Gadgetman
New member
Day started off with my mobile phone waking me at 5:15-am from my hiking buddy Redwood, as soon as the phone rang I know I over slept, new alarm clock set the wake-up time but not the alarm itself, Bummer... Anyway had all my gear ready to go so we were on the road heading north by 5:40-am.Uneventful drive-up with no problems but plenty of troopers giving out early Christmas presents, I was not one of them this time... Stopped at a local general store just outside Manchester VT for a grinder and breakfast sandwich before hitting the trail, gotta love those VT general stores they have a little of everything you need and good coffee and breakfast sandwich’s too…
Arrived at trailhead around 9:45-am dressed, booted-up and walking by 10:30-am with temps around 12-degrees, no wind and plenty of sunshine. Good steady climb up with a couple inches of snow and ice and a gain of 2,776 vertical feet over 2.89 miles on the Blue Summit Trail. Pretty good footing no crampons or stabilizers needed, (Group decision to leave the snowshoes in the car). As we ascended the Blue Summit trail the snow depths increased steadily as we walked the logging road, the trail then veers off the logging road onto single trek trail.
As soon as we started walking the single trek the snow depths increased, however, the trail was broken so footing was still fairly good until we reached approximately 3000 feet with occasional postholing, (If there is one thing I could do without it’s postholing). Sunshine turned partly cloudy and then full clouds with temps hovering around 16-degrees and the wind picking-up. As we ascended to the summit and snow steadily increasing in depth, postholing became more frequent and the trail less broken. I began tiring from breaking trail so when Redwood offered to break trail, (I was more then willing to move towards the back and draft for a while).
We summited around 1:15-pm with temps hovering around 15-degrees and a steady breeze which I’m sure dropped the temps into the single digits. Redwood and I found an open door to a utility room in the summit house so we went in and had a quick lunch, hot soup and sandwich and a couple of shots of brandy before we began our decent around 2:30-ish. Plenty of slipping and sliding, snowshoes would have been helpful for sure, oh well…
Made it back down around 4:00-pm changed into street clothes, had our traditional 3-Long Trail brews and headed for home.
A great day of trekking for sure, looking forward to our January trek. OH by the way woke-up on Sunday morning to 15-inches of champagne powder so I couldn’t lounge around watching football all day. Anyway, the Patriots finally won their first road game of the year and the Jet’s and Dolphins lost so we are in command of the AFC east.
GO Patriots!!!
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