Kris Freeman

This just in from Justin.

In my defense:

We had two problems. Going over time, which is my fault but only because I massively underestimated the roughness of several of the trails we were on (and having re-read the descriptions in the AMC White Mountain Guide I don’t fault myself too much), and getting lost, which was largely my fault but that Kris (as you will see) does bear some responsibility for and that is really due to the utter lack of signage on the trails.

Kate Sleeper, the trail with the worst blowdowns, is a trail Kris and I actually ran/hiked many years ago. It isn’t much for scenery, but the route I picked was actually ideal for the day in that it was generally high or near water and was in the shade, so that the intense heat was pretty much a non-issue. I think it is credible to claim half an hour delay for the various blowdowns we encountered between actual time negotiating them and broken momentum and extra effort.

The White Mountain Guide mentions about the Flat Mountain Pond Trail: “The trail, with easy grades and footing most of its distance…[some time after 4.2 miles] diverges right on a rough footway to circle an area where the grade has been flooded…returns to the grade at 5.3 miles…” I didn’t give much thought to the negative effect perhaps a mile on a rough footway could have on us. In fact, though, this “rough footway” is a completely unsigned, unmaintained, and often unfollowable glorified game trail. I don’t have a good memory but I think that it took close to half an hour to negotiate the alleged mile on dead flat ground. When we reached a shelter at the end of the stretch, there were again no signs and no indication of where we should head; it took five minutes to find the one trail that left the shelter and we followed it on the grounds that it had to lead somewhere.

The final mistake, which is what ultimately turned the run from an unpleasant, too long workout into a miserable experience all the way around, I have to give Kris partial credit for. We were, as it turned out, on the right trail at this point, with great footing, and moving fast from the adrenaline you get when you are lost. We moved so fast, in fact, that we ran right past the trail up Mt Sandwich. This was unfortunate, since I hadn’t memorized the trail names this far into the run and knew only that we took every available right turn. Three quarters of a mile past the trail we intended to take there was a second trail up the same mountain. We turned right on this trail, assuming it was the trail we had intended to take. At the top of the trail, just shy of the top of the mountain, we came to a junction. The trail we came up was signed; the other trail, which represented a right hand turn, was not. The trail initially headed southwest, the direction I knew our car to be in, and since I knew that we always turned right (and also because the option to the left involved more climbing over even more blown down trees) we took this trail. It wasn’t until we had dropped 1800 feet that we realized the mistake, and that we were going to have to leave by a different trailhead and hope for the best…