Oh yea, we’re into it now. 11.5 miles that took us about eight hours to traverse. Hello White Mountains. These are the mountains that have been talked about so much for the entire trail; always hearing about how hard it is, how slow the hiking will be, and how beautiful it is. It’s definitely slow going and definitely spectacular. And yea it’s hard in a technical climbing kind of way not a drop dead from exhaustion kind of way. The mountains today, particularly Kinsman Mountain, were quite steep but so rocky that there was almost no way to go fast enough to get out of breath. Just slow going from one step to the next, higher and higher. Once again the summit was quite nice, although nothing compared to Moosilauke, and still low elevation compared to what’s ahead the next few days. By the time we got there it was getting late and we didn’t have much time to linger.
The weather was nice and up here that’s the most important thing I can hope for. I lost my appetite for hiking in the rain sometime along the trail, and I know I’m certainly not looking forward to it now that it gets near or below freezing at night. The sun was out for most of the day today and it was actually almost warm for parts of the afternoon. Clouds started coming in later and it cooled off rapidly. On top of Kinsman the rushing wind added to the chill and I returned to my cozy fleece for the last mile and a half to the shelter.
Breakfast this morning was quite something too. It was included with our room at the Woodstock Inn and they had one of the most extensive breakfast menus I’ve ever seen. So much looked good – there was a BBQ pork omelette and a four fruit waffle, but I was feeling brave and went for the Mediterranean Womlet. It was a belgian waffle on the bottom, then a layer of Mediterranean veggies, then a layer of egg on top, served with syrup. It was gigantic and decently good but I ended up wishing I’d gotten something more traditional.