2006.02.26 - Going from a three-hour red-eye flight to the rental car counter, then following with a six hour drive, a hike to the highest point in Connecticut, another three hours driving, a short hike to the highest point in Rhode Island, concluding with another four or five hours driving through a mini-Noreaster (no exaggeration, as this is what the talking heads confirmed) to a small town in western Massachusetts really makes for a long day (and sentence for that matter)! This process left me with around six hours of sleep (definitely not enough) between my arrival at the trailhead for Mt. Greylock and starting out my wintry hike up said mountain.

I started the day by suiting-up for a cold day. The weather in the lower elevations was supposed to hover around 10-15F throughout the day, which meant a balmy 0F in the higher elevations. Although the forecast was for breaking clouds resulting in a sunny and windy day, the forecast would turn out to be 85% wrong; in the lower areas, it would actually be cloudy and calm. The summit of Mt Greylock, though, would be overcast and very windy. As I was getting ready, I debated as to whether or not I should bring my snowshoes, and thankfully I made the right decision. I had them on the entire day!

My chosen route up to the highest point in Massachusetts was the poorly- marked Cheshire Harbor Trail. I'm sure that its very easy to follow without 1-3' of snow on the ground, but the many spur routes were confusing on occasion. Despite this, I never lost the trail. Just above the parking lot, which was surprisingly accessible on this occasion, the depth of the snow was only about a foot. The shoes worked great and kept me from sinking into the white fluff hardly at all! After a few minutes of snow-shoeing, I had to stop and take off most of my layers to cool down. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a hot- body, which makes it fairly difficult for me to excercise aerobically and yet still stay dry. I got down to thin pants and a polypro shirt so that I could actually jog up the trail in a moderately comfortable manner.

The distance ticked away quickly, but as the snow grew deeper toward the top, my pace slowed somewhat; the deeper the powder, the more of my effort went to struggling with the conditions rather than moving myself forward. I evetually exited from the Cheshire Harbor Trail, and followed patches of wind-blown asphalt interspersed with deep drifts along the summit road before gaining the narrow Appalachian Trail for the remaining short distance to the summit.

This section of the AT reminded me a lot of what my Dad & I had experienced on Clingmans Dome, TN the previous year; the weight of the snow on the tree branches bent them inward onto the narrow trail, making a Quasimodo stance necessary to keep from getting bough-fulls of snow down my back. The snow was drifting deeper and deeper toward the top, so I was quite surprised to find the actual summit blown free of everything but the most stubborn rime.

The wind had picked up by this point to a near gale which made it very difficult to convince my tripod to stay up. After setting up for the summit photo, the camera and tripod actually took a nose-dive, but luckily the camera landed softly on my pack nearby. Crisis averted! I was finally able to wedge the apparatus on some small rocks on the ground, so that I could get my pictures and get the heck out of Dodge. It was cold! So cold, in fact, that while I was fiddling with the camera, my right hand turned into a useless stump. I quickly got my mittens out of my pack, but since they were near the top, the were too cold to help my situation at all. Putting my hand under my armpit helped considerably, so I was able to warm up both my hand and glove.

As I was readying myself to head back down from the -5F conditions on top, I saw another person coming up to the top of MA, much to my surprise! He was dressed in a warm jacket, but only jeans and standard hiking boots covering his lower half. Understandibly cold, he asked me to take his picture, which I was very happy to do. Before we had the chance to talk much, he had to head back down the trail to the windless climes below. I descended a few hundred feet, back to the Cheshire Harbor Trail and stopped for awhile to have some lunch and rehydrate.

I should definitely pause to say that I had some decent frost-nip, bordering on frost bite at this point. I had pulled out my phone to call Carol from the summit, but my mitten claws were too bulky to dial the number. I stupidly took off my left glove (the right one was already cold, remember) for the call and to take the picture for my fellow highpointer. Without really noticing it, all feeling had gone out of my fingers and I started to get a bright red color in my digits which had paled considerably toward the tips. Descending had gotten my blood flowing again, which thankfully helped my hands, but boy did my fingers hurt! If you've never had frost nip/bite before, I don't recommend trying it!

With my tail, or rather my hand, between my legs trying to thaw, I retreated quickly down the trail to make short work of what had taken much longer on the ascent. Though it wasn't a terribly long day in the grand scheme of things, Mt. Greylock definitely felt much longer than it was! On the way down I had time to contemplate my next hike up Mt. Mansfield, VT as well as the name of the route I was currently on. I'm still confused as to how the heck you could get a boat up here... Maybe the harbor was on the other side of the mountain!