freighttrain48
New member
Its not often that I have the chance to hike with my bestfriend. With the way our work schedules are and the fact that he has a 1 yr old son finding the time to hike has been a challenge. So when It came to planning out a hike for us I wanted to do something different. The original plan was to climb Jefferson go over washington and come down the recently fixed tucks trail. We were gonna leave at night and try and make Washington for sunrise. The day before our hike our car spot fell thru and with the doom and gloom the noaa was predicting for sunday afternoon plans changed. We drove to Jefferson notch trailhead got there at about 11pm saturday night. The stars were all out and it was quite a site to see. We tried to get some sleep and got up at about 2:30am and hit the trail at 3am.
The First mile was quite easy and before we knew it we were at the jct with the link trail. We took in the view from portal rock and the Mt Washington hotel looked like a little city with all its lights shinning in the distance. From the rocks the trail climbed up to treeline and the first cap. IMO this is were the hike got really cool. I was a little worried about the caps because I am not the best at dealing with steep and exposed but I found the caps to be steep but the exposure was no problem at night because you couldnt see anything that wasnt in front of your face. We made it past the caps and the sky grew brighter each step we took and before we knew it we were on the top and I had #31 out of 48 done.
love this photo
Do to the fact that we had less than 2hrs sleep and we decided to call it a hike on jefferson. We did walk down Jefferson Loop and take the gulfside trail to Monticello Lawn and the cornice back to caps ridge. I was curious to see the terrain that we ascended in the dark and once we got to it I saw it wasnt too bad at all. I was shocked by how many people we saw(lost count around 25) heading up the caps at 11 am some planned on making it to washington. I thought to myself are these people nuts dont they know that thunderstorms are supposed to come rolling in the next couple hrs? We get to the car and drive to the store next to bretton woods and I checked the weather and saw the storm missed us. It was a great hike non the less even though we cut it short for storms that never happend.
The First mile was quite easy and before we knew it we were at the jct with the link trail. We took in the view from portal rock and the Mt Washington hotel looked like a little city with all its lights shinning in the distance. From the rocks the trail climbed up to treeline and the first cap. IMO this is were the hike got really cool. I was a little worried about the caps because I am not the best at dealing with steep and exposed but I found the caps to be steep but the exposure was no problem at night because you couldnt see anything that wasnt in front of your face. We made it past the caps and the sky grew brighter each step we took and before we knew it we were on the top and I had #31 out of 48 done.
love this photo
Do to the fact that we had less than 2hrs sleep and we decided to call it a hike on jefferson. We did walk down Jefferson Loop and take the gulfside trail to Monticello Lawn and the cornice back to caps ridge. I was curious to see the terrain that we ascended in the dark and once we got to it I saw it wasnt too bad at all. I was shocked by how many people we saw(lost count around 25) heading up the caps at 11 am some planned on making it to washington. I thought to myself are these people nuts dont they know that thunderstorms are supposed to come rolling in the next couple hrs? We get to the car and drive to the store next to bretton woods and I checked the weather and saw the storm missed us. It was a great hike non the less even though we cut it short for storms that never happend.
