A Tale of Two Trips...

These two trips happened on consecutive days during a backpack that Michele and I did over the weekend. The two trips, over the same terrain and in the span of less than 48 hours, had so little in common that they may as well have happened years apart in different parts of the world. One day pristine with views as far as the eye can see, the second day a trudge through a quagmire of rain, mud and howling winds created by the remnants of a passing tropical storm.

We had been trying to figure out a time to do a backpack into the Bondcliff region of the White Mountains for at least a couple years now. The Bondcliff region is one of the most remote areas of the Pemigewasset Wilderness that requires more than 10 miles of hiking from the closest trailhead on a main road. It could be done in a 20+ mile day trip with a light day pack and brisk pace but that kind of defeats the purpose of hiking through one of the most beautiful areas in the world. Why would you want to rush it? So we planned a 3 day backpack that would cross over 9 or 10 of the 4000 footers in the Whites including the 3 peaks in the Bonds.. When we saw the forecast that included a day where the remnants of tropical storm "Bill" would be coming through we decided to cut the trip short by a day and head back in the rain on day 2. Nothing destroys a backpacking trip like rain. Having to break down and setup camp in the rain in the woods would take a lot of fun out of the trip and "fun" was the primary reason for us going. If "suffering" or "misery" were our goals, then we would have welcomed the rain.

Backpacking is one of those things that always seems like a good idea right up until about 1 mile into the trail when the weight on your back starts to remind you why you don't spend a lot of time carrying around 50 pound bags of concrete every day. Bill Bryson had a great analogy for it in "A Walk in the Woods". Think about when you pick up your screaming child who weighs about 25 pounds and put him on your shoulders to make the screaming stop. Everything is fine for about 5 minutes but then the shoulders start to hurt and your chest starts to cave in from the weight and finally you're saying "it's time to put you down for a little while", at which point the screaming starts again.. OK, now take two of those children, place them in a pack and strap them to your back and carry that around, up and over trees and rocks and up and down ridiculously steep inclines for hours on end. I don't care how fit you are, this hurts a lot. But there's a reason for that and it's because your body needs to adapt to it. Like anything you're doing for the first time, the body will take some time to adapt to it. This is not unlike the amount of pain people find themselves in the first week of training at Dynamic Strength and Conditioning before their bodies adapt to the demands you're putting on it.. I'm sure that after about 5 or 6 days lugging the pack around on my shoulders that my body would be perfectly adapted to it and I'd be able to draw a full breath out of my caved in chest whenever I needed to. But I only do this maybe once every couple years and even then I only do it for two or three days. So the pain is part of the price you have to pay to get to areas that most will never see unless they're flying over it in a commercial jet at 35,000 feet.

Day 1 was a picture perfect day for hiking. Temps in the 50's, sunny with endless visibility. We parked at the base of the Zealand Trail, strapped on our packs (which I need to figure out how to distribute the weight properly next time so it doesn't feel like I have an ape hanging off my shoulders pulling me backwards) and headed into the woods. Immediately the songs start going through my head. When you're hiking, whether it's alone or with somebody, you still tend to be very quiet and internalized. You think a lot, you talk very little. When you're not thinking about anything in particular, songs or other things creep into your head. Under the load of the 50 pound encumbrance, my head went into an infinite loop of "Beast of Burden" by the Stones.. I think this lasted until we got to the Zealand Falls Hut about 2.7 miles into our journey. We stopped briefly at the Hut and refilled our water bottles. From here we took the Twinway trail which is part of the Appalachian Trail that runs over 2100 miles from Northern Maine down to Georgia. The trail heads pretty much straight up for about 2000 feet of elevation gain over the next two miles. This was a fun climb up rocks and staircases carved from granite.

