Old Speck Mountain - 1/14/07

Type: Foot
Date: Sunday, January 14
With: Andrew LaSpina
Wore: Boots, duofold long underwear, rei rain pants, long sleeve duofold shirt, Columbia shell, balaclava, gloves
Brought: extra socks, emergency blanket, fire starter and matches, headlamp, Columbia lining, food. Andy brought full pack with bag.


We had been staying at The Enchanted Dome for a few nights eating, drinking, and sweating and decided to finally get out of the dome and do some winter hiking. We woke up at around 9, grabbed some breakfast and headed out to the mountain despite the rapidly falling snow at 9:30.















The parking area for the trailhead at 1500' had quite a few cars in it despite the ominous weather. We started out via the Old Speck Mountain Trail (AT) at 10:15 with the snow beginning to fall even heavier. This being my first winter hike I was really excited and nervous. I wasn't sure if I had dressed properly for the hike, and with the snow falling I couldn't help but think about how dangerous winter hiking can actually be. The temperature was about 25 degrees when we started the hike - but you lose about 3.5 degrees for ever 1000 feet of elevation gain and we were going to be heading up to a 4180' summit. After less than 1/4 of a mile we were slipping on ice and decided to strap on our crampons.




After putting on our crampons we continued to climb the Old Speck Mountain Trail (we opted for this instead of the more strenuous Eyebrow Trail simply because we didn't do enough research before heading out. I'm sure if Andy had known that the Eyebrow was more difficult we would have chosen that trail).
Though it's only 3.5 miles to the summit, the 2700' of elevation gain and the snowy conditions made for pretty slow going.
We arrived at the summit at exactly 1:00PM (which was our turnback time in order to guarantee that we made it back to the Dome in time for the Patriots playoff game against the San Diego Chargers).







The summit was wooded and would not have afforded views even if there hadn't been complete cloud cover on that day.


After stopping briefly at the summit it began to feel like the 17 degrees that it was, and we had to move on and begin our descent, but not before Andy attempted to climb the tower. Attempted.







The descent was, as usual, much longer than it felt like it should have been. We were cruising the entre time and yet it still took us 2:15 to get back to the parking lot. Just after spotting the parking lot from the trail my feet decided to stop working correctly, and my crampons got caught together and I took a small dive (snow nap) which was exactly what I needed.



We got back to the car at 3:04 coming in just under the book time of 5 hours for the trip. Not bad considering the weather.