KILKENNY DASH (Saturday , May 20, 2000)

View from Rotger's Ledge, sometime before sunrise

Two cones of light interrupt the vast late-night darkness up on Kilkenny ridge in the northern White Mountains as they move stubbornly and quietly north. Thick clouds hide the full moon and sprinkle the forest with a light drizzle. The birch trees this high up don’t have leaves yet, so the two hikers can feel every raindrop tapping on their shoulders. Totally focused on avoiding deep mud-holes and lake-like puddles caused by the recent snow-melt, they don’t have the strength to talk much. Only occasionally does the first one make a short jump and warns the second with an unpublishable word… after which the second, says "shoot shoot shoot" as he mistakes a deep pool of thick black mud for sturdy ground. When the mud stops, large granite boulders block their path instead, sometimes reinforced by a tree that fell across the trail. After a monotonous hour or so, one of them says “Break for five minutes”. As they sit down and lean against a rock, he continues “This is really pushing the envelope!”. Then, silence engulfs them again. But they mustn’t allow their fatigue and pains to overcome them, they mustn’t fall asleep, so they just get up again and keep going…

Those two lonely hikers are two members of the MITOC Presidio Team, Hector Briceno and myself. Trying to take advantage of the full moon in conjunction with comfortable hiking conditions and no bugs, we climbed Mount Waumbek on Saturday… From the South Pond Gate 22 miles away. This report brings you the full story and shares the lessons we have learned.

MOTIVATION

SUMMARY STATISTICS

USUAL DISCLAIMER

TRIP-REPORT

When it’s 7AM and you are already 10 miles and 3000 vertical feet into your hike, you know you are hiking with MITOC Presidio. We take our first real (longer than 5 minutes) break and just soak in the sweeping 360-degree view from this amazing peak.Mount Cabot almost within a stone-throw to the south-west, an impressive massif of the Presidentials directly south of us, Mahoosuc Range in the east, Green Mountains of Vermont far in the west, and who-knows-what-they-are-called mountains in the north. Forests as far as the eye can see, distant valleys capped in morning fog, York Pond glistening in the sun. But the chilling wind together with our pressing schedule chase us off this beautiful summit towards the highest point of the trip 4170 feet high Mount Cabot, a centerpiece of the range. (for someone else’s photos, see http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/whites/cabot.html for our photos, wait a few days). We vow to return to the Horn in the future, Hector mumbles something about a winter trip… I realize that these ludicrous-sounding remarks of his are ultimately what generates epic trips like the one we are on right now, because I vaguely recall having originally suggested the Kilkenny Ridge as a challenging one-way day-hike myself…never in my wildest dreams would I come up with this round-trip idea (again, this is a good thing, for those of you who haven’t grasped our philosophy yet). Never mind, time to get going again.

We reach the ugly wooded summit at 7:30 and not having found any significant ice on the way up, Hector decides to cache his grippers. Worried about the potential performance of his ultra-light trail-running shoes on snow, he brought these contraptions after a sliding incident on Mount Moriah in March. (I am wearing regular high-cut hiking boots and trying not to mention my cosy dry feet too much to Mr. “but these dry out pretty fast” Briceno) He doesn’t realize that this caching move forces us to retrace our steps on the way back, making various around-the-mountain strategies infeasible. Later on, he will blame me for playing a trick on him when all I did was merely agree with the brilliant idea of caching the extra weight… hee hee! Before we know it, we pass by the cabin on the more open southern summit, and head down the switchbacks to Bunnell Notch. The people inside the cabin are still sleeping. Whimps!

The Bunnell Rock on the way down has a nice view, one of the last of the day. Still in high spirits and with strengths renewed by the newly-bagged rare four-thousander, we charge across the two-peaked Terrace Mountain towards the deep Willard Notch. I find myself needing to remark loudly “Ridge my a**!” as we drop to 2700 feet on the so-called “ridge” trail. I don’t yet know of the roller-coaster called Weeks Mountain that lies ahead… It’s now 9:30, we have covered 16 miles, and our bodies are starting to feel it. So we settle down for a 20-minute break by a bubbling brook, refill water-bottles, and in another weight-saving move, decide to cache one of them at the Notch, because “it’s only 12 miles to Waumbek and back from here”. We started with 2.5 quarts each, now we drop to 1.5 quarts each… Trying to re-fuel, we eat as many granola bars and pop-tarts as a human can possible swallow in 20 minutes. The scenic part of the day is over. No more views. Just the purgatory of North, Middle, and South Weeks Mountains. Lesson 4: Always be suspicious when seeing a mountain in the Whites with a name that involves a sub-categorization like (south, middle, north) or (east, middle, west). This is an artifact of the lack of imagination of whoever had named the three completely INDEPENDENT peaks, most likely separated by deep unforgiving notches. So we go 1200 ft. up, 800 ft. down, 600 ft. up, 300 ft. down, 500 ft. up, get lost on the summit of South Weeks, find ourselves again, go 200 ft. down, and finally 500 ft. up as we finally reach Mount Waumbek (4006 ft.), the southern terminus of the Kilkenny “Ridge” Trail and thus our half-way point (Mile 22, 12:30 PM) Exhausted, we try not to think about the fact that there is a road only 3 miles away from here via a well-traveled Starr King Trail…gotta go pick up those grippers… Lying down in the mid-day sun, we became an easy prey to the local ferocious birds. They were able to snatch a Ritz Cracker or a Fig Newton before we could put it in our mouth. Lesson 5: When you look so tired that little birds consider you fair game, it’s time to head back to the car.