It ended at a viewpoint at the Zeacliff. The Zeacliff is an east facing cliff with a good 500 ft drop that overlooks the Presidential Range and Mt Washington to the Northeast and Mt Carrigain to the Southeast. It was a stunning view.. This is also where we came across the first AT hiker of the day. You can always tell when you come across the guys hiking the Appalachian Trail. These are soul searchers on a 2100 mile journey that will take them anywhere from 3 to 6 months carrying what they need on their backs, stopping to reload in small towns along the way. It's not difficult to figure out who the AT hikers are. They always have a half-crazed look in their eye, a wild, disheveled appearance, lots of hair, and the smell of someone who's been in the woods for days. Trust me, they're real easy to pick out. From Zeacliff it was up and over Zealand Mt (a peak in the woods with no view), Mt Guyot, which is at about 4500 ft but not considered an official 4000 footer on the list of "The 48 Official White Mt 4000 Footers" because it doesn't lose enough elevation on the back side of it before climbing up to a higher peak (stupid rule), and then off to the Bonds. But first, we decided we would setup camp at the Guyot campsite while it was daylight, drop our packs, and then head out with a much lighter daypack and try to get in the 3 Bond peaks before it got dark. This turned out to be a great decision. We were 8 miles in at this point and the heavy packs were really slowing us down. The Guyot campsite is 0.2 miles off the Bondcliff Trail but has about 500 ft of descent to get to. It is a very cool campsite with a running stream for drinking water, a half dozen tent platforms cut into the side of the mountain, and a 3 sided shelter that sleeps 12. We set up our tent on one of the platforms, filled a daypack with some trail mix, chocolate, and a bottle of water and scrambled back up the 500ft of granite to the main trail.

When we got to the Bonds we immediately understood why it was rated in a backpacking magazine as one of the top 3 most beautiful areas in the country. As far as the eye could see there was not a hint of human interference. No roads, no buildings, no cell towers. Just mountains, valleys, cliffs, and trees....forever in all directions. It was awesome. On our way

down from Mt Bond as we headed over to Bondcliff I recognized a view that can be seen on the cover of the Appalachian Mt Club's "White Mountain Guide" (you know you're in a beautiful part of the world when the AMC puts a photo of it on their guide cover ;) Here's a recreation of the photo, except with Jake in it instead of some random hiker... The experience from the top of Bondcliff was absolutely amazing. We were standing on the top of a ridge with the most incredible views in every direction. But the really incredible part of it was the 1/4 mile length of ledge with a sheer, vertigo inducing drop of over

1000 feet. When you stand out on a rock where one false move means a 1000 foot plummet into an abyss (as beautiful as that abyss may be) it makes you dizzy with adrenaline. I do handstands at the top of every mountain we summit and this mountain was no different. But in places where if I fall out of the handstand it means I will die, I opt for a pistol. This is a rule that was put in place by Michele.. With a 1000 ft straight down drop on 3 sides of this rock, it was the scariest pistol I've ever done :)

I found a safer place to do my handstand.... You get bonus points if you can find Jake's head peaking out from the rocks up there...

After coming off the incredibly impressive Bondcliff it was off to West Bond and then back to camp. We hit camp at about 7p and had been out hiking for about 11 hours at this point. Michele and I are both in excellent physical condition but we were pretty beat up from the long day. And really hungry. One of the worst parts about backpacking is the food choices you have to bring. You have to bring things that are packed in calories and come in small sizes. Lots of nuts and seeds. Not much fruit because it's too big for the amount of calories it contains. You eat dehydrated meals that you need to add boiling water to. In most circumstances you wouldn't feed these meals to a homeless person. But to a backpacker, these meals are unbelievably delicious. We ate some mish-mash of dehydrated potatoes and chicken rib meat followed by a "Santa Fe" chicken dinner that has pinto beans, rice, corn and bits of chicken and looked kind of like vomit.. It was unbelievable how good this hot meal tasted. We finished the meal with a cup of hot chocolate (sooo good) and went to sleep.

I slept really well for about 2 hours and then went into my "sleep 15 minutes and turn to try to relieve the discomfort of laying on a wooden platform" routine. I did this for the next 6 hours until daylight. If you were to catch this on a video camera and replay it at high speed I would look like a rotisserie chicken on the spit turning slowly over the flame.

