At Last: The Long Awaited Plot

Time profile of hike last weekend to Stillwater Junction. For those of you who thought this was a level-trail, feast your eyeballs on this baby..... although an interesting characteristic of the profile is that my ascent and descent rates are pretty uniform in terms of vertical feet per minute (I slow down on steeper parts).

[Update 10/28/07]
Well, the winds are touching 100mph on the summit of Mt. Washington. The heavy rains have let up and the temperatures are dropping. I'm caulking, insulating and scraping today (no big adventure) but while breakfast is settling thought I'd post a hike analysis. I'm trying to combine distance, elevation and time in an informative display and chose the image posted at right. The symmetry is, of course, due to the fact that the return trip from Stillwater Junction was via the same route (up and over the notch where Nancy and Norcross Ponds are). I've divided the hike into three stages and posted the times and average pace for each section. The middle 'flat' section by itself was close to 4mph (about a 15min pace) but I liked the idea of including the entire section from Norcross Pond to Stillwater Jct and back. If you go there, you'll see why - the terrain in and out of the valley is different from the ascent from 302.

The times are total hiking time (including stops for pictures, lunch, etc.).

Oh yeh, Summit of Mt. Washington at 2pm: 18°F, 75mph winds, -10° wind chill, and the pic at right shows the observation deck.

[Minor Update 10/28, 8pm]
I harvested all my remaining hot peppers and made the last batches of my annual 'hot sauce'. It's pretty hot - although what was interesting was not that the sauce was so hot, but that handling and cooking the peppers nearly destroyed everything near and dear to me, including my nasal mucosa. The normal precautions of wearing a respirator and latex gloves are for people who learn their lessons easily. This is the fourth time I've made pepper sauce and the fourth time I've declined to wear protection. Next time I'll do it, I swear. One quick anecdote: I dried about 60 peppers earlier in the season and spent about 20 minutes picking them out of a paper back, cutting the stems off with scissors and tossing them in an otherwise empty pot. Merely handling the dried peppers caused all sorts of full-body reactions (including sweating and other symptoms that pepper-eaters get to know). Now I've got lots of pepper sauce.