Apple Palooza

Yesterday we went apple picking in Warwick, NY at Maskers Apple Farm with friends from church. 

The free-all-you-can-eat-apples-while-you-pick policy meant that I went home not wanting to ever really see an apple again. But at least 25 lbs of them are sitting in our fridge, so I have been unearthing my favorite apple recipes. To share the apple/fall love, they are discussed below. Oh, and if you are serious about apples, save yourself the agony of mass-peeling and buy yourself an Apple-Peeler-Corer-Slicer. It will be the best $40 you ever spend, believe me.

Well, maybe not the best you EVER spend. But it will be pretty high up there.

Grandma Mooney's Apple Pie

I am starting with the best, first. This recipe was handed down by my grandmother, and has created probably hundreds of delicious pies over the decades. The beauty is the simplicity. Don’t be tempted to add cornstarch, or lemon zest, or anything else that those fancy-Dan TV people tell you to add. Stick to the simple recipe below, and let the apples speak for themselves.

Ingredients:

·         4-6 cups cored, peeled, thinly chopped apples (the more tart, the better. If you’re going store-bought on the apples, I like Granny Smith)

·         1 Cup white sugar

·         3 Tablespoons flour

·         1/8 teaspoon cinnamon  (I usually bump up to ¼ teasp)

·         Dash salt

·         2 Tablespoons cold butter

Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Mix apples and sugar/flour/cinnamon/salt. Prepare bottom crust of pie crust (8 or 9 inch pan), place in apple mixture, and dot the top with small pieces of butter. Put on top crust, cut slits for steam, and cover the crust (only the crust, not the whole pie!) with strips of aluminum foil. Bake for 25 mins, remove foil, then bake for an additional 15 mins. Pie is done when crust is golden brown and pie juice is bubbling through the slits.

Now – for those who want a quick (yet still delicious pie), go to the refrigerated section of your grocery store and buy a pre-made Pillsbury pie crust. There is no shame in this, and I will not judge you.  My grandmother converted to Pillsbury crusts at some point, and what’s good enough for Grandma’s standards should be good enough for you! But, if you are feeling truly masochistic (which I occasionally am), my homemade crust recipe can be found at the Strawberry Rhubarb Pie post.

On to the next apple adventure - apple butter! For those who don't know what this is (cough, friends born north of the Mason-Dixon line, cough) its a spicy spread that's sort of a thick applesauce. But better. And excellent on turkey sandwiches, biscuits, toast, pretty much anything. Yum. (And no, there is no actual butter in it).

Apple Butter

• ~10 lbs of apples (15 to 20-ish small/ medium apples, different varieties are ok. If you use a really sweet apple, use less sugar)
• 2-3 cinnamon sticks (or 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon)
• 1 t freshly grated nutmeg (I am supremely lazy when it comes to spices, so “fresh grated” for me means “use spice drawer from our wedding 4 years ago that I’m still working through." But this is probably not an ideal habit, so go for it on the fresh grating if you like!)
• 1 t ground cloves
• ¾ cup orange juice
• ½ cup water water
• sugar to taste (optional, and depending on the type of apples you used, but perhaps 1-2 cups. Or for a slightly healthier version, use 1 cup honey. Or no sugar at all. It's always easier to add more sugar later rather than ending up with butter that seems more like an apple lollipop)

Directions:

Peel, core, and finely chop apples. Put into crock pot with orange juice and water. Mix all dry ingredients separately, then add to apple mix. (If all your apples don’t fit into the crock pot at first, no worries – it will cook down significantly over the first hour and you can add more as there is room in the crock pot). 

This is a set-it-and-forget-it (well, don’t totally forget it) recipe… it needs AT LEAST 12 hours, and depending on the heat of your crock pot, maybe more like 18 hours. More time won’t make the butter burn, it will just make it thicker, so you can let it go until you get to the consistency you like. Once you are towards the end of 12 hours, if you want a smoother consistency, use an immersion blender to blend the mix in the crock pot. Or leave as is for a thicker/chunkier spread.

To make sure that the butter is at least minimally done, take a spoonful and put it on a saucer to cool. If water begins to separate away from the butter, keep cooking the mixture.

Add more spices to taste if you like, and enjoy! I recommend canning… properly canned apple butter can last for a year or more. Recommended eating suggestions: on a hot, fresh buttermilk biscuit… or on a cracker with brie cheese. Yum!