The rain started at about midnight, a good 12 hours before the last forecast we saw had called for. Ugh. It wasn't just showering either (like the forecast predicted), it was dumping big heavy drops that seemed to explode off the tent. The wind was howling and we knew we were in for a pretty miserable escape the next morning. We got up, packed as much as we could while inside the tent to stay dry and then got out in the rain to break down the tent and pack everything else up. This is where everything gets kind of soaked and is the reason we decided to cut the trip a day short. Breaking down and setting up in the rain soaks everything and the only thing that fixes that is a full day of sunshine which wasn't in the immediate future. I didn't even bother making coffee because it just wasn't going to be worth the bother in the mud and rain, crouching over a collapsible stove the size of a softball trying to heat up water. This seemed to bother Michele more than it did me, which surprised me because coffee in the morning is easily one of my top 5 favorite things in life and I know she can do without it fairly easily.. It occurred to me later that what bothered Michele was not that she wasn't getting a cup of coffee, but that she was going to have to deal with me not getting a cup of coffee :)

I thought I had prepared myself mentally for this. I knew it was going to suck. I spent 6 hours thrashing in the tent listening to the rain and wind knowing I would get soaked and have to hike for about 7 hours in miserable weather to get out of the woods. I was OK for a while too but eventually it took it's toll and I became really irritable, miserable, and in general, just a real joy to be around. When we left camp, the first thing we had to do was climb up an over Mt Guyot, which was going to be the only really exposed section of our hike for the day. At the top of the mountain it was like a mild hurricane. Rain whipping with sustained winds that were in the vicinity of 50-70mph, gusts that had to be 80+. With heavy packs on our backs we trudged along the trail weaving like drunken sailors as the wind toyed with us knocking us around like rag dolls. I thought Michele was going to fly away a couple times with her backpack acting as a kite to pull her into the sky. To me, this was the most enjoyable part of the day because it was a real challenge to the body and spirit and I like challenges. Once we got up and over Guyot we were sheltered by the woods and it became less of a challenge and more of a major annoyance. My pack was killing me. It was heavier than the day before now that I was lugging around a waterlogged tent, amateurishly secured off the lower back of the pack which made it seem about 3x heavier than it actually was. I couldn't draw in a full breath because of the way it was pulling my shoulders down and caving my chest in. The gloriousness of the previous day quickly vanished into the mud, fog, rain, wind of a new day created by the producers of "A Perfect Storm". Happy songs that went through my head during the hike yesterday were replaced with things like the theme from Gilligan's Island ("The weather started getting rough...." etc.), and the marching chant that the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz used to do in subserviance to the Wicked Witch... Honestly, that chant was in my head for the better part of a half hour.. I spent a couple hours hating the hike big time. I was irritated that all kinds of things out of my control were conspiring against me to make me miserable. It irritated me that I didn't find the conditions challenging, just irritating. It made me think I would never want to do this again because it's just not worth the aggravation and pain. It made me forget, briefly, what an incredible experience the day before was.. Finally we got back to the Zealand Falls Hut. We took off the packs, got some hot water from the caretakers of the hut and made the best cup of coffee I've ever had in my life. Blood started to flow through my chest and shoulders again. I could take a full breath for the first time in what seemed like days. I ate a cinnamon roll the size of a basketball that the caretakers of the hut and had baked just that morning. It was still raining and it was still windy and we still had about 2 hours to go but things were looking considerably better. I apologized to Michele for being a petulant, miserable prick for the last 4 hours. She acted like she didn't know what I was talking about which is exactly the type of thing that makes her so special :)

I fixed the loading of my pack a little bit and strapped it back on. 3 miles to go, no big deal. The last few miles are a flat stretch of dirt path, roots, rocks and bog bridges. We cranked and covered it in about an hour and a half. With the misery of the last 7 hours behind us my mind turned back to the positives of the trip. We got to see a part of the country that is easily one of the most beautiful in the entire world, untouched and sublime. We started to talk about options for our next backpacking adventure.....

This is why staying healthy, active and fit is so important to us and why we want it to be important to everybody. Everybody needs to experience the type of trip we experienced this past weekend. This is why we were put here. We weren't put here to abuse our bodies, our environment and each other. When you get out in the mountains and you realize on such a magnificent scale, how really small you and your problems are in the grand scheme of things, it makes you re-think your priorities. It makes you want to leave a positive imprint on everything and everybody you touch. That's why it's worth the trouble, aggravation, and pain of loading 50 pounds of clothes, food, and shelter on your back and hiking up and down unforgiving terrain to get to places like this. Places that make you feel very small and at the same time make you think very big :)