Rejuvenated by a 30-minute break, we greet a group of Scottish hikers who have arrived to the summit just before one along the usual Starr King Trail, and head back via our northern variation. The Weeks make us weak again, and the black Mount Cabot in the distance looms awfully tall. On the descent from North Weeks, I feel so sleepy that we need to stop for a 5-minute breather…

Finally, our knees shaking, we make it back to Willard Notch, ready for another break (Mile 28, 4 PM). Hector cannot quite extend his right knee without feeling an unhappy tendon, but otherwise, we are “OK” (whatever that means in a situation like ours). We can’t wait long, the weather is turning bad. Time to get moving… >From about this point, hiking is no longer fun. We focus our minds on the summit of Cabot above us, and slowly but steadily move ahead. It starts raining, time to put on a shell and…keep going. Finally, the cabin!!! (Mile 33, 7 PM) Two hikers inside have the stove already going, it’s cold and pouring rain outside. What a great place to spend the night! It turns out that one of the people in the cabin is a salesman at Wilderness House. He did seem familiar…a sad realization: we are gear-heads after all. When you find yourself leaving a warm cozy cabin at 7PM to hike 11 miles downhill in a rain, you know you are (you guessed it, I hope!) insane. OK, but when you are hiking with MITOC Presidio, it’s just a routine part of your training… So we pick up those damn grippers, and carefully descend to Unknown Pond on our wobbly legs (3200 ft., Mile 36, 8:30 PM). The rain is on and off, enough to make every log and boulder slippery, and the mountains seem at least twice taller than in the morning. Passing two lonely tents at the campsite, we seriously consider somehow driving their owners away and going to sleep in their sleeping bags. And then, darkness descends upon us… Going gets tough in the last saddle before Rogers Ledge, where the trail has turned into several miles of hopping from boulder to boulder over deep pools of mud and water. As a cherry on top of this trap is a 100-foot walkway over a swamp and a stream made of completely rotten and disconnected split logs. We get paranoid, afraid of stepping on anything non-granite. Then, we resign to our fate and simply walk through the stuff, even my waterproof boots give up and get soaked. A short break at Mill Brook Trail Junction: Eating is hard, all those sweet bars we have with us seem extremely unappetizing. We day-dream about Mc Donalds. Mental note: we must work on calorie-intake during future hikes… Last few hundred feet of ascent and we are at Rogers Ledge again. What was a quick run uphill in the morning next becomes a downhill race against fatigue. We both repeatedly fall asleep while walking. Hector discovers that his prescription glasses do help him see after all. He didn’t wear them all day because of fogging concerns… Instead of tripping and falling into mud-holes, he now looks like a coordinated humanoid bi-ped again. We take frequent micro-nap breaks. As far as I am concerned, these last 5 miles lasted an eternity (Our log shows 2.5 hours). By midnight, the trail levels off, we can see the pond. Hector catches his twenty-seventh wind, and leads the charge to the car. The last mile flies by, and before we know it, we are sleeping in our sleeping bags next to the car… Mile 44, 12:30 AM.

POST-SCRIPT

We are up again at 7 AM, drive to Intervale to rendezvous with Luke and Dave, and spend the Sunday climbing the 6-pitch “Sliding Board” at White Horse. It’s amazing how much can the human organism recover in mere 6 hours of sleep after something as grueling as the Kilkenny Dash…or how additicted some people are to climbing. Increadible to think that 15 hours before we would not even consider climbing on Sunday, we even had a bail out excuse "oh it rained on Saturday, so the rock will be wet"...and indeed, the rock was wet…

More pictures of this little trip

HISTORICAL NOTE

A few questions remain: can we do 20 4000ft. peaks in 24 hours? Can we do 60 miles in one day? FYI: The elevation condition set by D.A. on the second challenge is at least 5000 ft. up and 5000ft. down. Robert Zeithammer