5 AM on Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed and drove down route 2 in New Hampshire with Nick Crawford to attempt a Presidential Traverse. If you’ve never tried it, a Presi traverse is something like a 20 mile hike, hitting the summits of most of the highest peaks in the Whites. We were hoping to finish in something like 12 hours, and avoid thunder and lightning despite the 60% chance of rain and storms. Between the two of us, we carried four liters of water, 10 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, rain gear, and a map.

By 5:35, we were on the trail and hiking up towards our first peak, Mount Madison. After an hour of walking, we were about halfway there, but had already been passed by three French Canadians and a lone hiker carrying what appeared to be a large suitcase. By 8, we’d made it to the top, and were hoping to walk the remaining six or so miles to Mt. Washington in time to see the finish of the bicycle hill climb, which happened to be taking place that day.

The next mountain we tackled was Mt. Adams, which according to Nick is the highest roadless peak in the entire northeast. Very exciting. From the summit of Adams, we headed down towards the next peak, Mt. Jefferson. 

Coming down from the top of Adams, a familiar-looking girl blew by us, as did three more fit, college-aged students soon afterwards. Using our powers of deductive reasoning, Nick and I determined that these were probably cross-country skiers, which was confirmed after we introduced ourselves. It turns out that it was Kathleen Maynard of Colby, along with three of her friends, two of whom were also skiers at Williams–and they were attempting the same hike as us. Not willing to be outdone by Colby or by girls, Nick and I matched their pace and tagged along towards Mount Washington.

Apparently Mt. Clay doesn’t count as an official presidential peak due to weenie distinctions of height and elevation, but we decided to summit anyways, as it only added a little distance to our route. A quick history lesson: Mt. Clay is named for Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. A prominent congressman in the early 19th century, Clay came up with numerous plans that allowed for new states to be formed without upsetting the balance between slave states and free states. The most important of these by far was the Missouri Compromise of 1820–the act that created the state of Maine. Thus, I’m glad to say that we honored the memory of Mr. Clay by summitting the mountain that bears his name.

Between Mount Clay and Mount Washington, the weather started to get gnarly. Rain started falling, and I was dumb enough to comment that “at least it’s not snowing.” No sooner had those words left my mouth than pebble-sized hail began pelting us. Then, to make matters worse, we started hearing thunder and lightning. Above treeline, half a mile from the summit, this was about the worst place in the world to be for us to be during a thunderstorm.

The danger of our predicament was reaffirmed after one lightning strike where I actually felt a very, very mild snap through my body (does this count as being hit by lightning?). At that point, we ran just about as fast as we could to the summit of Washington, avoiding any further lightning strikes. At the top, there are a whole bunch of antennas and other apparatuses, so we walked over to quickly check out the stragglers still struggling to finish the bike race (the finish clock said something like 2:40 at this point, making for an average speed of like 2.5 mph up the 7 mile auto road). Amusingly, and perhaps sadly too, people were falling off their bikes on the steepest stretch up to the finish line (I think it’s 22%–so says Nick, who has raced it twice), because the hail had made the pavement quite slippery.

For lunch, it was 3 PB+J’s apiece in the visitor’s center, which we unfortunately had to share with the aforementioned stragglers. The weather improved a bit, so we headed out quickly to the next safe point on our route–the Lake of the Clouds AMC hut, which is a mile and a half from the Mt. Washington summit. We made it there with no real problems or lightning strikes, took a quick water break, and headed towards the next peak–Mount Monroe.

As we were leaving the hut, I was preoccupied with the large, dark, threatening storm clouds making their way towards us. I was pretty concerned, but nobody else in our group seemed to mind, so we continued on. Over the top of Monroe, we were quickly enveloped in fog/cloud, which was actually pretty cool–we couldn’t see more than about 10 yards in front of us. It got darker and darker, though, and then started to rain, and then lightning, and then thunder. And then the thunder started to sound like it was getting really close.

At this point, we were faced with a tough decision–three more miles of really exposed hiking until we reached the beginning of the descent and treeline, or a quick mile back to the Lake of the Clouds hut. And when I say we were faced with a tough decision, mostly I mean there was a lot of heated conversation, hand wringing, head shaking, etc. We finally decided to head back to the hut, and amazingly escaped any lightning strikes on the way there. Fortunately, the family with four children all under 12 years of age caught in a similar spot to us also made it to safety (if I ever have kids, I don’t think I’m taking them outside unless there’s 0% chance of rain).

We hung out in the hut for a while, debated whether to head down to the valley on a nearby trail, and ultimately decided to keep going when the weather cleared. The sun came out for a bit, and it the weather seemed promising again, so we prepared to depart again. As soon as we stepped outside though, a bunch of us saw a huge bolt of lightning jump across two relatively innocuous looking clouds heading our way, so we decided to hike out.

One of the Williams skiers’ mom met us at the bottom of the trail down from the hut. A few of us wanted to run to our car to finish the hike, so the friendly mom agreed to drop our packs off at the car. Forty five minutes and five miles later, we arrived at the parking lot in full, bright sunshine.