Apple Nut Coffee Cake

Ingredients:

Cake:

2 cups flour

1 cup white sugar

1/2 cup sour cream

1/2 cup butter, softened

 1/4 cup milk

2 eggs

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 cups apples, peeled/cored/chopped

 Topping:

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup brown sugar, packed

2 Tablespoons butter, melted

1 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions: Combine all cake ingredients except apples in large bowl. Beat on medium speed with mixer, scraping bowl often, until smooth. Gently stir in apples. Spread batter into greased 9x13-inch baking pan. Combine all topping ingredients in a small bowl; mix and sprinkle over batter. Bake for 30-35 mins or until toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out cleanly.

Apple Bread

Ingredients:

• 3 cups flour
• 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon baking powder
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup oil
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 2 cups peeled, diced apples
• ½ cup chopped walnuts
• 1 teaspoon flour

Directions:

1. Mix flour, cinnamon, soda, salt and baking powder together.
2. Beat eggs and add sugar and oil.
3. Add vanilla and dry ingredients.
4. Stir in apples.
5. Mix walnuts in a tsp of flour and add to batter.
6. Pour into 2 greased loaf pans.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour

 That's it! My loaf pans are fairly large (and my oven is a bit unpredictable in heating), so I ended up baking for ~70 minutes. Just bake until a toothpick comes out fairly clean (at least not gooey).

There you have it - an apple feast!

The Mystic Denisons

First, an apology for the drought in blog posts – between final exams and a recent switch in work roles, August seemed to pass by in a stressful blur. But I am on to a new semester (after a week-long reprieve from school), and happily settling into my new department, so the time has come to resume blogging (and social activities), sleep more, and drink less caffeine. At least until midterms.

We spent Labor Day weekend exploring the city with my parents and trekking out to Mystic, Connecticut. The town had been billed as a sort of seaport-version of Williamsburg, VA, and since my husband and I are William & Mary alumni, I was interested to explore Williamsburg’s NE ‘sister.’

Well, Mystic was and it wasn’t. It was a historic area, with cute local shops (complete with great ice cream at Mystic Drawbridge Ice Cream) and a beautiful river area. It was not, however, a true historical seaport town. Mystic was a shipbuilding and whaling town, but the ‘historic’ seaport structures there today were actually moved to the site rather than being actual historical representations. Oh, well. Perhaps it’s our Virginia-bias, but Mystic just didn’t seem quite as cool.

We also visited the Submarine Force Museum, home of the Nautilus, the first US nuclear-powered submarine. The (free!) museum included a tour of the Nautilus, as well as myriad submarine history and artifacts. Another cool moment was visiting the Denison Homestead. Part of my husband's ancestral family tree, the Densinons were some of the original settlers of Mystic. As the Dension website explains:

"In 1654, Capt. George Denison, one of the first settlers of Mystic, CT was granted 200 acres  by Governor John Winthrop Jr. for service to the early militia. Most of his original acreage has been preserved, thanks to the stewardship of  The Denison Society/Denison Homestead, and has been enjoyed by the community and Denison descendents since 1946. For almost 90 years, its open space and many trails have been open to the public."

Pretty cool being related to a family who sailed to America in the 1630s!

We partook of a nice dinner at Mystic’s Latitude 41 restaurant that evening - save for a bottle of Connecticut wine, which turned out to be fairly awful  – hit the local outlets on the way out of town, and returned to NYC.

Other weekend enjoyments included seeing good friends for dinner at the Peking Duck House, marathoning through my recently acquired Once Upon a Time (TV show) addiction, and catching up with family.

A final highlight: sweet circles of fried dough. Yes, dear readers, that chewy/savory moment of breakfast deliciousness: the doughnut.

We originally set out for the Donut Plant on Monday morning, one of our favorite NYC purveyors of gourmet doughnuts. With flavors like peanut butter banana, lavendar, and cashew with orange blossom, the Donut Plant holds a savory place in our hearts.

Alas, this Labor Day deliciousness was not to be: the store was closed for the holiday. However, being married to a bit of a Doughnut Savant, I knew my husband would have a back-up plan, and we seamlessly moved on to his back-up plan: the Donut Pub. 

While Donut Plant is delicious, it is also pricey, and a bit touristy. Donut Pub, however, is as if a local 1960 mom & pop diner managed to cryogenically freeze itself in time.  Inexpensive, tasty (if not quite as Donut Plant-fancy), and brimming with locals, Donut Pub was a great start to our morning, which we polished off with a walk along the High Line, detouring through Chelsea Market food shops and Eataly on the way home.

