Saw this route that Gwen Stratton put together / ran in 2021 and decided to give myself some time in the Pemi while the weather was perfect. I traveled the length of the route solo and without any support/pacing/food from any others.
Starting from the North Twin Trailhead just at 7:08am, the pace picked up to a jog relatively quick on the mostly flat / false-flat out until the crossing over Little River. The legs were a bit slow heading up N Twin, but felt renewed as I was able to pop up out of the woods and make a quick traverse from N Twin to S Twin. Despite being Labor Day, I only saw a couple of people all the way to Galehead Hut, where I dropped my pack and did a quick out-and-back to summit Galehead. Unfortunately, I realized along the 'out' that the next trail I needed to take was along the way, so dropping my bag at the hut was rendered useless and actually added a bit of extra distance. After retrieving my bag, I headed down the Twin Brook Trail and nearing the Thirteen Falls site I took a wrong turn onto Franconia Brook Trail. Again, thankfully, it felt like something was off and I re-checked my map before I went too far down the trail; retracing my steps, I went further past Thirteen Falls and made the correct turn onto Lincoln Brook Trail heading on a long trek around to the West side of Owl's Head to ascend the slide (Owl's Head Path) and marking the distance from the Brutus Bushwhack to the top to ensure that I wouldn't somehow miss it on the way back down. The mile up Owl's Head ended up being the slowest of the day, once again highlighting why this is my least favorite of the NH48.
The Brutus portion didn't end up being significantly quicker, to be fair, but I was taking it relatively slowly to avoid a fall this far in and then filtered a full set of four bottles at the bottom before the long run South along the Lincoln Brook Trail, Black Pond Bushwhack, and (turning left onto) Lincoln Woods Trail and a couple of running miles on Bondcliff Trail before the next ascent began towards Bondcliff. There were lots of trail runners heading South on Bondcliff Trail and I'm assuming they were mostly running single-day Pemis based on the limited gear with them. Started to get a little anxious about the water supply as I began the ascent to Bond, with only 750mL left; however, a group passing by indicated that Guyot Spring was flowing and the anxiety I had been holding onto finally passed. I dropped the bag again at the W Bond Spur to complete another quick out-and-back to tag West Bond before continuing down the Bondcliff Trail to refill all four bottles at Guyot Spring. The spring was just trickle, and I ended up taking nearly 20 minutes just to get everything topped off.
Heading out from Guyot, I took a right turn onto Twinway to head towards Zealand, which I summited right around 31 miles. The poles were starting to come in more handy at this point as they kept me upright and moving forward with a bit of propulsion to restart the jog whenever it stopped from Zealand down to Zeacliff and to arrive at Zealand Hut. Everyone at Zealand Hut looked like they were just finished with dinner and that was enough to give me a strong push to finish this efficiently so I could dive into my own food stores back at the car. Here we go! Off from Zealand Hut onto the Lend-A-Hand and did my best to run everything that wasn't a strong up. Summited the final peak, Hale, at around 36.5 miles into the trek and started the "falling with style" run down Fire Warden's Trail with two things in my head: (i) no more kicking rocks during these last miles; and, (ii) "Heyyyy Bear!". I might've sounded ridiculous loudly proclaiming it over and over every couple of minutes but having been completely in the dark for the past 25-30 minutes I was adamant that I didn't need to run into an unexpected visitor.
An uneventful final 3 miles at a steady jog seemed to catalyze the effort as a success. More running than I expected, particularly carrying more gear than I needed and too much water weight at times. Having now done the route and better understanding the trail, my water refills could certainly be optimized to not be carrying 4 full bottles at times / take water in more appropriate spots to limit stopping. Since I hadn't done a large section of this there were some blind spots that caused me to bring more than I needed. Overall happy with the trek though and would encourage others who are looking for an interesting route that still hits many of the highlights of the Pemi to give this a try. There is a lot of fluff in my time and someone more confident in running this could take a number of hours off of it (in my opinion).