Totals for the day: something like 15 miles hiked, 5 more run, one-half lightning strike, and a lot of peanut butter and jelly. I had three really good pieces of bacon pizza at the Mallard Mart in Bethel on the way home (highly recommended). Bottom line–the Presi Traverse will have to be attempted again before the end of the summer, as we were tantalizingly close to completing it. We’ve got a few pictures, but I don’t have them yet–I’ll put them up when I do…

Also–”travers” in the title is not a typo–we almost finished, but didn’t, so I left out the e….

So, two of my major goals for the summer were sticking to a 550-hour training plan, and to diligently record my hours in a training log. Thus far on this blog, I’ve been showing everyone the glamorous side of summer (races, hikes, swordfish, etc.), but in order to accomplish the aforementioned goals, there’s also been a decent amount of the mundane-rollerskis, runs, strength and threshold sessions, which I have managed to record in an online excel spreadsheet.

I just finished my internship on Friday, and I’ve got a 10-day vacation ahead of me before I return to school to lead a bunch of freshmen on a whitewater canoeing trip. Since I’ve got some time, I figured I’d do a little number crunching, both to share with any readers and to help me take stock of the training I’ve done. Also, I’m aware that this post is a little bit self-congratulatory, but I figure self-congratulation is justified after 65 hours of rollerskiing…

Nat’s Summer, By the Numbers:

Total hours trained since May 1st: 160.88

Total rollerski hours: 65.7–at 12 kph, that ends up being about 490 miles, or from Brunswick to Ithaca, NY

Average rollerski hours per week since June 1st (when I bothered to start using them): 6.57 (much better than last summer’s dismal average of .5 hours per week)

Shortest workout: 15 minute run in the middle of the night in the pouring rain on April 29th, the first day of the training season (I was in a really, really bad mood)

Longest workout: 240 minutes–hiking Mt. Washington

Longest real workout: 210 minutes on rollerskis (2 times, once classic and once skate)

Biggest week: 16.3 hours–I’ve got 16.5 hours planned for this week                 Rollerskiing is rad!

Smallest week: 8.75 hours (not including the last few hectic weeks of school)

Hours of threshold training (all on rollerskis): 5.4

Number of bike races since June 1: 3

Number of bike races last year: 25

Number of rollerski crashes: 1

I’m including my training log to prove I’m not making all this stuff up–I have to credit Marty Hall with the template…

Nat’s Training, 2008-09

Also, the photo is courtesy of James Cook, and was taken in the fall of 2006.

Bowdoin Ski Team at the summit of Mount Washington

L-R Maren Askins, Nat Herz, Anna Ackerman, Spencer Eusden, Shem Dixon, Nick Crawford, Tom Cook, Woody Mawhinney,

The tale of the Bowdoin ski team’s ascent of Mt. Washington begins on Saturday night, as I was trying to fall asleep. Instead of drifting peacefully off to relaxing Enya music or anything like that, I was actually being serenaded by the lovely voices of the Bowdoin baseball team as they partied in the next apartment over.

“GET FU-KED UP!!!”

“DRINKIE DRINKIE DRINKIE!”

It seemed as if they were playing some sort of game involving chanting these lines over and over. And so on and so forth until the wee hours of the morning, much to my simultaneous amusement and chagrin. At a certain point, though, my fatigue won out over the cacophany, and I fell asleep.

Sunday morning I woke up around 6:30 and met up with about 6 other skiers on my team that had gathered at Bowdoin for a summer training weekend. We piled into vehicles and set off west, stopping at the lovely Bridgton Hannaford’s for some provisioning. Coffee was delicious and entirely necessary.

The forecast for Sunday had looked dubious at best, and we drove through a few showers, but by the time we got to Pinkham Notch the rain had mostly tapered off. We suited up in our finest synthetic clothing and set off toward storied Tuckerman’s Ravine. We set a surprisingly steady pace, and made it up to the summit in about 2.5 hours. Some highlights from the hike up:

1. A rock sneaking up from nowhere and brutally attacking my left knee. I now have scrapes to match the ones I got on my right knee from a rollerski crash while sprinting for a town line.

2. Freshmen I’ve known for less than 24 hours already giving me crap.

3. The old guy who said “not much, woof,” when I asked him what was up, dawg.

4. The ATVs that were the first things we saw once we got to the summit.

Once we made it to the summit, we cruised into the observatory for a delicious lunch of peanut butter and jelly, peaches, and watermelon. Yes, that’s correct–watermelon. I swear. It was really good, too. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture before it was all gone, so you’re going to have to take my word for it. But regardless of whether you believe me or not, you should try it. Watermelons are perfect for adding a challenge to a hike, because you eat it at the top and don’t have to carry it down and ruin your knees.

No highlights from the way down. In fact, I actually managed to get dropped by the rest of the team on the descent, though fortunately our captain Nick Crawford was dropped too and kept me company.

The way down, on the Lion’s Head Trail (sorry–I couldn’t quite figure out how to align these pictures)

Amazingly, I woke up on Monday unable to move. Who knew that hiking was going to make me so sore? Everyone in my office has been making fun of me all week for hobbling around like an old man…

Despite soreness, Mt. Washington is still totally rad!