From mitoc-request@MIT.EDU Tue Sep 21 17:53:25 1999
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 17:35:24 -0400
To: Hector Briceno <hbriceno@graphics.lcs.mit.edu>, aumond@MIT.EDU,
        bradiko@MIT.EDU, cguth@wellesley.edu, doml@MIT.EDU, kerim@MIT.EDU,
        eklund@ll.mit.edu, histed@MIT.EDU, jussi.ala-kihnia@datex-ohmeda.com,
        stf@alum.mit.edu, elron@alum.mit.edu, stoph@MIT.EDU, zan@MIT.EDU,
        meaftias@MIT.EDU, amsab@MIT.EDU, amahone@wellesley.edu, adomin@MIT.EDU,
        ingram@MIT.EDU, bwalker@MIT.EDU, blockyer@MIT.EDU, yorkc@MIT.EDU,
        oliveira@MIT.EDU, knutsand@MIT.EDU, lorien@MIT.EDU, mjevans@MIT.EDU,
        mholling@MIT.EDU, lehman@MIT.EDU, mrwarden@MIT.EDU, minw@MIT.EDU,
        mlpriebe@MIT.EDU, nthaper@MIT.EDU, olivera@MIT.EDU,
        mcnamara@math.mit.edu, remlein@wellesley.edu, ronny@MIT.EDU,
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From: Robert Zeithammer <rzeitham@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Trip Report: Mount Tripyramid

Hi everyone!

Prompted by Hector's great trip-report, here are is more:

On Sunday, while the mainstream circus participants headed for some
peculiar rock-games involving ropes, harnesses and Hector, and while the
masochistic participants opted for a 245-mile hike over Kinsman Ridge, the
small-but-important core group of experienced mountaneers headed by Bill
'Canoe' Finger and my humble self scaled Mount Tripyramid in the Sandwich
Range. Scaling the highest peak of his life that day and navigating the
whole team was our resident low-land specialist Peter 'Compass' McNamara.
Saving all his strengths for the last 3-miles-in-20-minutes leg of the
journey was Christopher 'Stoph that rhymes with loaf' Long. 

The hike is simply amazing, definitely top-three in the Whites, and I want
to recommend it to all of you, especially because of its proximity to
Camelot. It is not very well known, surely much less crowded that Franconia
Ridge or Chocorua (the other two on my top-three list). Here is a report
about our experience with it:

After the first 3 miles of pleasant walking along the almost-flat Livermore
Road, Peter demanded to see these "rough mountains we were talking about".
Two minutes later, he was fording a stream saved only by his special
orienteering shoes. After that point, the trail quickly turned into the
hillside, and before we knew it, we found ourselves clinging to huge
granite slabs scrambling almost vertically upwards. We were following the
North Slide trail that literally slashes the mountain with a vertical scar
of granite about 100 feet wide. The views start at the bottom and continue
improving uninterrupted all the way to the top (a very unusual feature in
the Whites). As we were climbing up on all four and the top kept running
further and further away from us, we concluded (in a very MIT fashion) that
the mountain was convex. Using this lemma, we dismissed several
"near-summit feelings" as mere conjectures. Also because of the convexity,
going got easier near the peak. The three pyramids of Tripyramid are quite
significant conical mini-mountains atop a ridge, each making the hiker
successively more tired. (FYI: The Middle summit has the best views.) By
the time we got to the South Slide Trail, we were ready for a nice easy
descent (hinted at in the AMC guide)... In hindsight, we should have
noticed the similarity in names between "North Slide Trail" and "South
Slide Trail" and extrapolated this to assumptions about the similarity of
the actual trails. This is what we recommend to any future hikers (i.e.
expect a BRUTAL descent over large boulders covered with slippery scree).
Needless to say, blood was shed, but only in symbolic quantities - just
enough for that nonchalant remark a few years from now: "Oh yes, the
scar...that's just an old climbing injury, honey!". So OK, we made it down
from the mountain... and being the hardcore mountaneers, we were not tired,
but actually energized. Hector would say that 'our guns were loaded' by
summitting. In what would some misguided biological-basis-of-behavior
speculants call "a surge of testosterone", but what actually was a joint
decision to have more fun, we decided to run the last 3 miles along the
flat Livermore Road back to the car. After dropping Peter and me on mile 2
(both Peter and I have subsequently generated sufficient excuses for
temporary exhaustion), Stoph and Bill sprinted all the way to the finish
line.  Bill won in a powerful kick, but the significance of this
achievement was decreased by him not carrying a backpack... Either way,
this last stretch totally unloaded our guns...

We all had a lot of fun on our hike, and the above is only one possibile
way of doing it.  Again, I highly recommend this beautiful peak. One neat
challenge would be a winter ascent... Summary stats: 11 miles, 2800 feet
elevation.

Robert

