Aug. 22: The Presidential Range

As soon as I reached the top of the Tuckerman Ravine trail, which goes straight up - straight up - Mt. Washington from Hermit Lake shelter, a group of upstate New Yorkers wearing farm clothes and bonnets asked me where I was hiking from.

"West Virginia," was my response :)

It's getting very common for me to find myself explaining hiking the Appalachian Trail to tourists.

From there, it was a short day of hiking, 5.7 trail miles, to Madison Spring hut, over the Presidential Range of the White Mountains, where I saw the most spectacular views I've seen during my entire hike. It's 25 miles of above-treeline, alpine hiking. You can see exactly where you're going to go and you know how far that is. It's as though you have been dropped into a role-playing video game, somehow. Time actually flies while hiking, for once.














[The Presidential Range, Aug. 22, 2009]














[Looking back up to Mt. Washington, with summit building on top, across the Cog Railway. The railway is a short old-timey passenger train for tourists. It was once an AT tradition to moon it as it went by, but there was a crackdown in 2007 and nobody does it any more.]














[Approaching the mountains. The AT actually skirts all the peaks, but the views are still breathtaking.]