It was the second day of winter and the cold spell had us avoiding the higher peaks, but wanting to do something big. I'd been eyeing trying to knock off more of the NEU8 sky-runner challenge hikes this winter, and figured this was a good one to start out with. The day started with a 4AM wakeup at a nearby hotel, where I started cycling three gallons of water through the coffee maker to warm it up and prep for supply drops. Then I drove off and we met up at the northern terminus, and Elliot left his car there. Some gear shuffling and a short drive later and we were dropping off a styrofoam cooler with 2 gallons of water and some pretzels at the Petersburg Pass parking lot. Then a quick breakfast at Stewarts and a second gear drop on Madden road, this time with a side of lox for a high-protein breakfast. Finally we made it to Lebanon mountain road; layered up, and got started.
The first leg was fast - we thought we might be on track for a <11 hour finish which would have been insane. We were running down some nice flowy sections and generally keeping spirits really solid. This didn't last long though - when we stopped for the first supply drop my knees really started to feel it, and the rest of the trip would be more of a death march. I'm not really sure why this hike hit the knees so hard, but generally think it was a mix of the cold weather impacting the joints and the very powdery snow making it impossible to get any traction, so every footstep had a few inches of slipping. All those small twitches to stabilize myself ended up taking a toll.
We made it to the first drop and gorged ourselves on hot water (mixed with some electrolytes, and with a light bit of coffee flavor from the machine earlier :). Also went through a bunch of lox, which tasted great but in hindsight the macro blend was off - went too high on gels (maurten) plus protein (lox / jerky) without enough complex carbs for really sustained energy. But after a few minutes we were off, continuing on for what was the longest leg. The first bit after Madden road was especially steep with lots of sustained vert. I had gotten a number of 6K feet for vert somewhere, I think from an erroneous GPX file. It ended up being closer to 9K for the day, and we definitely felt the difference. By the end of this stretch our knees were feeling it, but we got the Petersburg pass, crunched on some pretzels and hot water, and continued onto the final leg.
The last leg was a wonderful trail, with the exception of one bit where we got really deep drifts of ~2.5 feet. Thankfully nothing got past the gaiters and it was on a steep descent, so it was a pretty fun bit to trudge through. Finally we got to the trail finish point a little after 10PM.
Definitely felt like this could be done a fair deal faster, though I'm not sure how conditions evolve over the winter, and bits of it are pretty remote. Not sure if anyone has gotten a faster time before, but wanted to submit this to start a record of winter times for this route.