Day Fourteen
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Zero Day in Gorham
Rain is in the forecast and Mount Washington is next on our itinerary, so we took another day off today. It's a good thing, I guess cause it took us all day to figure out exactly how to arrange our itinerary for the Presidential Range.
Ah, Mount Washington.... How do we hike thee? We took today off to avoid hiking it in the rain. Still, to hike Mt. Washington in any direction almost requires a stay in a hut since you can't camp above treeline. That is, for us, as slow as we have been moving. Anyway, we kinda wanted the experience of a hut stay. So, we booked a stay for Wednesday night at Lake of the Clouds Hut, planning to hike 11 miles up from Crawford Notch to the hut, northbound as usual, then over to Valley Way campsite (7.2 miles) and then Pinkham Notch (7.8 miles) over the Presidentials.
Then we decided we couldn't do 11 miles from Crawford Notch uphill in one day, we've been averaging 8 miles a day around here. So we paid a 10% change fee to change our reservation to Madison Spring Hut on Thursday night. Our plan now is to take a shuttle up the auto road to Mt. Washington and hike southbound (SOBO) to Crawford Notch (12.5 miles). Surely going downhill will be easier right? But, upon asking advice online, we decided maybe that would be a stretch for us as well.
Now we were in a conundrum. We had already changed our reservation one time, we surely didn't want to pay another fee to change it again. We still have a reservation for Madison Spring Hut on Thursday night. Lesson learned, don't make a reservation in a hut until you have worked it all out.
We finally decided to call the reservation office and ask their advice. They agreed to make another change for us without a fee. We changed Madison Spring Hut from Thursday night to Wednesday night. We will do Mt. Washington north to Pinkham first then go back and do Crawford Notch to Mt. Washington. Ugh! I hate to do things out of order, but oh well. Darn Huts!!
