Mt Washington, 2023
We had attempted Mount Rainier as our first big winter climb in June of 2023 and we’re unsuccessful. As part of the training for the for our next attempt, we decided to do the classic winter climb of Mount Washington in New Hampshire in December. I had always wanted to climb Mount Washington in winter after having lived in Portland, Maine for 20 years and spending a lot of time hiking in the whites.
We began by arriving and staying at the Glen House (a 10 minute drive from the trailhead). on Wednesday, December 15. We departed the hotel by 4:30 am to arrive at the. Pinkham Notch parking lot with light snow falling, and the temperature around 32°, After locating the Tuckerman Ravine trailhead we began setting out in a comfortable falling snow that gradually turned to wet sleet as the sun rose. We navigated oonto the Lion's Head trail and encountered some deep, slushy snow as we linked up with the turnoff to the Lion's Head winter route.
As we navigated the winter trail, we came to the Wilcox Step.This was a bit tricky given the amount of ice and snow, but we were able to get to the top and then scramble up through the trees to where we stopped short of the tree line. At this point the wind picked up considerably, and the snowfall began to increase, limiting our visibility. Before we left the tree line we added extra layers, goggles and heavier gloves. We then moved onto the snow covered rock areas, and following the cairns, moved our way up the mountain. We were passed by a three or four other climbers who stopped at a natural wind break between two large rocks to fix crampons. We debated whether or not to put on crampons and by the time we were past the wind break, the wind really didn’t give us a chance. We felt we could have added crampons, but there was enough purchase between the rocks and the snow that they weren’t absolutely necessary.
As we got further up the mountain the wind continued to increase severely and then the auto road appeared and at that point I knew we were fairly close to the top. We were able to cross the road and move up to the actual summit platform where we posed for a few photographs. As we approached, we met the group that had passed up on this the way down and gave them congratulatory high fives as they shouted a couple words of encouragement over the wind (gusting up to 80 mph at this point). We stopped behind one of the buildings to get a bit of wind shelter to re-fix gloves and other equipment and scrape off frost from our goggles. We then began our descent, which again may have been aided by crampons on some of the sections, but we felt OK without them. We descended slowly to the tree line and once inside the wind died down and it was comfortable enough to remove some of the other layers.
We had an uneventful descent, other than needing to use a 30' long piece of 7mm cordelette to help lower ourselves down the Wilcox step. We arrived in the parking lot about 4:30 pm for a total round-trip of about 12 hours. We got in the car, headed back to the Glen House for dinner and celebrated our winter summit of Mount Washington.
