With two leader substitutions and two people signed up, we met at the Richmond Park & Ride at 9 AM and headed up to the Duxbury trailhead. The day started cold (for the time of year), but all the snow and almost all the ice from a week earlier had melted off (just a little ice left on a few of the rocks near the summit), and while it was windy up top, it wasn’t really too cold. We had some sun in the morning, but it became mostly cloudy as the day progressed.

We started up the trail around 9:40, reached the Dean / Monroe junction around 10:30, and the LT around 11:25, seeing quite a few people along the way (more on that below).

We stopped for lunch around noon at a relatively wind-free viewpoint along the LT, and then continued up to the summit, again seeing an unusually large number of people for this fairly difficult section of trail. We reached the summit around 1:45, but only stopped briefly, as the winds were pretty strong, but spent a little time playing summit caretakers, reminding quite a few people we saw tromping across the grass of the fragility of the vegetation at that altitude. We stopped to prop up a rock-braced sign at the Alpine / Monroe junction which was leaning a lot, and then continued down Monroe, reaching the Dean trail junction a bit after 3, and the car a little before 4.

This probably should be subtitled a GMC recruiting trip, since we stopped for conversations about the GMC with at least 8 to 12 groups of folks along the way, including students from several local colleges and universities, several people new to or considering moves to the area, folks from Quebec, and a number of locals. And we weren’t making a point of bringing up the topic; in many cases other people approached us with questions! Probably a more productive recruiting trip than the stint one of us spent at EMS Club Days the day before.

Participants: Max Seaton, Phil Hazen, David Hathaway (leader).