we’re at the summit of Stratton. At the summit we run into an LT caretaker who directs us to the Stratton gondola. It’s well before noon we check it out. Unfortunately it’s totally socked in with fog so there’s really nothing to see. We skip the fire tower at the summit for the same reason. We decide to move on, in search of some more interesting place to eat and chill for a minute.
The way down Stratton is considerably steeper than the way up making it a lot more interesting. We cruise about half way down the mountain at which time we stop for some lunch, water and a pint. It’s noon-ish by now and we realize that it still hasn’t really warmed up past the mid 60s. It threatens to rain, but with the summit behind us, I almost don’t care if it does.
We make it to the pond at about 1 PM. The pond is outright beautiful but some better lighting wouldn’t have hurt. It’s still pretty dark out; in fact it’s threatening to rain somewhat more aggressively than before. Additionally we’re starting to realize that at our present rate we’ll be out of the woods in plenty of time to hunt around for some apres-hike delicacy. We roll out…
The final 4 miles is virtually flat and we waltz out of the woods around 2 PM. As we’re getting out of our boots and packing up the car, thunder rumbles a few miles away and it begins to rain. Perfect timing. We pile into the car, fire on some tunes, flip into 4wd (totally unnecessary but it’s been my first excuse to use it so far) and snake our way down the dirt road toward town and dinner. This dirt road, known as Stratton-Arlington Rd is dotted with makeshift riverside camp sites and a few hunting or fishing shacks. Every few hundred yards we come by another camp.
Eventually we show up in Manchester Center with the aim of hitting up the tavern where Alex and I hid out upon being defeated by the LT. The only two maps of the area that we have are an LT trail map and a US Atlas. The atlas has nowhere near the granularity that we need to navigate Vermont and the LT trail map, in the words of Tripp, is ‘totally incongruous with reality.’ I’m glad that he explained it in those terms because they were the exact words I needed to explain the source code that I was debugging to my coworker today. In any event Tripp eventually figures out which way to go. We feast and head home.
On the ride home I consider two things: A) The Manchester Tavern or whatever it’s called seemed way cooler after 5 days in the woods than after 6 hours in the woods, and B) some of the trees on the highway are starting to turn already! The fall hiking season draws near…

Long Trail Debrief

This post is long overdue, but I need to get these thoughts down for posterity before it’s too late, so here we go…


As many of you now know, a number of things went wrong and a number of bad decisions were made. However, the straw that broke the camel’s back can readily be identified: our water filter broke on Day 5!

We did some research and discovered that there was an EMS about 15 miles away. We were all set to hike out, find a replacement, get a few odds and ends fixed/replaced, regroup in town for a night, hike back in and carry on with the hike. On the hike out we arrived at the conclusion that the most reasonable thing to do was to call it quits and try again in a year or so. At this point, I’ll rewind and see if i can do justice to the whole set of circumstances that accrued and colored our decision making…

