Monster effort.
Basically anything you want to find in mountains, you can find in the Whites. Ice climbing, mountaineering, multi-pitch trad climbing, bushwhacking, easy trails, empty trails, whatever. I was very lucky to be able to hike there.
> "A niche, fringe project, but one that resonated deeply with me because these are my mountains. This is my backyard."
I grew up smack in the middle of the White Mountains with a clear view of the presidential peaks. I have to say, at no point did I think, "Huh, I really should climb all those."
That said, for pre-season high school cross country training one year, we jogged up to the visitor center at the top of Mt. Washington. Not many people can say they did that. I also had friends who had summer jobs hauling building supplies and tools up and down the Appalachian trails to maintain the trails and huts. They were in insane shape when school started from carrying bags of concrete mix or a stack of bricks up and back every day.
The trail designers, such as they were back in the day, were true masochists. Literally direct lines straight up a ridge or alongside a gully. Given that they are on the fall line, the trails become rivers during rains. Unbelievably painful to hike.
No Forest Service namby pamby shallow grades and switchbacks here! Typical: the Air Line trail, ~4500 feet up at a 21% average grade.
Having done trail maintenance for over a decade, describing switchbacks as namby pamby sounds childish and ignorant. I also disagree that early maintainers were masochists. I encourage you to rethink that the next time you’re out there.
¹ this list is outdated vis-a-vis modern mapping and includes at least one peak shorter than 4000 feet (Tecumseh) and omits at least one peak that should qualify per the rules (Guyot), but if the list were updated they would still have completed the direttissima, since they passed over Guyot on the way to the Bonds (dropping Tecumseh could only make the diretissima easier, but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference; it's been a decade or so since I hiked that section of the whites).
As an aside, that day 5 from Wildcat to Cabot is absolutely brutal even if you're fresh, to say nothing of having already covered 180 miles in the previous four days.
If you do visit and you're into geology you may want to visit Madison, NH. It's home to the largest glacial erratic in North America.
It really is a great area. Just don't tell anyone.
As someone who grew up hiking in the White Mountains before moving to Washington, the mountains in Washington (and many places in the West) are just on a whole different level.
tasuki•6mo ago