Mt. Pierce (4310)

Trail: Crawford Path

Date: March 7 2000

Attending: Gabe, Simone, & John Chicoine

Miles: 5-mile Round trip Time: 2.75hrs up, 5hrs. total

AMC huts, / shelters / camping site:

Weather: Mid 40’s at base, 30’ish on summit 40-50Mph wind, mostly cloudy,

What a beautiful day again, again! Again, our first 4K of 2000! We started at 10:00AM at the 1’ST parking lot on Mt Clinton Road. We took the Crawford Path to the top of Mt Pierce. The Crawford path to Pierce was a very easy path, well traveled in recent days. The section of the Crawford path that bears left at the Mizpah cutoff was less traveled but still a solid footpath. The Summit of Mt. Pierce was crusted over with rime-ice. The trees had it a foot thick but the trail had blown clear with only a 1/4-inch rime-ice crust. It helped our footing a lot over what we could see was an icy path that would have required crampons or at least some tricky rock hopping until just a few days ago. From the summit, we could see a couple of hikers on the side of Eisenhower. Simone thought they were on a rope because one of the hikers would go ahead a short distance and then the other would hike up and meet him, then the process would repeat until they traversed the whole side of the Eisenhower dome. It certainly was windy enough to merit that type of hiking. Even on Pierce it was very windy and Eisenhower is much higher, and the Crawford path is totally exposed for miles.

We had lunch for about 20 minutes on the summit; it was wicked windy but if we stayed low it wasn’t that bad. Coming off the dome, facing into the full brunt of the wind was a different situation. We got brain freeze from the wind chill in just a couple of minutes; even with the Wind-block balaclavas cinched down tight. I had to rush to remove my gloves to take a picture and get the gloves back on quickly. My fingers froze to the bone in the time it took to snap a picture. Fortunately it was only for a few hundred feet of open exposure before we would tuck behind the tree cover out of the direct wind. As soon as we got into the trees the sun made it nice enough to take the wind-blocks off. We met another couple on the trail right as we were getting into the trees, (before we had a chance to unbundled, so we must have looked real strange all bundled up while they still were still in head bands and vests. They asked Gabe to snap a picture of them so I stepped 2 feet off the trail to get out of the picture and sunk almost hip deep into the snow.

We brought our snowshoes, but we never needed them. Simone used hers on the descent, just for the fun of it. As we were dealing with the harsh conditions on the summit, I though about a conversation I had had with a friend of mine discussing the cost of his scuba diving gear, and comparing his expense to mine, and how he needed to spend as much as he did, because his life depended on his gear, but I was just hiking. He obviously has no clue how much trust my family and I put into the hands of the gear we use. But I do accept how instantaneously an equipment failure on his gear could be catastrophic.

 

We’ve still never seen this trail in the summer and although I suspect it must be very nice I think we plan to save this trail as one of our regular winter hikes. Although,,, if I had to bring a complete new-be up a 4K, (a sneakers and T-shirt kind of guy) this would be one of my top 5 picks.

Links to all the pierce hikes:

  1. Pierce 1 – (2014, Carrie, Winter)
  2. Pierce 2 – (2013, Ben, Winter)
  3. Pierce 3 – (2010, Tyler, Winter)
  4. Pierce 4 – (2000, Gabe, Winter)
  5. Pierce 5 – (2002, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  6. Pierce 6 – (2004, Gary, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  7. Pierce 7 – (2004, Dale, Chris, Fletcher, Gabe, Spring)
  8. Pierce 8 – (2005, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  9. Pierce 9 – (First summit, 1999, Winter)