Multi-Sport Day

This past Saturday was really good.  At 7am Steph and I were up and quickly packing to make it out the door.  We were headed to Franconia Notch in NH.  The goal was another mountain Steph had never climbed and another tic for our list of summits together. 
Ever since our honeymoon I have been scheming to get us as a married couple to the top of all the 48 peaks.  The honeymoon was about 30 miles of the AT from hut to hut so it got us a good sampling of the whites and now slowly we have been getting ones here and there.  For April I was really happy that we could have an objective as hard and with as little snow that was a 4000 footer. 

We ended up in the parking lot to start hiking at 10am and quickly geared up and got going. The weather was great and the skies were blue. It was impressive how dry the first two miles of trail were.  After about three thousand feet in elevation it was snow the rest of the way. We had no extra gear.  No spikes, no snowshoes, no extra warm clothes and we were going almost light and fast alpine style was what was going on in the back of my head.  We passed one guy that seemed to think we were under prepared but we made it just fine.  When I told him my strategy was to let the group of 15 that had spikes and packed down the trail get us a highway to the summit I think he realized that there are lots of ways to get to Rome.  Whether or not you are doing what the Romans do.  Another one of the blogs that I have been following is the Committed blog.  It has a couple that really wants to do North America's 50 classic climbs and they have taken a video on each one.  One of the glacier climbs to the base of a Teton has them putting full on crampons onto a sneaker to just get by with what they have.  that 15 seconds of YouTube video tells it how I want it to be for me if I am going for that kind of objective.  So no, I do not think that we are to that caliber but "to each their own".
At the top I again became infatuated with Cannon and its cliff.  I took a picture because I thought it was a neat picture and we spent some time on the summit because it was a clear day and the weather was great.  Hopefully Steph's second alpine climb of length will be on cannon.  We have been thinking of doing Lakeview for a couple years and I think it is almost time.
The hike down was what we were un-used to. Slippery and steep for 3 miles down.  When we were back to the car I went and fished my victory beer out of the stream where it was being kept cold and we drove up to Echo Crag for a couple pitches before dark.  I ended up leading one climb that was about 55 feet to top rope the 4 climbs on either side of it.  In about an hour I got 5 climbs in and we were ready to drive home.

12 summits down as a couple and 5 pitches of training!