Rendezvoused at the trailhead at 6:32am sharp. There was a slight chill in the air. I said to Xander “there’s a slight chill in the air”. He concurred (about the chill). We were a bit concerned about possible ice at higher elevations, but we didn’t want to be silly and still wanted to send it.
We began our run at 6:51am. As Xander’s strength is running and mine hiking, Xander jumped ahead on the gradual ups in the first couple miles. Trail was leafy but *mostly* dry until the South Baldface Shelter. Shortly after the shelter I caught up with Xander and jumped ahead on the steep scramble. There were thin ice patches on a lot of the rocks, and this made goings a little bit slower than ideal. Unexpected snow flurries made most of the time above tree line rather interesting, as it was hard to see which rocks were iced over. We also ran into the characteristic high winds on the tabletop section of South Baldface.
Xander jumped back ahead of me during the last push up South Baldface. We rejoined at the top, where we were pleasantly surprised with our time and quickly hurried on to the North. From then on, we ran mostly together.
Again, most of the traversing and descending above tree-line was slowed significantly by slippery conditions. There’s a lot of time to be gained on this route given the right conditions. Once we got below tree-line, we were able to hammer the last few miles, but yet again we lost some time during this section due to an abundance of wet leaves obscuring underlying obstacles. All in all, we felt solid about the effort we were able to put out today, and we look forward to revisiting this one in the summer.
Thanks to Carissa Winning and Jesse Wall for getting this board going and giving us some awesome times to chase!