White Mountain Direttissima | Hacker News Reader

White Mountain Direttissima

whitemountainski.co

49 pointsoftenwrong36 comments

This is a weird link to be on the front page of HN.

> "A niche, fringe project, but one that resonated deeply with me because these are my mountains. This is my backyard."

I grew up smack in the middle of the White Mountains with a clear view of the presidential peaks. I have to say, at no point did I think, "Huh, I really should climb all those."

That said, for pre-season high school cross country training one year, we jogged up to the visitor center at the top of Mt. Washington. Not many people can say they did that. I also had friends who had summer jobs hauling building supplies and tools up and down the Appalachian trails to maintain the trails and huts. They were in insane shape when school started from carrying bags of concrete mix or a stack of bricks up and back every day.

I grew up in New Hampshire and the White Mountains are such a good playground for stuff like this. Big network of trails, all kinds of terrain. Four very different seasons, lots of weather.

Basically anything you want to find in mountains, you can find in the Whites. Ice climbing, mountaineering, multi-pitch trad climbing, bushwhacking, easy trails, empty trails, whatever. I was very lucky to be able to hike there.

I am the bushwhacker

The whites are an amazing resource for mountain sports of all levels. They are a bit deceptive as they lack the craggy above tree line terrain, or altitude of younger ranges - but they provide some of the longest and toughest trails in the world due to steep rocky trails which lack switchbacks. The mountains are mostly down to hard granite at this point, and as such don’t have the nice smooth trails of younger mountains.

re: switchbacks.

The trail designers, such as they were back in the day, were true masochists. Literally direct lines straight up a ridge or alongside a gully. Given that they are on the fall line, the trails become rivers during rains. Unbelievably painful to hike.

No Forest Service namby pamby shallow grades and switchbacks here! Typical: the Air Line trail, ~4500 feet up at a 21% average grade.

> No Forest Service namby pamby shallow grades and switchbacks here!

Having done trail maintenance for over a decade, describing switchbacks as namby pamby sounds childish and ignorant. I also disagree that early maintainers were masochists. I encourage you to rethink that the next time you’re out there.

Dude I am totally agreeing with you!!! Hiking is super tough when there are no switchbacks and trail just goes straight up! But that is the East - we could do with some basic trail design.

The White Mountains are great. As a local, one of my favorite things about them is that they aren't "cool". The people that make it here seem to respect them and the history.

If you do visit and you're into geology you may want to visit Madison, NH. It's home to the largest glacial erratic in North America.

It really is a great area. Just don't tell anyone.

For those like me who looked into this and were curious about how a US state was "gifted" a 5,000 short ton boulder; the land was gifted, which included the boulder.

For those of us not into imperial units: that last day is 96km distance and 6km altitude gain. The previous days are a little easier but not by much. Wild!

Love the White Mountains, but I wouldn’t drink the water unfiltered like this guy, unless I was truly desperate. People I know have picked up giardia and hep A. Neither of which is any fun.

~0.1 micron water filters are pretty common, and they do not adequately protect against waterborne viruses like hep A (or polio). Get your vaccines!

Yeah there are plenty of new filter bottles that you can just fill and drink from. There’s no downside and it works amazingly well. I like Katadyn but others work too. Drinking straight seems like an odd choice

I absolutely love the White Mountains and it’s what I miss most about living in New England. In my opinion the best day hike in the country is the Franconia Ridge trail

I guess everyone has their own preferences, I just find this opinion surprising given the wealth of other hikes in the country.

As someone who grew up hiking in the White Mountains before moving to Washington, the mountains in Washington (and many places in the West) are just on a whole different level.

Franconia ridge is stellar, but so is angels landing in Zion or the Half Done cables or the Kaibob trail in the Grand Canyon or many others that are hard to compare and all worth the trip.

I love big stupid stuff like this. I didn't realize Ski the Whites has rebranded into White Mountain Ski co. Everyone shits on little 'ol new england, but the presidential range will chew you up as anyone who has thru hikes the AT will tell you. Suffering gives life meaning; go do hard stuff.

Worst weather in the world!

I had friends up (Greens) in midish July and we were talking about taking the trip over to the Shire to do Mt. Washington the following day or two... until we checked the summit forecast: temps in the 30s and wind chills around 15F. Instead, we drank some beers did some chores and did the much easier Camel's Hump!

That sounds more pleasant. I think I remember seeing frost or maybe some light snow up there around then.

The first time I visited it was 70F and sunny at the base, and when I got to the summit it was 38F with a constant 30mph wind and 70mph gusts, all in a dense fog. Truly an unreal place to experience

Yeah summer is actually especially dangerous because people get caught unprepared. There's an excellent book called Not Without Peril by Nicholas Howe. Many of the exposure deaths listed in the appendix occurred in the summer and fall.

Having hiked the AT through the Whites, the #1 way you can get into trouble fast is to not pay close enough attention to the weather reports.

come back in the winter and ski Tucks! if ya aint freezin and dying it aint fun yet

Theres a really good interview with this guy on Singletrack, too: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Fjq9n2tNcXibfK6tWF5XO

Monster effort.

What is it that makes this route a direttissima? I’m not super familiar with the term.

I think it's intended to be a direct route to the top of all of the peaks of the white mountains?

It's a TSP route over the highest 48 peaks of NH.

All 48 peaks on the AMC white mountains 4000-footers¹ list in one continuous trek (no driving/shuttling/etc between trailheads).

¹ this list is outdated vis-a-vis modern mapping and includes at least one peak shorter than 4000 feet (Tecumseh) and omits at least one peak that should qualify per the rules (Guyot), but if the list were updated they would still have completed the direttissima, since they passed over Guyot on the way to the Bonds (dropping Tecumseh could only make the diretissima easier, but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference; it's been a decade or so since I hiked that section of the whites).

As an aside, that day 5 from Wildcat to Cabot is absolutely brutal even if you're fresh, to say nothing of having already covered 180 miles in the previous four days.

It's Italian for "the most direct route". Which this certainly wasn't!

I walked all of that but not in one trip! Boy my knees hurt on the descents.

Went up and down Washington as a group of 20 somethings. Boy were we suffering on the way down. At one point below the treeline as we are crawling down, these two guys catch up to us; they looked like they were in their 60s. Grey hair, thin as twigs. They whooshed past us literally hopping rock-to-rock. That one little moment had a lifelong impact on me ever after as I though how nice it would be to be able to do the same at that kind of age.

That is precisely what sold me on trekking poles. I used to be anti-trekking pole but that was before I did a lot of descents in the Whites.

+1 for poles. Offloads so much knee and ankle pain to upper body muscle workout and soreness. It’s such a win

viewer discretion advised, that foot image should be banned

I respect the FKT guys, but I'm more of through hiker type. When I saw that pic, I thought "Yikes, nope, nada, never will I ever do one of those trips."

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