Happy 42nd tMail!

tMail bagged Carrigain today. More details to follow, but I do have one comment. Winds on the Bad Boy slowly dropped from the 100's to around 80 today and are inching back up. We saw The Bushwack
huge winds - streaming snow - gusts ... in Crawford Notch. On the entire 8.5hr hike, the only winds we experienced were when we climbed the tower on Carrigain and they were probably maxing out at around 20mph in some of the bigger gusts.

We followed two guys who broke trail about 45min ahead of us. They lost the trail on the switchbacks (see red trail on pic at right). We bushwacked the green trail. That was the crazy part. (Click the map to zoom.)

Pics are posted: [tMail's Pics] [mutha's Pics]

From tMail:

"if you could make an analogy the Bushwhack was like this...if you are driving on a nice paved road with a set destination and then decided to drive 100 mph up a cliff through trees, stumps, deadwood, falling ice...it would go something like that..."

From Mutha:

"Initially, we were just climbing upwards on a steep, heavily wooded slope. We packed our poles to keep them from snagging on branches. A few traps gave us some challenges, but in general we were just fighting Start of Bushwack
gravity and branches (see pic at right). But the higher we got, the icier the boughs of the trees and the fewer the deciduous trees. Soon we were pushing/pulling through dense spruce/fir groves with interlocking boughs covered in ice up to four inches thick."

"Imagine a rack of clothes in a closet that is a hundred feet across, with poles places every 2 feet. Now add hundreds of racks above and behind - like a jungle gym, thick with clothes from all the bars. Then imagine that we have to climb through the clothes and work our way to the top rack, all the way in the back. Lastly, add to this picture that all the clothes are wet, covered in thick ice, are all fused together, and the poles have sharp sticks radiating from them ... and there's snow everywhere and you have a backpack on and snowshoes ... and scattered randomly throughout the poles and racks are special ones that can break unexpectedly when you are relying on them for support."

Also, in the course of doing some online research I found two great sites, linked on the right sidebar in the "Recreation Links" section: "White Mountain Lost Trails Project" and the UNH online historic USGS maps. These are two great resources.