Dries Buytaert

Presidential Traverse

Smiling man with gray hair wearing sunglasses sitting between people inside a wooden building.
Wooden bunk beds in a cabin with backpacks, sleeping bags, and hiking gear scattered around.
The view from my bunk at Mizpah Spring Hut.
A bearded man reflected in a weathered mirror with hooks, mounted on a wooden wall beside a red fire extinguisher.
A worn mirror, an old-school fly catcher, and an early-morning selfie.
A hiker with a backpack climbs a rocky trail through a dense, sunlit forest of tall trees.
Between Mizpah Spring Hut and Mount Pierce, the trail passed through a forest straight out of a fairy tale.
A wooden trail sign marks the Crawford Path and Appalachian Trail, with Mount Washington 5.4 miles away and Lakes of the Clouds 3.9 miles away.
The sign put Mount Washington 5.4 miles away. What it did not say was how difficult each of those miles would be.
A weather station building with large satellite dishes and antenna at the top of a rocky summit.
After hours of hiking, we reached the summit of Mount Washington, where we found a weather station, satellite dishes, and tourists who had driven up. Sharing the highest summit with people who had simply driven there felt strangely anticlimactic.
A stacked stone cairn marks a rocky mountain trail overlooking hazy ridges and a small white hut in the valley below.
The trail down from Mount Washington is a long scramble over broken rock. The small white building below is Lakes of the Clouds Hut, tucked beneath Mount Monroe, with Mount Eisenhower and Mount Pierce in the distance.
A helicopter flies near a mountain hut and alpine pond, with rocky terrain and hazy ridgelines in the background.
Lakes of the Clouds Hut looked peaceful from above, but the helicopter flying beside it was evacuating a hiker who had fallen ill after a difficult climb up.
Wooden trail sign reading "Crawford Path (AT)" atop a mountain, with an alpine lake and hazy ridgelines in the background.
Leaving Lakes of the Clouds, we rejoined the Crawford Path, which carries the Appalachian Trail toward Mount Washington.
A person uses their phone to photograph a mountain sunset, with a hut visible to the right.
At Lakes of the Clouds Hut, sunset brought everyone outside, where they all took the same photo.
A pair of worn brown leather hiking boots rests on a grassy hillside, with mountain ranges in the distance.
I stopped to take off my boots and treat my blisters before they got worse.