At dinner the night before, a visiting meteorologist at Lakes of the Cloud hut informed us of a cold front moving rapidly into the mountains from the northwest. The front, he predicted, would bring with it a drop in temperature, mixed precipitation, high winds, and fog. We awoke the next morning to all of the above. Some of our fellow hikers decided to call it a day and stay in the hut until good weather returned... predicted to happen one day later. Since we had the appropriate gear, we decided to continue our traverse to the next hut at Madison Spring.
We set out at 8:30 AM, encountering a dense fog that made sighting the next cairn marking the trail almost impossible. The winds were equally challenging, with gusts approaching 45 mph, making any summit attempts impossible. By 10:00, the mixed precipitation arrived -- a heavy, drenching rain that the high winds blasted into our faces as we skirted the mountainside just under 5,000 feet.
Instead of going up and down our three peaks, we had no choice but to push ahead in the quickest way possible -- the Gulfside Trail. Each time that we passed a cut-off for a peak, we pondered a summit attempt. But the cold, wet, and wind soon made us reconsider. Four long hours later, just as our Goretex shells had soaked through from the outside and our wool undergarments were drenched with sweat from the inside, we arrived at Madison Spring hut and took refuge from the storm.
We took not a single photo to document our Presidential traverse. Removing a digital device in that White Mountain shit storm would have rendered it inoperable in seconds.
Destination: Madison Spring Hut
Elevation: 4,800 feet (Gain 1,650 feet)
Distance: 6.8 miles one way
Route: Crawford Path, Gulfside Trail
Conditions: 29 degrees F (18 degrees F windchill); mixed precipitation, fog, wind gusts up to 45 mph
