Ritzhikes

Where: Pemi Loop When: August, 1985 With: Solo A new tent, a new stove, and my first White Mountain Guide...time to go hiking. This was the end of my first MEDITECH vacation and a solo walk seemed in order. I packed homemade spinach pasta and headed north. I'm not sure how I picked the route, though I can see the attraction. A big circle on a ridge. I didn't realize that I was about to hike the Pemi Loop, a bucket-list hike for many, and begin what would turn into a multi-decade quest to climb all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000' peaks . This hike would be a good start, ticking off eight of the peaks on the list (I would later go back and tag three more that are commonly summited on The Loop - West Bond, North Twin, Galehead). But I didn't know about the list, or the Loop. It just seemed like a good route for a hike. The trail head was the Wilderness Trail (now Lincoln Woods) parking lot on the Kancamagus Highway and I headed in on the WT to the Bondcliff trail, wh...

Where: Long Trail When: August, 1985 With: Bill The start of a week's vacation...my first at MEDITECH, and I decided to kick it off with a hike with brother Bill. We elected to try out the bottom end of the Long Trail, so we drove over to Williamstown and went in from there. Found a place to park, then followed the AT markers along a couple of roads to the trailhead. If memory serves, the trail followed a stream at first. We didn't go too far that first day due to a late start and settled in at a primitive campsite (the Sherman Brook Campsite). Some interesting site-mates. Two thru-hikers were the most efficient campers I'd ever seen. Came in, one set up while the other cooked dinner, they ate, talked a bit and then went to sleep. One had some bad blisters and was using a cane. They said they'd had to get off the trail a couple of times to find a hospital. The other folks were a group of kids who came up to our fire at one point. They seemed interested in partyi...