Pre-Hike Planning

Step number one, or so we thought, would be to plan out the whole hike to the best of our abilities. We pulled out the LT Guidebook, a topo map of Vermont, a calculator, and a spreadsheet and set about estimating how much we should aim to hike each day. We built it easy days, accounted for variations in terrain, and planned for overshoots and undershoots at various legs of the trip. This seemed not unreasonable…
From this tentative itinerary, we estimated overall trip length and used it as a baseline for the rest of our planning. We calculated our average mileage to be 15mi/day (ranging between 10mi/day to 20mi/day at times). This seemed pretty do-able – last summer Rob and I managed to cover 55 miles in 2.5 days and go to the gym the next day…
Next we loaded our packs with all of our non-expendable gear items: clothes, tents, cook set, water filtering equipment, emergency equipment, etc… From this weight extrapolated our average pack weight to be about 60 lbs. for most days. This seemed reasonable as well; in the winter I often carry about that much doing overnight ski skips in the Whites.
Using our average mileage and average pack weight we able to estimate our required caloric intake/day. (We found a reasonable looking chart that correlates those two variables.) This came out to a be a staggering 4500-5500 calories/day. This was sort of cause for concern due to the sheer cost of and weight of all of those calories. We set about finding the most calorie dense foods we could get our hands on…
  • The pemmican, seemed like a solid bet: about $25 for ~5 lbs, yielding nigh incalculable calorie count…
  • Over $100 of nuts and berries – they don’t go bad, they test great, calories, nutrients, how can you go wrong?
  • Fifty servings of oatmeal – cheap, filling, light
  • Gatorade mix – calories, electrolytes
  • Clif Shot Bloks, Clif Bars – dense calories, carbs, protein
  • And last but not least, 2 servings of assorted Backpacker’s pantry each per day plus a sprinkling of deserts and breakfasts.
That was a ton of money but, really no more than I would have spent eating in Boston for that amount of time. Now the question became how to get all of that food to the trail when we needed it there. We felt that minimizing rendezvous with various cohorts was paramount in order to cut back on total points of failure as well as to keep planning overhead to a minimum. We arranged to have Andrew Ziehl meet us at Killington (about 1/3 of the way North) on Day 7 and we planned to visit Alex’s cousins’ house at Mt. Mansfield whenever we managed to get there. We would pick up an extra 1/3 of our pre-bought food at each of these locations. The only stop we needed to get to by a specific time was Killington, and even that could be pushed back by a day or relocated closer if need be. It seemed pretty flexible.
Day 1

We planned to leave at 7am, arrive at North Adams, MA around 11 and hit the trail for a leisurely 10 mile stroll through the rolling hills of southern Vermont. None of this happened. We left at more like 8. We got to North Adams just after noon. We forgot that North Adams is 4 miles south of the border, so we actually had a 14 mile hike ahead of us. We did not become aware of this fact until about 10 miles down the trail when we began to wonder why we were’t there yet. Additionally it rained most of the day, the air was still, the humidity was in excess of 100% and the temps had to be in the 90s. It was a challenging first day. We made it to camp around 8 pm. We were on schedule, but pretty beat. I actually needed two hands to raise my Nalgene bottle for a drink because my shoulders were so tired… Before going to bed I gave my feet a brief inspection and what I discovered was rather alarming: my feet were swollen and covered in blisters…I’d put hundreds of miles on these boots over the previous year. Apparently the combination of 14 miles in the pouring rain and a 60 lb. pack take a toll on your feet. I slathered them in Neosporin and fell asleep.
Day 2

When we woke up I endeavored to fix my feat with topical pain killers, sterile gauze and duct tape. I’m pretty sure it helped because we managed 16 miles that day. For some reason the final 8 miles was 100% devoid of water sources so by the time we rolled into camp we were down to a few drops each. We were still on schedule, but no less exhausted, nor healed than we were at the end of Day 1. We decided to make camp, sleep in and take a half day the next day. The schedule and food provisions allowed for a day or two of slacking and this one seemed warranted given our condition. Plus the camp site was amazing – at altitude with a great view.
Day 3

After a whole night of sleep, and a whole morning of slacking, my feet were still totally mangled and hardly fit for activity. This was supposed to be a 20 mile day – our first really hard day of the hike and we assumed that we’d be warmed up by this time. We were not. We hiked a scant 4 miles to the next closest camp site. Overall, it was a great day, we were in no rush at any point, we had ample time for recovery, we made it to camp on time for once, the weather was pleasant, we didn’t nearly run out of water. Nothing went wrong. Our camp site was even better than the previous one.
Note: Actually, one thing went wrong. I set one of my socks on fire trying to dry them by a campfire. Literally one side was on fire while the other was still soaking wet…
Day 4

Having done some hardcore slacking the previous day, and having only 10 miles to cover, Day 4 also turned out to be a great day (It helped that we took a huge shortcut, avoiding summiting Stratton Mountain). Alex’s fly swatting count broke 100, and we made it to camp on time. We discovered that we were keeping pace with some of the AT through hikers which was a good confidence boost, as well as (mostly) good company. We also discovered that we had gained notoriety as “those guys that are constantly eating”. We thought we were consuming a reasonable amount of food. As it turns out, many of the AT hikers were eating less food and carrying only 4-5 days worth at a time, making stops in towns as necessary. In any event, we were enjoying feasting constantly and felt poised to seriously pick up the pace and start getting back on track.
Day 5

