This has been planned for a while with the Manchild and his friends and it was exciting for it to finally come to fruition. We hiked up to Zealand Falls Hut on a bluebird day, taking the longer route that led over Mt. Hale.
The infamous Manchild actually had to head up on his own as he had religious duties related to his son to deal with earlier in the day. He actually skied up to the Hut and made good time, too.
Day 2 was a hike in wintery conditions to Mt. Zealand. Afterwards we split up as Rob & Derek went back to the hut and Peter, Duncan and myself pressed on. We had originally hoped to the Bonds but the snow was so high that we spent a lot of time battling the spruce branches that would normally be over our heads. The landscape on Guyot was bare, unforgiving, awesome. But non of us wanted to venture back into spruce misery to get to the Bonds so we called it a day.
Getting back to the hut by early afternoon was reward in and of itself as we enjoyed comradery and played board games.
On Day 3 we packed up and headed out. All the other guys went out via Ethan Pond. I went solo up to the Tom-Field-Willey ridge. I had wanted to do the entire ridge but it took longer than I anticipated to get up there. Once I did, the recent snow had masked the old trail up to Field and I had to turn back, defeated. I made it to the top of Mt. Tom at least. But my car at the Highland Center was half-buried in plowed snow so serves me right for parking there.
Despite the peaks that were denied, this trip was excellent! Hard to beat a wintery trip to the Whites with good people. Here's the video:
