Week 2 Reflection

 May 22, 2023 — 2:35 P.M. 

Total Hours: 110

This week has been a rollercoaster, emotionally and physically, if you count our changes in elevation. It started very fast, and I felt like I was being bounced around between a million different things, but once we got out there and began our trip, I finally caught up. We started with a curveball, being dropped off a day into our trip–we got dropped off just before our second campsite–and then having to cross a river that we almost fell in multiple times. But we kept going because there was nothing else to do until we got cell service. Then, it started snowing on us, and we got our second curveball; we couldn't stay on the top of a mountain if it was gonna be -2ºF, so we adjusted our route. Instead of going up and over Moosilauke, we stayed at the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, run by the Dartmouth Outing Club, and escaped the freezing night. And it was still not smooth sailing from there; the next day, we met a through-hiker who told us that the light rain storm we were anticipating on Saturday was supposed to be a washout, and he was prepared to not hike that day. But we just kept going and began our 9-mile day that felt like 25 miles. Since that hike was so physically taxing on some of our pre-existing injuries and because of the rain, we decided to be picked up a day early, and I think it was an excellent decision. 

Continuing on and trying to get over the Kinsmans despite injuries and a potentially dangerous forecast would have meant putting ourselves in a hazardous situation, and we were not about to do that. So we were weighing our options–because none of us wanted to cut our trip short–and we realized how much was coming up that we could not jeopardize; we had graduation, senior dinner, and the whole summer, so we decided we could go hiking another time.

I wish we had had the whole senior project to do our hike because we could have had a bit more flexibility with days and trying to avoid poor weather, but the trip that we did get to do ended up being an amazing experience. I also wish we had done a bit more research into the views and stuff we would get to see because a lot of the mountains we hiked didn't have any views for us to enjoy. Though the few views we did get were really pretty, I'm still a little upset about it because we did a lot of hiking for a little payoff. I think that next time I would also do more research into the trails themselves because I felt like we kept being surprised by the difficulty of the trails and over or underestimating how long it would take us to do a  hike. Regardless, it was a really cool experience, and it gave me a really good foundation for continuing to do similar trips and excursions.