An excellent weekend of family bonding, ice cream/doughnut savoring, and resting up before the start of a new semester!

Please Rob Me and Other Cookie Mistakes

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 7

Big Brother is watching you.

While I never considered myself overly paranoid about online security, taking a Digital Marketing course at Columbia this semester has made me all too aware of the personal details that websites scrape, store, and sell. Most users are aware that websites use ‘cookies’ to remember who we are (so you don’t have to re-log in every time you visit a site). But do you realize everything that those cookies are doing? 

Cookies are a huge part of the $31.7B annual Digital Advertising spend strategy by firms because they allow advertisers to target incredibly specific groups of people. While the cookies on your browser don’t include names (supposedly), they do track your specific computer IP address, including your Google searches, website purchases, and other items that allow advertisers to know your age, gender, and location. 

It’s not a coincidence that if you put an item in a website shopping cart, but leave before buying the item, that you might get an email coupon from the retailer soon afterwards for the exact item that you almost purchased. And when was the last time Priceline or Orbitz sent you an email advertising specials for an airport nowhere near you? They remember from your cookies where you have recently searched/traveled, and make their email/ad targets towards you specific. The targeting allows retailers to achieve much higher "conversion" rates than generic email blasts.

Why did Facebook get a $1b valuation? Not because of the social warm fuzzies, but because they literally have all of your personal information – your age, location, sexual preference, dog’s name, everything. Google+ also isn't a coincidence. While Google might simply be interested in helping us all foster friendships (::cough::), they will also reap hundreds of millions in ad benefits once they have access to similar personal data as Facebook.

While in some ways this is handy (I like getting NYC travel emails rather than general country spam), the flip side is understanding that Orbitz knows exactly where you are going. And they are allowed to sell that information to other people if the privacy policy allows (and who really reads the privacy policy fine print, anyway?). Retailers will even throw in targeted ads purposefully among 'normal' adds to keep users from thinking the ads are too targeted, since there is an eventual creepiness factor (as discussed in the NY Times last month) for users when companies obviously know more than they should. In fact, Target recently came under fire for figuring out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did.

But what about moments when you want to remain anonymous? Say your coworker is looking on while you Google hard-hitting business research – and the Google display ads all relate to cream for that rash you looked up last week? Or baby ads if you haven’t yet told friends you’re pregnant?

DuckDuckGo is becoming a popular resource. While it will likely never take over Google, the site promises total anonymity and has found a cult following among those searching for privacy.

Sites like PleaseRobMe have popped up to help users understand that combinations of online data could allow criminals to easily steal your stuff (For example, your name and geolocation from FourSquare/Facebook/GoogleBuzz tells burglars that you’re out for dinner, or on vacation in Tahiti, allowing them to find your address from Facebook, and perhaps the fact that you recently 'liked' Blue Nile jewelry and might be loaded).

To better understand the level of detail that companies like Google track, check out DoubleClick Ad Planner. It's a free site from Google intended to help companies plan where to advertise by showing for any domain name the age/income/location/etc of the website's visitors. It also shows "sites also visited," meaning that people who visited the one domain also like going to the other listed sites.

Google Insight is also an interesting one. Another free tool that shows patterns for our search terms. Say you enter "pants, slacks, gifts for him" as search terms (top left of homepage). Google Insight shows interest over time (how many people search those terms by month - note the spike in searches over December and May... Christmas and Father's Day, anyone?), as well as a heat map by region. Click on the United States and you'll see darker states where people more frequently searched for "pants" (northwest US) vs "slacks" (southcentral US) vs "gifts for him" (midwest/central US). Click into states and you'll see search terms by city.

It's naive to think that we can erase our presence from the internet. But by the same token it behooves us to understand just who is watching - and why it makes sense to keep an eye on what you share. Also clean out your cookies every once in awhile (from your browser tools/security window). Cookies lurk indefinitely and track your behavior even if you haven't visited a site in months, so doing a periodic cleaning can help reduce your data sharing.

Happy searching!

Toes over Toronto

In our latest escape from NYC, my husband and I ventured up to Niagara Falls & Toronto over the July 4^th holiday week. Neither of us had visited previously, and NF seemed like one of those “classic Americana” things we needed to cross off of the list. We flew into Buffalo early on the 4^th and made the drive to the Canadian side of the falls. We watched Nik Wallenda cross the falls via high wire a few weeks ago via TV, so it was particularly interesting to now experience the falls in person.

