Hiked the Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains of New Hampshire on Sunday, May 30. The forecast over the last few days had dropped like 20 degrees and the chance of rain was steadily increasing, so we nearly abandoned the plan to do this hike, but I’m so glad we didn’t. We drove to Boston Saturday night and stayed with a friend, then a shorter 2 hour drive to the trailhead in NH early in the morning. We started hiking about 8 am and it was good weather to start, mid 40s and partly cloudy. I just wore my long sleeve shirt with no jacket to start because I knew I would get warm quickly. I had thin gloves but took them off almost immediately and stored them in my pockets (and stupidly didn’t put them on again later).
The hike started out with some beautiful waterfalls and pretty quickly gaining elevation – a lot of the elevation gain is in the first 2-3 miles with 3480 ft gain in 4 miles. As we climbed you could feel it getting cooler but I waited until about 2.5 hrs in when we got to the first summit – Little Haystack, which is about 4800 ft. But that was a mistake because as soon as we got up there it was like being hit with a wall of freezing wind. I don’t know what the mph were but it was enough to feel like you had to fight it to stand up. I took a pic at the summit and then quickly ducked behind some rocks for shelter and dug into my bag and put on my down jacket and then my windbreaker over that, my neck buff, hat and ski gloves. By the time I got all that on my fingers were so painfully cold. I had to take a minute to get them warmed up before I could take the gloves off long enough to get some food out of my bag and get some much needed food and water. We didn’t want to stay long in that wind so we ate quickly and then headed out onto “the ridge”.
The ridge itself is amazing. It’s an exposed rocky ridgeline above the tree line that runs from summit to summit as the backbone of the range. It started spitting rain with a little freezing rain just as we were heading out onto it but fortunately that didn’t last. The views from this ridge were just amazing in all directions despite the cloudy day. You can see the Presidential Range, including Mt. Washington, the highest peak in the northeast. My friend was so excited by the coolness of this ridge that she could barely keep from running it (she kind of did, but stopped to wait for us a few times). We kind of rode this ridge up and down to summit Mount Lincoln, Truman and then Lafayette – which is the highest peak in NH outside the Presidential Range at about 5200+ ft. The wind died down in places and picked up again but it was never as bad again as that first summit. We were about 4 hours in at this point and we took another break to eat huddled in a rocky shelter.
We then started descending, which was equally or sometimes more challenging, and tough on the ankles and knees stepping down from rock to rock. We could see in the distance the “AMC Hut” which is the Appalachian Mountain Club’s lodge that has some food, water, and bunkrooms for hikers. We got there in about an hour though it looked closer. They are not currently open for staying or serving food, but they had brownies and coffee that you could pay for on the honor system. We had no cash so no brownie or coffee despite how amazing that sounded, but using an indoor bathroom was almost as good. It had started drizzling at this point and after a quick break we headed back out to get the hike over with as quickly as we could.
The rest of the hike was all descent but made trickier with the increasingly rain-slicked rocks. I slipped and fell on my butt only once, but a friend said it was the most gracefully done landing on your a$$ he’d seen. Not harm done. The long day was catching up with me but we kept up the pace as best we could and just powered through. As always, the last 2 miles of the hike seemed eternal. We completed the loop a little over 2 hours later, for a total of 7.5 hours hiking. The rain had stopped briefly when we reached the parking lot and it felt amazing to have a chance to get out of our wet gear, get the boots off, and change into some dry clothes. We were starving and in need of real, hot food so we headed to a pub in a nearby town that ended up being really good. After this much needed fortification we had the long drive back home (with multiple stops for coffee, bathrooms, and hauling stiffening muscles in and out of the car). I arrived back in my house at 12:30 am, almost exactly 20 hours from the time I got up. I slept like a very tired rock.