White Mountain Overnight on the Sandwich Range

My friend and I spent a night on the Kate Sleeper Trail over Presidents' Day weekend. We made it an easy carspot by leaving my car at Sabbaday and making the short drive to the Oliverian Brook Trail. We started in spikes but on the ascent to Passaconaway we switched to snowshoes and they would be used for the bulk of the trip. Day 1 was cold and in the single digits much of the day. We saw a good number of people as we went from Passaconaway to Whiteface and then were were alone for the remainder, except for one pair we met at the top of North Tripyramid and those enjoying Sabbaday Falls.

The heavy packs wore us down and we were tired by the time we reached Whiteface.  We were breaking trail on Kate Sleeper and ready for camp. Luckily there were plenty of good spots to camp on that trail. We set up camp in the low point between East and West Sleeper and while the temps warmed through the night the wind also howled something fierce. I had my share of camping blunders, doing a poor job with my tarp tie-outs and having stove issues in the morning. Luckily Pete heated up water for me. The most challenging part of the trip was the South Slide climb. It was fairly icy but the snowshoes worked great for traction (as well as the heel rises). Pete lost his Garmin InReach on the slide which was dispiriting but we deloaded, threw on spikes and went back down. Luckily he found it right where he suspected he lost it. We wore spikes the rest of the way up South Tripyramid out of stubborn/laziness and that was a true slog. From there we went back to snowshoes for the remainder of the trip.

After enjoying the short packed out section from Middle to North to Middle Tri, we descended via the Sabbaday Falls Brook Trail. The trail was choppy due to the recent warm temps and as we descended it probably reached 40 degrees, resulting in mash potato snow. That five mile hike out really finished us off. Passaconaway and Whiteface were #27-28 on my winter 48 list and Whiteface was #45 for Round 3 leaving me with three more to go (Owls Head, Isolation and Wildcat A).