The NF area was – to put it politely – “over-commercialized” (my co-worker prefers the adjective "trashy"). It’s a bit of a shame, as the falls themselves are immense and majestic, but the surrounding area is full of casinos, Ripley’s establishments, and copious amounts of bars/pancake houses. We partook of the classic tourist activities with the Maid of the Mist boatride (cool, but a bit expensive for a 15-min soaking) and the Journey Behind the Falls (uber expensive way to look through a port hole at a gray mist which my husband described as “the backside of water.”)

Nonetheless, we enjoyed seeing the falls, and spent dinner in the rotating dining room of the Skylon Tower to celebrate our fourth anniversary while enjoying the evening fireworks over the falls.

Check out the rainbow on the falls in the below pics!

On the 5^th we spent some time hiking along the Niagara river itself, downstream from the falls in a nearby park. The trail was only 2 or 3 miles, but it was neat to experience the incredible current/rapids of the river while walking through the gorge’s woods.

From there we went on to the Butterfly Conservatory. Again, in our opinion overpriced, but an interesting room full of various butterfly species flying around the open space. 

We left for Toronto, after a brief stop at the Hamilton Botanical Gardens, and arrived in the evening. Toronto is an interesting city. Without the land-locked limitations of NYC, it is considerably more spread out but retains an artsy sub-culture.

We spent three days in Toronto, and highlights of the city included a 4-hour bike tour with Toronto Bicycle Tours. Chris and I were the only ones who had signed up for the tour, so we had a private tour with the guide, Rick, who was excellently informative. The day was crazy hot, but the tour was a great way to see most of Toronto and learn about the city’s varied history. The tour is the one of the most popular Toronto activities on TripAdvisor, and it’s well-deserved!

We also went on the Edge Walk adventure at the CN Tower. The world’s tallest tower, CN stands 1,815 ft tall and allows for views of 100 miles on a clear day.  The Edge Walk experience allows you to walk along the top of the tower’s restaurant… outside! Complete with jumpsuit, harness, and safety lines, we walked the perimeter of the tower on a grate that allowed you to look down. Alllllll the way down. Sweeping panorama views of Toronto and Lake Ontario made the experience unforgettable… though the initial moment where you do “toes over Toronto” (i.e. shimmy your feet to the edge of the grate so your toes are off the grate and hanging over Toronto while you lean over the Edge – relying on your safety line – also definitely get the heartbeat going).

All in all an excellent trip!

Leadership Credo

 One of my classes this semester - Demystifying Organizational Culture, taught by Peter Meola - recently required us to go through a "Leadership Credo" exercise and present our credos to the class. While I admit the process seemed a bit corny at the outset, I ended up deeply impressed by my classmates' thoughtful results.The basics of our exercise:

1. Leadership Lifeline 

      a. Identify 4-7 defining moments in your life
      b. What leadership lessons did you learn from those moments? What core principles did they create for your desired leadership style?
      c. Give a few examples of practical applications of the above - what worked? What didn't?

2. Leadership Credo
     a. Describe what you stand for as a leader (in one sentence or less)
     b. What is your firm's Winning Proposition? (i.e., what is your mission that sets you apart from everyone else?)
    c. What are your key priorities? (i.e. what goals do you have in order to achieve your winning proposition?)
     d. What are your instrumental behaviors? (i.e. what do you require of your employees/ colleagues in order to achieve the key priorities?)

Below is my credo - edited slightly to remove specifics on my company... as Dragnet would say, names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Seek adventure, pack lightly, and bring a pencil.

This may not sound like typical career advice. It may not even sound like typical mountaineering advice. But it is my leadership credo.

What does this mean and why does it matter? Our department is a non-traditional one. Customer acquisition, stockholder demands, and regulatory requirements are all meaningless terms for us. We serve a single family, and our mission is to solve their financial needs before they are even aware of them.  

Our battle is therefore not against competitors but against our own complacency, and to successfully advise the family we must be proactive with our advice, accurate yet agile with our methods, and creative in our approach towards developing passionate employees.  

People rarely consider accountants to be adventurous. Our field’s stereotype is someone who plays it safe, hides in their cubicle, and – above all – avoids at all costs engaging with other human beings. This is not us, and this cannot be us. But what does it mean to seek adventure in an industry typically defined by tradition and static rules?

