Jason needed to hike all 9 of the VT peaks on the New England Hundred Highest list in September for his grid, and he had a crazy dream of trying to do them all in under 24 hours, so a challenge was born. I crunched the numbers and figured out we were looking at roughly 50 miles of hiking (7 separate hikes) and 6 hours of driving (217 miles) from trailhead to trailhead. If we averaged 3 mph on every hike, 50 miles would take us 16.5 hrs, plus the 6 hrs of driving equals 22.5 hrs, so we'd only have about 1.5 hrs to spare, most of which we'd need at trailheads to load our packs before each of the 7 hikes. We knew it'd be tight, but we thought it was just within the range of possibility. We started at 7:54 a.m. on Saturday with the Jays and worked our way south to finish with Stratton. We got lucky and really didn't have any big issues, just a few little things that didn't eat up a ton of time. We ran into alot of traffic from a town-wide yard sale on our way to Breadloaf and Wilson, had some slight difficulties following the herd path on Mendon in the dark, Jason struggled with a little quad cramping on Equinox, both of had a terrible time staying awake on the drive to Stratton (had to take a 20 min nap), and I had some bad lower shin pain while descending Stratton. We finished at 7:16 a.m. on Sunday with 49.2 miles, 15,798 ft elevation gain, and a total elapsed time of 23:22. As far as we know, no one has ever done this before. Afterwards we passed out at the trailhead for a few hours and then celebrated with an enormous breakfast and some of VT's finest beer.
Comments
What a fun challenge! So many logistics, I'm impressed!