What a day, I am so beat!

I put the summer tires on the front last night and Dad arrived to stay the night in preparation for the Big Trip to Mount Washington.

My alarm went of at 5 AM, I jumped in the shower and then made breakfast while loading the car.  We hit the road at 6:08 and I forgot the Bunkhouse sign and my CK bag with the girdle belt in it.  But I remembered the food and my radios, so yay.

But from Cabot it’s about 10-20 minutes shorter.  Bethlehem is the halfway point and we made that by 7?  We got on Rt 2 at 7:20 and I knew we had plenty of time.

I checked in with Mr. Cliff at the Bunkhouse and he told me had a box for me.  I’ve been asking about t-shirts every year and last year I said that I had hoped to get an Auto Road Pass.  So in the box were 4 t-shirts and 2 auto-road passes!

We went to the three porta-potties but the line was 20 people long with an average wait of 2 minutes per person, so we went on up the road.  About 2 miles up we pulled over in a wide spot and I went into the woods to practice my backwoods skills.

We drove on up the mountain, I went past Hairpin and dropped Dad off at the Tanks and then went back down.

I like Hairpin for some reason.  Last year I asked for Cow Pasture and found it was more boring.  There was not as spectacular a view, the wind was much less which meant far more black flies, and it was all flat with nothing for the kids to climb on except delicate alpine flowers.  So this time I asked for Hairpin again.

I wonder if I should ask for a higher point.  There is a place at the tanks, the first checkpoint within sight of the summit.  But I was wondering if it would be hard to keep Errol nearby, as I would expect him to gravitate towards the cog tracks.  But then again I could bring my camera and get great video footage of the steam cog from there…

So we got on station and then started exploring.  First thing we did was look for snow patches.  The largest was on Jefferson across the gulf. From our perspective we would turn 90˚ left, stick to the same elevation and work our way around.  Errol and I start down the rocky embankment. We see a stunted birch tree along with the pines in a little hollow.

I guided a determined Errol down a tricky part, nothing he couldn’t do himself, and then he takes off across the alpine meadow, heading straight into the gulf.  I called to him, “Errol, come back,” but he kept going.  “Errol,” I cried, “Where are you going?”  He stopped and turned back to me and pointed across the gulf to Mt Jefferson and said, “I wan see ‘no.”  He wanted to see snow and had plotted a straight line to get there.  I showed him the wisdom of staying at the same elevation and he took off again, this time to the left toward Mt Clay.  He was not happy when I took him back to the car.

So we hung around, the runners came.  Errol and Olivia climbed among the rocks and stood at the edge of the road.

The biggest excitement was the First Aid kit Steph included.  A point below called about a female needing bandages so I got it out and stuck it on the roof of the car so the runners could see it.  In about ten minutes I was standing out and saw the woman in black right when she looked over.  She came over and I found two large self-sticking bandages.  She had nickel and quarter-sized blisters on her tendons.  Another runner got past hairpin and stopped to barf. I called for the medics to come up but she pressed on.

Occasionally Errol asked to see the trains.  Finally Cliff came by and we secured our station with Net Control and made our way to the summit.  As usual the clear skies got cloudy right when we got up there.  It looked like someone left the fog machine on full blast.  Errol just walked up and down the tracks – just like I did when I was his age.

After a while I went to the west end next to the Obs tower to use my radio.  I have a 5 watt handheld radio and I put my long whip on it (+9 dB – it looks like a fishing rod) and I raised a few repeaters (2M FM) back in Vermont.  Eventually I got N1ZRA on the Williamstown repeater.  We spoke for a while and then someone from Plattsburg called in.  He said we could hear me direct with his 5 element quad (very directional antenna) but that he had to rotate it off the repeater bearing to do it.  That’s 120 miles with my 5 watt radio.

Then we heard from a Quebec station.  He also had a directional antenna pointed at me, hearing me direct.  Wow. That’s at least 180 miles!  What a blast.

I was all set.  We made our way slowly back across summit, hitting the bathrooms along the way. Then we headed down.  I didn’t lift the bumper so it was melting on the tail pipe when I got to the bottom.  I pulled right off to the side of the main road to check.  There was a lot of smoke actually coming out the pipe. Not as much from the melting bumper.  I looked long and hard to verify that it all fine.  When I got up the police cruiser doing traffic duty was ready to jump into action.  I waived him off with a thumbs up and took off.

We went into Goreham and went to the little Italian place there, as is our custom.  Dad and I had paninis and Olivia had ravioli, Errol was asleep the whole time.  He awoke just in time for the cannoli!  Dad said we could drive to the cog base over Jefferson Notch Rd.  I got the restaurant’s password and looked at the map.  I saw the photos of the turn and related them to a landmark I knew.  I had no trouble finding the right turn (actually it was a left).

Jefferson Notch Road is a 1.5 lane wide dirt road that goes up, up, up high enough for the trees to shorten to 30 feet.  We paused at the trailhead on the top of the ridge and dad explained that this was the one trail to the summit that got you to the tree line the fastest.  With the trees noticeably shortened already, no wonder.  I just don’t recall the name of the trail.

We got to the Cog base at about 5 and the place was nearly deserted.  There was one engineer fueling a diesel and we found their steamer idling on a siding, Waumbeck #9.  Dad asked the cog man if we could pose for photos in Waumbek’s cab.  So I got in there with Olivia and Errol and dad took a few shots, then I took his camera into the cab and took lots of photos of the controls.  I got out and took more of the drive gear and fittings.  The cog only runs 2 steamers in this day and age.  The four diesels do the work now on biodeisel, with a lot less smog and water.  I was born at the end of the steam age and I am witnessing the end of steam itself.

Errol didn’t want to leave, he wanted to go all the way down the tracks and see every one.  They had three diesels and the steamer.  By now I had to carry him to the car.  It was convenient as he had on his lined overalls.  When he did the passive-resistance thing, I just picked him up from the back of the overalls and carried him like a suitcase.

Dad was tired and I was worried about him making it home alright so we hightailed it back to Cabot.

What a day!