These days I’ve been having a bit more fun getting out for adventuring. It’s annoying to wake up early, drive two hours, and then start hiking. But now that I own a small bit of property in NH, I can stay the night at the dam, which enables getting a good night’s rest and an early start. Pretty nice! I’ve also been a bit into solo adventures lately, its really nice to just be able to explore on your own.

Mt. Lafeyette is special to me because I hiked it on a family trip when I was 12. I’ve not been back since, and I was getting antsy about whatever big adventure was next, so it was time to return.

Friday after work, I headed up to the dam. After some cleaning of clutter I was able to make space to roll out my air mattress. I’ve got two sleeping bags, I sleep inside one and use the other as a blanket. Its pretty cool to sleep amidst the dam electronics.

I woke up at 6:30 and drove up to the trailhead. I was a bit slow and actually set off up the trail at 8:15.

I went pretty quick up the trail. I had to shed a lot of layers because I was cold sleeping at the dam. My bag wasn’t quite big enough so I ended up using paracord to lash my snowshoes to my front. This looked funny but worked great, with the only downside that I had to un-lash then every time I wanted to take my pack off. This is definitely not “the right way,” but if it works, who cares!

On the ridge of the old bridle path, some ice slides could be seen on the lafeyette-lincoln ridge. They looked ready to be climbed!!! Next time….

I reached the Greenleaf Hut at 11:04AM. Pretty nice and snowswept.

I continued up. The trees looked really cool. There was absolutely no wind here.

Pausing for some lunch and more layers before going above treeline, I ran into some friends from the MIT outing club! It is always amusing to run into friends over a hundred miles from home.

At this point, I hiked into the clouds. I was hoping the clouds would clear up, but no luck. I also switched out my microspikes for snowshoes to avoid postholing. I reached the summit and found a pretty incredible display of rime icing- the rime ice on the summit sign was literally longer than I am tall. Weird!

My original plan here was would just have gone back down the way I came, as the visibility was poor and I was solo. But, my MITOC friends showed up on the summit as well, and so I asked if I could join their group for the ridgeline. They said yes, so off we went.

The visibility was probably a few hundred feet here. We met quite a decent number of other people on the ridge.

I split off from the group to descent via the falling waters trail. I got back to treeline, took off my snowshoes, and ate some food.

Now it was time to have some fun. I decided to combo bootslide and run down the mountain. This was good and speedy. I probably ran down about half of the mountain.

On the falling waters trail, I ran into, unsurprisingly, falling waters. I put back on my microspikes and descended alongside, and over, some cool frozen waterfalls.

I got back to my car at 2pm. All in, 5 hours and 45 minutes. Nice!

Then it was back to Boston. After a brief nap at home, it was off to MITERS, where some old cruft was gathered for putzgiving. Some familiar faces!

All in all, a fun day.