This is the story of my first ever experience camping! Like, real camping. I’ve done some hut camping, but I’ve never stayed in a tent before. Very exciting times. A trip full of both Type 1 Fun (things that are fun in the moment) and Type 2 Fun (things that are not fun in the moment, but fun to recant later).
Jenna and Adam figured out most of the logistics, given my newbie status. They choose the Osgood tent site, being that they had platforms to set up on. It was only a short and easy 2.5 miles to the tent site where we would camp for the night, and we would tackle Mount Madison, Mount Adams, and possibly Mount Jefferson the next day (we were very ambitious). Ben and I got a cheap-ish backpacking tent from REI and borrowed sleeping bags and pads from Lara and Wyatt and away we went.
Things I learned about my first night camping: Dehydrated camping food. Filtering water through a Sawyer straw. Using a tiny gas can to cook dinner on a 3-pronged camp stove. Invest in a better sleeping pad.
Despite the overly salty food and the rocky sleep, nothing could beat the light coming through the trees around the site in the morning.
Other things I learned: You just leave your tent and most of your stuff at camp, and just assume it will all be there when you get back. (Very lucky for us, it was).
Outside of the tent and the sleeping, it was just a regular day in the mountains. From Osgood, it was only a little over 2 miles to the summit of Mount Madison. We got up there pretty quickly and stopped at Madison Hut to fill up water and have some lunch (love the White Mountain AMC Huts for some surprise baked goods).
Mount Madison stands at 5315 feet of elevation, and then there’s a descent to Madison Hut before climbing to the Mount Adams summit at 5735 feet. Knowing that we would be passing Madison Hut a second time on our way home, we left most of our bags in the hut and just took a couple small day packs up to the Adams summit.
The extra 400 feet of elevation gain meant climbing up into the clouds – there was no view on Adams, just a wall of fog. It added to the extraterrestrial feel of the Adams summit – the whole thing felt like it was just a pile of loose granite slabs, grayscale and alien. Jenna and I passed our small packs to the guys and went hopping around the rock piles like mountain goats.
The sun was getting low as we got back to back to Madison Hut and we spend some time exploring the mountain ponds left up there in the blue dusk.
However, with the sun setting, we began questioning whether or not it would be best idea to return to Osgood the way that we came in. Was it manageable? Sure. We all had headlamps (or so we thought) and we’ve hiked at night. But hiking back up and over Mount Madison again in the dark didn’t seem appealing.
So Adam broke out the White Mountains map he had, and after studying it astutely and using the highly accurate “finger measuring” technique, we deduced that we had come about 4 miles over Madison and Adams. Using further finger measuring, we discovered a “short cut” down through the Great Gulf Wilderness that seemed to be about 2.5 miles, and decided that would be a better option than backtracking the way we came.
Friends, this is the last photo of us before our descent into the Great Gulf Wilderness. You can see the tiny sign in this photo that wrongly gave us the impression that this would be a good way to get back to our tentsite.
It took us over 5 hours to get back to Osgood. That is 5 hours to go 2.5 miles. Basically, we were total n00bs about it (and none of us would have considered ourselves hiking n00bs).
It would almost definitely have been faster to go back up over Madison and do the gradual descent from there. Instead, we ended up picking our way down a dried-up river bed turned boulder field at about a 20-30% grade drop in the growing darkness. And by picking our way down boulders, I mean, imagine rocks from days of the glaciers that are so big, you can’t even get your arms halfway around them, and then imagine having to find footing as you crawl down over one, and then another, while maintaining your grip.
That was maybe the first 1500 feet and took us about an hour.
From there, we realized, in the dark, that there was no real trail. This wasn’t like the rest of the White Mountain trails, with their distinctive pack and sporadic blazes. This was true wilderness, rarely traveled, places that ordinary hikers don’t typically venture.
Our one amazing spot of good luck was that a lone traveler DID pass us at some point. It was early enough that it was still light enough to see him but long enough into our descent that the sense of ominous dread had already settled upon us. He was ascending (which we had taken as a good sign) and he walked with the ease of someone used to navigating overgrowth and underbrush. Later in the night, we dubbed him our Leprauchan.
He was good enough to both not berate us on our stupidity, and also to give us some advice – the path we were headed on would cross a river multiple times, and we’d probably be doing it in the dark. If we lost the trail near water, we should stop and assess the opposite side to see if we could find any sense of pack to suggest someone had done it before.
It wasn’t much, but it ended up being a lifesaver (maybe more than we even know).
In the deepening darkness, with thankfully no more boulders, we trudged on with nothing but our headlamps to lead us. Poor Jenna realized her batteries died, and ended up having to navigate with the light of her iPhone (which astonishingly, held up til we made it back to camp).
I sang – out loud – to keep my mind from running wild into terrible places (and hopefully to ward off bears). Adam, a perennial camp counselor, kept us occupied with word games from his camp days (“List a band name for every letter of the alphabet!”). Ben, who had taken the lead, took to announcing every. single. spot. that you could possibly slip on (spoiler: it was every 2 or 3 steps). Jenna declared that she was giving up, she was going to sleep here, we should come back and get her in the morning, and actually lay down on the ground and curled herself up in a ball.
Safe to say, all of us had our moments. But we did get Jenna up, and we did carry onwards, and just past 11pm, we saw a few sparkling and waving lights ahead of us that would either be aliens or other campers (thankfully it was the latter).
But we did make it! Five hours from the summit, we all crashed hard in our tents, Big Agnes or none.
And there you have it. My first experience camping. I survived, and there was definitely enough Type 1 Fun to balance out the Type 2 Fun. We packed up our site in the morning and found a nice ol’ cool river on our way out to jump into to wash off the grime from our adventure.
Other tidbits and notes to remember:
• Ben’s trail name: “Dead Eye”
• Jenna navigating the loose granite field with her migraine
• Adam saving Jenna and me when we got stuck on the rock
• All the Mountain House