Peak: Flume, Liberty, Lincoln, Lafayette, Garfield, Galehead, South Twin, Bond, Bondcliff
Trails: Osseo, Franconia Ridge, Garfield Ridge, Twinway, Bondcliff, LWT
Mileage: 30ish
Elevation Gain: 9,757′
Weather: We had a wonderful morning out until we got to about south Twin. The rest of the day was cloudy, misty, raw, viewless, etc.
Notes: After a few hikes out in the Southwest US and a Pres traverse to prep, we completed a single day pemi loop! In hindsight, we were barely ready for a day like this. Our plan was to front load hiking in the dark. We crunched the numbers and knew we’d be hiking in the dark one way or another and decided to get the flat walk over with early in the day.
After we made it to Bond, Justin did his best to convince me we should be chasing glory atop summit of West Bond. I’ll now admit he was right at the time and we should have tagged it, the weather was still good enough. We made it to South Twin and kept moving down towards the Hut.
After a stop at the hut we kept moving in the direction of our next peak, Garfield. After hiking for only a few minutes we ran into some other hikers who congratulated us for bagging a Galehead! We hiked back to the hut and made our way for Garfield. GRT was a beautiful waterfall as we hiked up. When reaching that summit, the day had turned fully cloudy and we got some judgy looks for being so brief at the summit as we essentially played tag with Garfield and left.
On the way over to Lafayette, we played leapfrog with another hiker who was doing a three day pemi loop that ultimately decided to head for Lincoln woods with us and make it a two day loop. Hiking up Lafayette from Garfield was the crux of the day for me. From there, most of our work was done and all we had do two was hike down the ridge and let gravity do the work. It wasn’t that simple, but we made it down.
When we got to the junction of LWT and Osseo trail, we ran into a veteran hiker who correctly presumed our loop and was hyped to hear it was our first loop. He and Justin ran to the bridge when it became visible. Justin and I shook hands after getting to the car and headed back to Concord.