The word vacation to me used to mean a week of sitting comatose on a beach, enjoying a novel while listening to the hypnotic sound of waves hitting the sand. Then I married a Navy veteran with aspirations of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, the world’s second highest peak. The notion of using boots, camelback water systems, and Cliff Bars to facilitate vacation was a foreign one to me, but I was willing to first try San Gorgonio, a training climb in Southern California. With a trail of 20 miles and an ascension of 6,000 feet, the elevation climb alone would be the equivalent to climbing the stairs of the empire state building seven times.  Such a trail can’t be taken lightly. Every item going into your pack must be carefully considered – needs vs. wants assessed, extraneous weight eliminated. Every ounce of unnecessary baggage would weigh down each and every step we took on the trail.  Even our goal had to be considered.  Why? – you ask.  Shouldn’t the goal be obvious – reaching the summit?

Despite what inspirational posters or sports books tell you, reaching the top is not always the bottom line. You must temper your desire to bag the summit with an acknowledgement of the unexpected. We very well might not reach the top, through uncontrollable factors. Altitude sickness. Lightning storms. A twisted ankle. Our defined end-goal was to enjoy good company, remember humility in the face of untamed nature, and endure the physical challenges: which would hopefully, but not necessarily, end up with us reaching the summit.

What does my journey mean for this company? I am tempted to offer a variety of inspiring platitudes about endurance, believing in yourself, or somehow comparing the euphoria we felt as we experienced the sweeping views from Gorgonio’s peak to the elation of a job well done. But I won’t do that. I’ll instead share what I believe mattered most that day: writing in pencil.

We made plans. We were prepared. But we were also willing to change course at the blink of an eye and to embrace adventure as the willingness to change a destination point as the journey threw challenges towards us.

So too must we embrace this idea as a department. The temptation we face is to accept our processes and goals because they are simply there. Familiar and comforting, if at times monotonous, our customs wrap us in a false sense of success. Without the pressures of external customers or regulatory deadlines, we could easily continue just as we are without being fired. But we would fail in our mission of providing proactive, unparalleled service to the family.

This desire to serve the family can only thrive in our desire to blend financial accuracy with management flexibility; to constantly reassess how our goals are serving (or failing to serve) them, and to be willing to erase failing efforts and redraw new plans. A sense of adventure will serve us well as we look to be flexible and proactive with a thirst for the next challenge, in whatever form it might take. 

This means that no idea will be shot down because it is different. We will not let ourselves be weighed down with unnecessary baggage. Therefore no process will be kept unless we can explain why it is needed – and why there is no better way to accomplish it.  

Finally, keeping ourselves motivated towards flexibility and excellence will only occur if we can invest in our personal interests both inside and outside of the workplace. We cannot expect one another to be passionate about our jobs if the firm is not also passionate about developing us as complete citizens. Therefore our department will offer [specific volunteer/training initiatives].

We are a Family Office: we serve a family, but we also strive to in some ways become a group of adopted siblings. Willing to embrace one another’s interests and to develop each other professionally, but with the underlying understanding that our commitment to providing the family with unparalleled financial management means that we will seek adventure, pack lightly, and write in pencil.

Jim 'n Nicks... ish Biscuits

Jim 'n Nicks is a southern BBQ staple - we enjoyed their wares while visiting family in Alabama, and what perhaps lives most famously in our memories is the Cheese Biscuit. Yes, so delicious that it earns its own capitalization.


Of course, JnN doesn't publish a recipe, but dedicated fans have been trying recipes to approximate the Cheesy Deliciousness. I tried out one of the recipes, with my own tweaks, and they came out quite tastily. While they could still use some tweaks to achieve full JnN glory, they were a tasty stand-alone muffin... and (as always for my recipes) met the required rubric for being pretty easy.

Somehow, it tastes like there is corn in the muffin even though it's not an ingredient. This is one of the great muffin mysteries of all time, but perhaps a chemistry-pro reader can offer advice here.

