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Mt. Adams - Wednesday, October 3 (4.3 miles up - 4.2 miles back, 4,493 feet of elevation gain): Wouldn't you know that this day (and the next would be crystal-clear up at Mt. Washington's summit? Oh, well … too many trails and not enough time to even scratch the surface. I did this hike with one of the other guests at Pinkham Notch - up via the Airline Trail and down via the Valley Way Trail. This hike has an even steeper grade than the Mt. Washington hike but it was more sustained. The Mt. Washington hikes provide flat-to-low grade trails to start off then make you do big-time UP hiking before "leveling off" again as you near the summit. Mt. Adams provides much less of this except at the very beginning of the hike - the rest of it is just plain UP. Coming above treeline on the Airline Trail was also much more dramatic than I experienced on the Huntington Ravine trail the day before … that may be because Huntington is so straight up that I was concentrating on watching where I was going and didn't really notice when I left the trees behind. On the Airline Trail, though, it's very sudden. As you break out of the trees you see Mt. Adams (and Mt. Madison) staring right down at you! You're also greeted by stunning views down into King Ravine (I think?) from the very edge of the ravine headwall … really beautiful. You leave the soft green behind you and walk up into a hard, dark gray pile of rocks - that would be Mt. Adams. It's interesting that there's no single, visible HUGE chunk of rock that seems to make up the summit. It's more like if you took a handful of salt and poured it out into a cone shape … except each grain of salt is as big as a refrigerator. No real "trail" to the top - just blazes painted on the rocks to point you in the general direction. The return trip was, as on the previous day, uneventful … as we hiked back down the Airline Trail to where we could pick up the Valley Way Trail to return to the car we passed by Mt. Madison. It was enticing, to say the least! Being able to do two big summits on one day would have been neat but would have added two miles roundtrip and two hours to the hike and we would have risked being caught in the woods in the dark on a trail that was probably the worst downhill hiking I've ever done. It was on this one that my knees began to give me the first hints that they were going to rebel at some point in the not-too-distant future!

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