We thought we knew what we were doing. We thought, hey, this will be a great bonding experience for the family, and the kids will someday thank us for taking them. We believed we were doing the right thing, baking in a little character with some smiles. After all, I had climbed the Presidential Traverse several years ago, all in one day. Surely, taking the kids would be devoid of drudgery or complaint, especially if we took three days to do it and stayed at two of the AMC’s huts along the way. The kids will love this! And us!
The kids did not love it. Or us. We had made a gross miscalculation. When I completed the Traverse several years ago, I was in the best shape of my life, or close to it. I motored the twenty-three-mile route I planned that day, not with ease, but a determination that only self-propulsion could muster. Even though we cut out several of the summits I did back then and made it a multi-day effort, trying to drag a squadron of four across a similar route was overzealous at best. I found it much harder than I remembered as well.
View of Mount John Quincy Adams on the descent of Madison
The first day wasn’t too bad. We made our way up the rocky ascent to the Madison Springs Hut, situated between Mount Madison and Mount John Quincy Adams, and managed to beat the mid-afternoon drizzle. After staking out our bunks and taking a brief respite in the hut’s common room, we climbed up to the top of Mount Madison, figuring if we could eliminate that summit from the following day’s journey, we could keep Day 2 “fun.” In this, we failed, but thank God we didn’t have to do Madison on Day 2 or we might have had an all-out mutiny on our hands.
In the morning, we started out on the Star Lake Trail, making our way up to Mount Adams before linking up to the Gulfside Trail that would take us to Mount Washington. We were in good spirits but that was partly because we hadn’t quite told the kids how long the day was about to be. The night before, when consulting the map again, my wife and I realized that we were going to have to inject some false optimism into the day if we were going to make it to the Mizpah Hut in one piece. We were enacting our parental right to maintain bliss through ignorance as long as we could.
It was quite a stretch. The kids showed a ton of grit, but it was a lot. Why we hadn’t gone for a few shorter 4000-footer hikes earlier that summer to get them accustomed to the chore, I have no idea. Weighted down with an oversized pack carrying all of the extra gear a family might need, I fell behind the others. When the rest of them approached the summit, they realized that I had all of the money, and they sent one of my sons back down to grab my credit card so that they could order some food. As he took my credit card, I put in an order for an obscene amount of juice, strawberry milk, and a number of other sugary drinks to get my electrolytes back up. If I could, I would have ordered an IV of Dr. Pepper. I watched with envy as my son bounded back up the trail.
When I finally neared the summit of Mount Washington myself, I had to cross the tracks of the Mount Washington Cog Railway. But before doing so, I had to let one of the cog trains pass in front of me. It was moving at a pace I could have jogged past under normal circumstances, but with my oversized pack I was sure that if I attempted to jump across the tracks, I was probably going to trip and get run over in the slowest manner imaginable. While I waited for it to go by, its passengers waved to me like I was an animal in one of those old zoo safaris, unaware that if they reached one of their hands out too closely, I might bite it in search of a Snickers bar.
The tracks of the Cog Railway below Washington’s summit
The second day was long. After leaving the Disney-like vibes of Mount Washington’s summit—where people who drive up the mountain by car stand in line to take a picture with the summit sign before grabbing some fast food at the summit café—we set out on the Crawford Path towards Mount Monroe, Eisenhower, Pierce, and what I consider to be the prettiest part of the Presidential Traverse. But we weren’t interested in much sightseeing anymore. When we arrived at the Lake of the Clouds Hut, we bumped into two brothers in their thirties who had been with us at the Madison Springs Hut and appeared to be in good physical shape. They were shocked when they learned we were continuing on for another four or five miles to the Mizpah Hut. They also thought they were being helpful when they pointed out the remaining distance to us within earshot of our children. They weren’t.
My family abandoned me. The older kids, determined to “get this done,” marched their way down the trail while I struggled under the weight of my super-pack. My wife, meanwhile, hurried along with our youngest, whose eleven-year-old frame was diminishing under the surprise effort we had cast upon her. I was thirty or forty minutes behind the last of them when I finally arrived at the Mizpah Hut, just in time to grab some dinner. Thankfully, the AMC hut crew had saved some for me, and I greedily ate all of the leftovers. Back at the Madison Hut, I remembered they had put out some apple juice, and I asked the Mizpah crew if they wouldn’t mind providing us some with dinner. They obliged, and all of us gulped as much as we could.
Stiff, sore, and exhausted, we were still somehow smiling and laughing. My wife’s sister, father, and niece had also met us at the Mizpah hut from a shorter hike they did that day, and it gave all of us a welcome jolt of energy. Maybe we’re creating some positive bonding, after all. During the last few hours of the hike down the Crawford Path and over Mount Pierce, I wouldn’t have been surprised if my kids didn’t talk to me for the rest of the evening, but over dinner they found their excitement again, and we laughed about some of the trail talk we overheard from some fellow travelers—two girls and two guys—who openly discussed their bowel movements. I guess when you’re that tired, you don’t care about much anymore and will say anything just to keep conversation going.
After a night in the Mizpah Hut, we descended, all of us quite ready for a shower and civilization. A couple of my kids said they never wanted to experience anything like that again. A couple of them said they would, but only something shorter, to which my wife and I wholeheartedly agreed. Going forward, I think it’s probably a good idea if I restrict the self-inflicted agony to myself and those willing to volunteer themselves as tribute—namely, my buddies who want to keep testing themselves and seeing what they’ve got left in the tank. But if I do the Traverse again, one thing is for sure: I’m going to break up the hike a little more and add the Lake of the Clouds Hut to the itinerary.
Lake of the Clouds Hut below Mount Monroe