I do a lot of hiking all year 'round and in August, one of my hiking buddies ("g-$$$", pronounced "gee-money", so named because of all the gear he owns) asked me how many of the 48's I'd done. The "48's" are the 48 summits in the White Mountain National Forest that are above 4000'. He was up to 43 and a number of us had been accompanying him in part for the cameradie and in part because these hikes are classics and very interesting.
But back to his question: I didn't know. I was sure that over the years I'd done many of them, and "doing the 48" doesn't require any particular timeframe - it's like seeing all the Star Trek episodes. You could do them in a marathon weekend or over a lifetime - whatever suits your fancy.
The question kept coming up throughout the fall, and in October I finally sat down and went through my logs and found that I had done 34 of them. g-$$$ got me thinking about it and I decided to finish off 13 of my 14 and g-$$$ and I would do the last one together in the summer and have a picnic and a beer on the summit or something like that.
However the situation evolved very differently. The rest of the story unfolds below the fold.
The Story Continues...
I continued hiking through the fall, knocking summits off the list, Thanksgiving came and went, and on the morning of December 12th, as I lay in bed about 4am about to get up to head down to central NH to hike the Tripyramids with my buddy "The Puppet Master", a surprising notion popped into my mind: I was mentally listing all the summits and realized that here it was in mid-December and after todays hike I would only have one more peak left: Tecumseh. ... HOWEVER ... (and this is the point of the story) ... while I lay there counting, I realized that in the 2006 calendar year alone I had hiked 40 - many of them multiple times. That meant If I just count 2006, I had 8 summits left and if I could hike them all in the remaining two weeks I could make my 48 in One Calendar Year! Technically, it would be 11 months because I didn't hike any last January. But that would be a challenge because 5 of the summits were in the Presidential Range and aside from Mt. Washington (which I'd hiked three times in 2006) are among the highest and most challenging. If I could save Tecumseh for last, since it was the easiest and could be done in rain, sleet, snow, blizzard, etc., how hard would it be to try for all 48 in 2006?
Well, I did it. Yesterday I finished my 48th summit (Tecumseh) on the last day of the year. I posted a story w/ a movie about my trip w/ "tMail" up Madison in high winds just before Christmas here on Candleblog. As you might imagine, I have a movie I made, but not about all 48 - that could be dull like an endless photo montage from Uncle Elmer's wedding. Instead, the movie is about a trip in the high Presidentials to Jefferson and Adams - the 2nd and 3rd highest peaks in NH and only about 500' short of Mt. Washington's peak. The Puppet Master and I tackled both on one big loop, taking all day (coming down in the dark) and experiencing one of the most thrilling and fascinating treks in the White Mountains and certainly one of the most (if not THE most) transforming hikes of my life. To start the new year w/ some Quicktime entertainment, here's a way to utterly and irrevocably destroy 5 minutes and 30 seconds of your life. [LINK]