The Chase
This somewhat orphaned FKT route was posted in 2018 but has only been run once. Lisa and I looked at it several times for our annual Labor Day Weekend run but, frankly, always found something with a little more “punch”. For several reasons, this seemed like the perfect year to “take it easy” while knocking off another FKT in our running backyard.
We chose the counter-clockwise direction and – to get the 4.6 miles of gravel road miles out of the way – set our start/finish at the East Branch Trailhead. We arrived at 6:45 am and were putting on our shoes when - in a somewhat bizarre coincidence - a car drove up with a lone occupant who mentioned that he was hiking this exact same route, in the same direction, as part of his Red Line effort. A friend of his arrived minutes later to drive him to the Slippery Brook Trailhead and let him skip the gravel road. Lisa & I set off on the road (part of the FKT loop) and estimated that he would have a 30+ minute head start.
We’d never run the Slippery Brook Trail but it provides good access to the Baldfaces from the North Conway area and was well traveled. It starts with 2 miles of almost flat fire road before it hits 2.5 miles of uphill single track and finishes with a ½ mile climb in the alpine to the day’s first summit - South Baldface.
We reached a granite clearing about an hour into this section and could clearly see our hiker on the ridge heading up to South Baldface – about 15 minutes ahead. But he was gone by the time we reached the summit and we lost visual contact as the trails are in & out of the woods from this point onward.
From South Baldface, we crossed North Baldface on the way to Eagle Crag where we headed into the Wild River Wilderness Area down the Eagle Link Trail to the Wild River Trail –two of the most overgrown and least maintained trails that I regularly run. Perhaps the only benefit of this summer’s drought in NH & Maine was the great running conditions we found with the Eagle Link Trail easily passable and the boggy areas on the Wild River Trail both dry and firm.
We were making great time on this section and expected to see our hiker around every corner. At the Wild River crossing, we met a hiker who said we were the first people he’d see all day. We weren’t crushing it but were barely behind the male FKT time and started scratching our heads to see how a hiker could have gotten that far ahead when we’d nearly caught him earlier that day.
As an aside, the drought had a big impact on water availability throughout The Whites. The Saco River got to the lowest level on record and many of the dependable brooks I regularly cross were bone dry. While we didn’t need water on this short run, it’s worth noting that the Wild River had great flow even in this crazy dry year.
Determined to catch our hiker, we put the petal to the metal over the last 6 miles and – thanks to the good trail conditions – made great time. With several miles to go, we met a day hiker who – also – had not crossed paths with anyone. We started to ask ourselves if our “hiker” could really a fellow trail runner.
The last 2 miles of the East Branch Trail were easy running as the trail was flat & wide, alongside the nearly dry East Branch of the Saco. Greeted by the cheers of our spouses at the finish, we savored the completion of another FKT route before turning out attention to our hiker’s car – it was parked in the same spot and he was nowhere to be seen. Did he take a detour, get lost, or add a loop to his route to knock off some nearby obscure trail on his red line quest? We’ll never know but will always remember this FKT as the day we spent chasing a ghost!