Over the years the same questions keep coming up on the various bulletin boards that discuss hiking and peakbagging in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont:
- What is the easiest way up Mt. Washington?
- What is the best way of getting to Mt. Isolation?
- How does one get to the Bonds?
- What are the easiest 4,000 footers in the Whites?
- Where can I find the AMC 4000 Footer Club lists of peaks?
This site attempts to answer these questions. It offers a detailed discussion of the routes to the 4000 footers of the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont, together with general information that seems useful. Here is the structure of the site:
Routes to the Peaks
The Routes to the Peaks section discusses briefly the basis on which routes were selected, and leads to the main body of this site, the hiking routes to the peaks (see list of pages in panel). For every route described I give the distance, elevation gain and book time, for many peaks there is also a table comparing these statistics for the various routes.
Peakbagging and Lists
This section discusses Peak Bagging in New England, together with some notes on New York. It begins with a historical introduction, and goes on to describe the various lists of peaks that people bag. There is the New Hampshire 4000 Footer List (White Mountains 4,000 footer list to give it its official name), the New England (Maine and Vermont) 4000 Footer List and the NE Hundred Highest Peaks List, together with some information on the numbers of hikers completing each list.
The Index of Lists also has pointers to Excel spreadsheets that you can download and use to record your progress in bagging the peaks. Once you have bagged them all, the spreadsheet may be used as an application to the 4000 Footer Club.
General Information
The General Information section includes a list of guidebooks, maps, web resources of general use to hikers, and some very brief notes on safety. The closely related FAQ (list of Frequently Asked Questions) answers questions that did not fit into the General Information section, and includes a section on doing a one day presidential traverse. The Links section has links to sites I have found useful but that did not fit into the more narrative sections.
AMC Huts
The AMC has built a chain of 8 huts, located a day's hike apart along the Appalachian Trail, which offer comfortable accommodations with bunk beds and hearty, family-style meals.
All of the New Hampshire 4,000 footers can be hiked in a single day, but many hikers prefer to spend a night at one of the huts when doing some of the remoter peaks, and others just go to the huts as a destination.
Articles and Adventures
I have added some articles that I have written over the years. Most deal with hiking in New England. I have also added accounts of various adventures, the latter being either unusually long hikes, or hikes where something "interesting" happened.
