Mount Mashington Saga Part 1: Arrivals and Departures

This is the first part of the trip, it was longer than I thought. Part 2 will be published shortly. If this is your first visit, check out the posts leading up to the hike. So it’s been over a month since my trip with my friend Felicia to New Hampshire to hike Mount Washington and it’s taken almost that long to realize what it meant. So it all started on a sunny Thursday when we left Manchester CT to drive the 5.5 hours north through Massachusetts and Vermont before arriving at Joe Dodge Lodge at the base of Mount Washington. I felt good. I am fit, I work out, and I have completed too many road races to count and almost 20 sprint triathlons. It will be a long day but the hike will be no problem. We were set to start our climb on Friday morning and it was expected to be a beautiful sunny day. But let’s not rush this. I need to tell you about Joe Dodge Lodge. In my recent travels I have grown accustom to a certain level hotel. Well, let me just say that this is definitely a lodge not a hotel not even a Garden Inn. It is a clean, wood paneled, communal bath kind of lodge. For your $70 per person per night you get breakfast, dinner and a comfy private room. In this example comfy means tiny and similar to what you might expect in a convent that was decorated in 1972. In other words one limp pillow, a double bed, no heavenly bed linens, and a window fan for cooling. We arrived at Mount Washington probably close to 4 and dinner was at 6pm. You get a little ticket that gets you into the dining room and you sit on long picnic tables that seat 16 or so people and there are 8 to 10 tables in the dining. They serve water but you are welcome to bring other beverages with you. We packed the wine... After we tasted the water we were grateful to have the wine. Being on the mountain I expected clean, refreshing spring water. What it was I can’t even describe; but I will try. It was terrible. It tasted like when you go to the dentist to get a metal filling and you have to swig water to get rid of the metal fragments. It tasted like the metal water you spit out. Really disgusting, I am a big tap water fan and I have never had anything so terrible... The food is served family style and there is plenty of it. It was not five star dining but it was pretty good. I wish I remembered what we were served. If I were my sister Lauren I would have taken pictures of it all. But I didn’t, I remember they had a great soup, really good bread and several other dishes that were interesting... Not bad just not sure exactly what I was eating... Dessert was pineapple upside down cake and it was awesome... After dinner we went out to our car and got our packs ready for the next day. We decided to forgo the movie they were showing in the dining room. It was some old movie on climbing the mountain and I felt at this point it was just better I didn’t know. By 8pm we were back in our room reading and getting ready for bed. I haven’t been to bed that early in a very long time... Did I mention communal baths? Yes. So as any smart person would, I had been hydrating all day to make sure I was well hydrated for the hike. In addition Felicia and I shared that lovely bottle of wine at dinner. As a result I woke up around midnight and had to go to the bathroom. In order for me to do that I would need to leave the room, walk down the hall and into the bathroom. This is a problem. At midnight I am fairly certain that this is a bad idea. There are clearly people lurking in the hallways and I could get murdered in the hall way or worse yet someone could sneak into the room I was sharing with Felicia while I was in the bathroom and kill us both. This would have put a definite cramp in our plans to hike the next day and I will not be a lead story on Dateline on a hiking trip gone badly. So being sound of mind I tell myself, I will wait. I can will it to go away. If I just fall asleep I will forget and just go when I get up in the morning. So that is what I do, I go back to sleep but I don’t wake up in the morning I wake up ten minutes later. That is okay I will cross my legs and will it away, and I awake ten minutes later. This is clearly not going to work. I must have laid there for an hour trying to figure out another solution. At which point I get up to go to the bathroom and suffer the consequences be that what they may. At which point Felicia also awoke and wanted to go to. Crisis averted! After tossing and turning most of the night I got up at 515 am. We knew this hike was going to be eight to ten hours and we wanted to get a jump on the day. I put on my new wicking everything. My pants were not new and neither were my cotton t-shirt and my boots. After all, I had purchased those boots at least a month ago… It was important that I was wearing a cute outfit; I wanted to make sure that the people passing me had something else to say besides, boy she is slow. And the outfit was the ticket. I could imagine it… “Boy she is slow but what a great t-shirt, day pack, visor, boots…...” That said I didn’t want it to look like I had never hiked before so it couldn’t be over the top new. I wanted to blend with the out doorsy hikers... Breakfast was buffet in the dining hall, but it was good and almost anything you could possibly imagine except fruit. So after breakfast we packed up our 15-20 pound day packs, I have my hiking poles and we set off on the Tuckerman’s Ravine Trail... It is just an incline but it is like any of the other trails I have hike. I am going to leave you here for now. But stay tuned for Part 2 to see if we both survived!