The view of the sunrise is gorgeous
Then we took at 3 hour nap. After which Keith and Elizabeth descended and Fred and I continued on.
I think at around 3pm we had lunch at Mt. Clay:
View from Mt. Clay:
And we finally reached the summit of Mt Washington at around 6pm.
We proceeded down the gulfstream trail. At 8:30pm we gave up hiking since we had lost the trail. The trail was in poor condition after the ice storm of January '98. We bivied and got out of bed at 9:00 am and got back the the Mt. Madison parking lot noon.
Here are my notes from the trip: Accompanied by Fred Hopley (he is from South Africa) Trail: webster trail up to mt. madison great gulf stream trail down back. We started at the trail head accompanied by Elizabeth from Wellesley and Keith from RPI who where only accompanied us just to the top of Mt. Madison. We started at 1:30am. We reached the top (within 40 feet of mt. madison) at 5:15am, just in time to see the sunrise. We napped until 8:30am; at which point Keith and Elizabeth headed back ,and fred and I continued with the traverse. I can't remember the intermediate times, we reached mt. Washington at 6pm (I think mt. clay by 4pm and had lunch? until 4:45pm). We stayed at mt. washington just a bit and headed down the great gulf stream trail which loses 2000feet in about 1/2 mile (very bad for knees). We got down to a lake that is there at about 8pm. At which point the trail was very hard to follow. We lost the trail and at 9pm gave up looking for it. We set up our sleeping bags and went to sleep. Although unnecessary, we were lazy in the morning and did not get out of bed until 9am. After bushwacking for a while, we found the trail again and followed it back to the trailhead (for I think 5 miles) and arrived at around noon. So the total hiking time is something like 4 hours to get to the top of mt madison via daniel webster trail 8 hours for the traverse 8 hours to go down via great gulf stream trail all the way back to the daniel webster trail head. It is important to note that we were carrying almost full backpacks (food for 1.5 days and tent) and I was breaking in my new boots.