Quadrathlon Saturday : Swim / Bike / Run / Hike. . . Mount Moriah

Date of Hike: 2/24/18

Mount Carter Drive, Cul De Sac, Logging Road: 1.0 miles  /  Stony Brook Trail: 2.5 miles  /  Carter-Moriah Trail 2.6 miles  /  Stony Brook Trail: 2.5 miles  /  Logging Road, Cul De Sac, Mount Carter Drive: 1.0 miles
Total Miles: 9.6 (3,490 feet elevation gained) Garmin Forerunner 920XT

Trip Report
- This weeks weather has been a major blow to winter in the White Mountains, trails have turned ugly with rotting snow and a minefield of postholes and ice.  To shake things up I decided to still get in a hike but to do an indoor mini triathlon at the local athletic club as a warm up!
- During the week I spend early mornings strength training at the Royalty Inn Athletic Club.  The club also has a pool, sauna, hot tub, racquetball court and basketball hoops. It's a nice little facility, most of the equipment is old but clean and in decent shape, plus it's never crowded.  It's totally different from when I lived in North Providence RI, where I went to one of those big named gyms that was usually crowded and had the feel of a bad reality TV show, this made for great people watching but there were also quite a few characters who always seemed to be on the edge of rage, hmm...
- Anyway, back to my little athletic club in Gorham NH, I headed over there at early on Saturday and started swimming in the pool just before 6:30AM.  The pool is 25 yards in length, so 70 lengths equals one mile.  When it comes to swimming, I'm slow and steady, I ended up doing just a little over a mile 1,850 yards in 39 minutes.  2:08 / 100 yards, usually I'm at 2:04 / 100, my goal for this summer is 1:59 / 100.  After swimming a mile straight I get this goofy unbalanced feeling when I stop, it's quite funny, if I jump out of the pool I walk uneven for the first few steps, to combat this I stayed in the pool and walked up and down the lane one more time.
- Next up I headed downstairs to the cardio room and hopped onto the stationary bike where I did a hill workout for 35 minutes on level 12.  It's a grind and a definite quad buster, the program is kind of a ball buster as it's just a continuous uphill.  It's not a big mile ride, today I came in at 12.33 miles, I'm usually around 12.25 to 12.40.  when I step off the bike my shirt was soaked, making for a great workout.
- Finally comes the treadmill of death, of which I'm not a fan, so I did a quick 5K with negative splits of 7:30, 7:00, and 6:30.  It goes by fast and is the easiest of the three for me to do.
- After leaving the athletic club I went home for a quick breakfast before grabbing my backpack, heading out the door and across and up the street, before jumping on the Stony Brook Trail for a late morning hike of Mount Moriah.
- Trail conditions for the hike were pretty sad, spring feel down low with some standing water, ice, and choppy snow.  Worst of all was the small debris from trees scattered around the snow, making for a sorry looking trail.
- Once I gained the ridge the fun started, overnight we had some sleet and ice fall, it all melted down low but above 3,000 feet it was still around and made the open slab sections on the mile approach to the summit tricky and tough to navigate in my old microspikes.  Once I changed over to my more aggressive Hillsound spikes I had much easier time managing the glaze ice.
- Views from the ledges and the summit were ok, there was a thick cloud layer at 4,100 feet and above, with Moriah's summit at 4,029 feet I was able to have some decent views to the north and to the southeast of the Wild River Wilderness.
- Considering I had spent a lot of energy this morning at the athletic club, I still was able to maintain a good pace up and down the mountain making it back home to play in the yard with Sarge in just over three hours.
-  It was a fun little morning pushing myself physically, and I am looking forward to doing a few more of these over the next couple of months when the trail conditions are just so-so.

 Frozen over cascade on the Stony Brook Trail

Looking southeast into the Wild River Wilderness

Ice over section of the Carter-Moriah Trail

Everything above 3,000 feet was covered in a small layer of glaze ice

View from the summit looking to the Baldfaces off in the distance

Middle Moriah and Moriah Shelburne 

Hiking along the trail corridor of the Carter-Moriah Trail

Carter-Moriah Trail ledges 

Beaver patrolin' Sarge!

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