Valley Way gains four thousand feet in three and a half miles, and it does all of it under hardwoods, in the dark, before the range has shown you a single reason to be there. At 4:40 a.m. the trail is a tube of headlamp light and root lattice, and the only evidence that the Presidentials exist at all is the grade — a slope with intent, cut by people who considered switchbacks a moral failing. My partner Nate set the pace, which is to say he set the silence. You do not chat up Valley Way. You pay it.

The one-day Presidential Traverse is New England's blunt masterpiece: call it twenty miles and nine thousand feet of climbing from the Appalachia trailhead in Randolph, New Hampshire, to Crawford Notch, across the seven presidents of the range's spine — Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Monroe, Eisenhower, Pierce — plus Mount Clay, which the maps demote to a shoulder and your legs count anyway. Something like twelve of those miles sit above treeline. On paper it is a long day. On the actual rock it is a different sport, one in which "running" describes a quarter of your morning and almost none of your afternoon.

The deal

The Presidentials are short by Western standards — Washington tops out at 6,288 feet — and the range makes up the difference in pure atmospheric hostility. Three storm tracks converge on this ridge. The weather station on Washington's summit has recorded winds over 230 miles an hour, and the range collects hypothermia cases in July the way other mountains collect selfies. The forecast we started under promised a window: clear until early afternoon, then fifty-mile-an-hour gusts and cloud. Up there, that counts as an engraved invitation.

We broke treeline at the hut below Madison at 6:50, into the kind of light that makes you stop fiddling with your watch. The summit cone above is five hundred feet of frost-shattered talus stacked at the angle of repose, every block big enough to require a decision. A gray jay followed us up the whole thing, patient as a creditor, and collected its toll from Nate's trail mix at the top. East across the notch, the Carter Range floated on valley fog. It was the last standing-still we did for four hours.

The Presidentials don't have trails so much as suggestions painted onto rockfall.

Rock math

From Madison the route follows the Gulfside Trail along the rim of the Great Gulf, and this is where the traverse teaches you its arithmetic. The Presidentials don't have trails so much as suggestions painted onto rockfall — cairn to cairn across tilted blocks, each footfall a small wager on lichen and angle. Adams went by at 8:15, Jefferson at 9:30, and between them I checked my average pace exactly once, laughed at it, and turned the screen off. Ankles are the currency here. Spend them slowly.

At Sphinx Col the Great Gulf started manufacturing weather ahead of schedule — cloud pouring over the lip like dry ice off a stage, then shredding in the wind. The col is the traverse's honesty checkpoint: the Sphinx Trail drops east from here into shelter, and it is the last cheap exit before Washington. We stood in the lee of a boulder, ate, and did the math out loud. Moving well, fed, warm, two hours from the summit against a window that gave us three. We went. But we said the other option to each other first, which is the entire discipline.

Washington's summit is the strangest place in American mountains: you claw up the last talus through blowing cloud and arrive in a parking lot. The cog railway exhales tourists in sandals. A child in a dinosaur poncho watched us eat crushed sandwiches against the summit sign with the frank pity the comfortable reserve for the self-inflicted. Somewhere below the observation deck you can buy a chili dog at 6,288 feet, and I want the record to show that we did not, and that I have regretted it since.

The long down

South of the summit the range changes character. The Crawford Path — cut in 1819, the oldest continuously maintained footpath in America — rolls down toward the lakes below Monroe, and for the first time all day the ground consents to actual running. It is a strange gift to open eight hours in. The lakes were wind-scoured pewter; Monroe went by in fifteen minutes; and my quads, which had spent the morning as shock absorbers, discovered they were now expected to be springs.

Eisenhower's bald dome and Pierce's scrubby summit came and went in that late-day state where the body has stopped filing complaints because management clearly isn't reading them. Below Pierce the trail finally ducked back into the trees and the green closed over us like water. You don't run this range, is the thing. You negotiate with it, mile by mile, and if you're smart you lose politely.

You don't run this range. You negotiate with it, and if you're smart you lose politely.

  • Start before five. The above-treeline miles are a weather tax, and morning is when the rates are lowest.
  • The huts below Madison and at Lakes of the Clouds sell water and calories in summer; between them, carry more than feels reasonable.
  • Memorize your exits — Sphinx Trail, Jewell Trail, Ammonoosuc Ravine — before you need them, not on a fogged-in col with a dying phone.
  • Wear shoes that defend against rock and pack a real shell. This ridge has ended July days with December weather.
  • Set a turnaround time at breakfast and treat it like a rule, not a mood.

We reached the depot at Crawford Notch ten hours and ten minutes after leaving Appalachia, which is not fast and was never the point. Nate bought two chocolate milks from the cooler and we sat on the grass by the tracks, watching the cloud pull apart over the notch, sound above the ankles and quietly wrong everywhere else. Twenty miles. Seven presidents, one demoted shoulder, one gray jay paid in full.