Day 5 was pivotal. We felt that making it past day 5 would put us close enough to Killington to get our food one way or another. Between my solar chargers and our phones we were able to communicate to Andrew that an earlier rendezvous might be needed. Things were under control. It seemed like a given that we would be able to hit our goals for the next day or two at which point we would be free to make as many schedule adjustments as possible.
Of course this was all before the water filter broke. Somehow a bit of sand or sediment got sucked up into the cylinder of the pump and shredded an O-ring. It could not be repaired and we did not have enough fuel (or the time) to boil all of our water. We had to replace it with a new one. A caretaker was able to direct us to a nearby EMS – about 15 miles by foot. Fortunately 8 of it was on the way. The final stretch was along roads in some town. We felt it would be a good excuse to get real food, sleep indoors, and resupply. We covered 8 miles in 4 or 5 hours – by all indications we were actually starting to get warmed up for the rest of the hike…
However started to do some math and began to have serious reservations about our ability to keep pace. Yet again it poured essentially all day (or at least for all of the time we were hiking). My feet were slowly getting better (still swollen and blistery, but to a lesser degree), but beating on them in the heat and rain for another 15 miles would be a set back for sure.
We were a good 10 miles behind and our EMS excursion was going to set us back another 10 or so. A number of things occurred to us at this point. For starters, we were not going to be make it to Killington. Andrew only had a long weekend to spend meeting us with the food – we weren’t going to make it to Killington until Monday in the best case. If we were unable to rendezvous with him we would be forced to abandon that parcel of food (at least until we got back to Boston) and proceed buying extra food along the way in towns that we passed. The second realization was that it seemed highly probable that more set backs would occur – in other words, unforeseeable situations, which we would no doubt be able to deal with, as we had thus far, would crop up and set us back farther. This was problematic for two reasons:
  • We had planned on being away from work/Boston for a relatively finite period of time.
  • We had purchased our food and other consumable supplies based on that relatively finite period of time.
As we fell more and more behind we would be forced to get more and more food, re-arrange, our meetings at Mansfield and Canada and take more time out of work. Additionally the sense of urgency was growing. We realized our plan was fundamentally flawed and unsustainable. By this time we saw that we were taking a radically different approach than our peers on the trail. It was debatable as to whether or not we’d make it to Canada at all, given our time and money constraints. It seemed that the best plan would be to call it quits and do things correctly from scratch at a later date.
Summary

So what is correct? It seems that ‘correct’ would be the following:
  • Don’t do 30 miles in the first two days no matter how strong you think you are or how broken in you think your boots are, especially if it’s going to be hot and humid.
  • Everyone else had about 40 or 50 lbs of stuff compared to our 65. Carry less redundant stuff (lamps, batteries, duct tape, repair materials – expect things to fail/run out and replace them as needed)…
  • Don’t try to meet people places – cell service is too spotty for this to be reliably coordinated.
  • I want to say eat less because that’s what everyone else was doing, but I also prefer not to waste away to 150 lbs in 2.5 weeks… the jury’s out on this one…
  • Carry only 4-5 days of food at a time and resupply when you run low.
  • Allow for time spent resupplying.
  • Allow for time spent chillin’ at random places that seem nice to chill at – we were in a huge rush the entire 5 days. It was stressful which was counter-productive and less fun.
  • Allow for time spent recouping from whatever you might need to recoup from.
  • The last bullet point deserves a whole paragraph:
Do not attempt to adhere to any sort of rigid schedule where rigid schedule is defined as anything correlating dates, times, waypoints, goals, destinations, supplies or the like. In other words – NO SCHEDULE. It won’t work!
The irony of all this, of course, is that we seriously considered just winging it in lieu of a formal plan and decided that this was irresponsible and not the way to tackle such a serious endeavor…
It’s all good though, now we know what to do next time and as an added benefit, I can’t feel any load less than 35 lbs.