Jim 'n Nicks-ish Cheese Muffins:

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups flour (the online base recipe recommended self-rising flour, but I refuse to buy new ingredients just for one recipe so I used normal flour and it turned out fine)
• 3/4 cup sugar (the recipe called for 1 cup but that seemed like a lot so I cut if down. If you want to go healthier, cut this further to 1/2cup... or better yet, don't eat these muffins at all).
• 1 cup shredded cheddar cheese (sharp, freshly shredded if possibly. I had non-sharp, pre-shredded in the fridge so I used that. Oh well.)
• 3/4 cup buttermilk (while I usually encourage cheating around weird ingredients, don't cheat on this one - the buttermilk is part of the magic.)
• 2 medium eggs, beaten well (this is flexible - I tried one batch using 1 large egg and one batch using 2 large eggs and they tasted pretty similar, so go with whatever speaks to you.)
• 4 tablespoons butter (the recipe calls for softened butter which you mix in... I preferred using cold butter, cut into small pieces and mixing it into the flour until it was like course crumbs... this makes scones flakier, so I thought it might do the same for muffins... or maybe its just my chemistry superstition?)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees and grease a 12-muffin pan (or you can make these as mini-muffins, just cut down baking time a bit).

Take all the dry ingredients mix them together. Mix in butter (either soft butter, or work in cold butter until mix looks crumbly). Add cheddar cheese and stir. Beat eggs with vanilla and buttermilk. Add mixed wet ingredients to dry and mix LIGHTLY, just until mixed. Over-mixing is bad. Very bad.


Bake ~11 mins, or until muffins are golden-ish. Enjoy! These are great as a side with BBQ, burgers, or even breakfast.

Presidential Traverse: Mt. Washington

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
           Shakespeare, As You Like It, (II.i.1–17)

Over Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I returned to the White Mountain area of New Hampshire where we snowshoed in February. Returning was a completely different experience – it was a luxury not to be worried about freezing food/water/skin and sleeping in 4 layers of clothing, though the trails were obviously much more crowded, eliminating some of the serene peacefulness we experienced during the winter. The trip was also a reunion for us; 5 of the 9 of us were snowshoe trip alumni.

Mizpah Hut

The worst part of the trip is always the drive, but we packed up with everyone in a 15-passenger van by 7am Saturday morning and trucked along on the 7-hour drive north. Arriving in the afternoon, we hiked for ~2.5 hours up a 1,900 ft. elevation gain on the Crawford Path to stay at the Mizpah Spring Hut, one of the many huts owned and operated by the Appalachian Mountain Club.

Sunday night would find us at a different hut – Joe Dodge Lodge – so we packed everything into our packs Sunday morning loaded up on water, and headed out by 8am for a crazy-full day of hiking. 

The poetry of the earth is never dead.  ~John Keats 

We took the Webster Cliff Trail & Crawford Path trails to summit Mount Eisenhower (4,780 feet), Mount Franklin (5,001 feet) and Mount Monroe (5,372 feet). After stopping for a brief lunch break at Lake of the Clouds, we pressed on to summit Mt. Washington, the tallest peak in the Northeast at 6,288 ft.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.  ~John Muir

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.  ~Henry David Thoreau

The Mt. Washington summit is also accessible via car, so it was a bit strange to go from hiking in the wilderness to a summit with gift shops, a cafeteria, and hordes of tourists. The views were spectacular, though; apparently we enjoyed one of only a few clear days Mt. Washington has all year.

Mt.Washington View (and Parking Lot)

Mt. Washington is famous for having some of the most volatile weather in the world, and holds the world record in wind speed (231mph, recorded in 1934). The trails to/from the mountain are deceptively exhausting. While the hike was “only” about 12 miles, it took us a full 12 hours as much of the trails were piles of rocks/boulders. Particularly on the descent via the Lionhead trail, you had to think about every step you took, and steep/slippery sections of the trail could mean serious injury if you stepped carelessly.

That said, everyone in the group eventually made it down to Joe Dodge Lodge. Most of the AMC huts are bare-bones: some have running water (drinking only, no showers), electricity for a couple hours at night only, and large shared rooms of bunk-style cots. They essentially provide shelter and cooking facilities so you can minimize your carried-in supplies. Joe Dodge Lodge, at the base of Mt. Washington, was accessible by highway and therefore had hot running water. Oh my. Having a hot shower at the end of the traverse was a ridiculously nice surprise.

The Intrepid Crew!

Monday morning we explored North Conway, a cute, touristy NH town, before driving back into the city. We were rather like a gimpy clown car on the way back; we would stop for bathroom breaks and 9 incredibly sore hikers would slowly pile out of the van, easing their way out one foot at a time, and stretching/limping towards the restrooms.

There is a season for everything, and while we missed a bit the soul-refreshing solitude of our February trip, we enjoyed the soul-warming friendliness of company on this trip. Chris and I are already plotting additional hikes for the summer - stay tuned.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.  ~John Muir