20 miles. 9000 feet of vert. Eight 4000-footers. One long, epic day.

The Presidential Traverse is the canonical intense White Mountains hike.

We will drive up to NH on Friday 5/26 in the late afternoon and camp at Sugarloaf Campground, getting up early to hike on Saturday morning, waking up around 4am.

We will split into 2 groups (of ~5 people in each group), and we’ll hike this route, with one group hiking north-to-south, and the other group hiking south-to-north.

Prerequisites

This is a very difficult hike, with difficulty arising from the length, elevation, technical terrain in the northern presidentials, and weather in the alpine zone. As a rough guideline, you should:

• Have done a single-day hike of 14+ miles with 5000+ ft of elevation gain in the last 12 months
• Have hiked in the northern presidentials in the White Mountains (or equivalent terrain)
• Have hiked above treeline in the White Mountains (or equivalent conditions)

If you don’t satisfy the prereqs, you’re welcome to sign up anyways, but please be detailed when filling out the sign-up form, so we can make sure that this is the right trip for you.

Sign-up process

Sign up for the trip by entering the lottery below and also filling out this Google form. The trip lottery will run on Sunday, May 21st.

Details

Rain date. The trip might be postponed to Sunday or Monday of Memorial Day Weekend, depending on the weather.

2nd night camping. Depending on what time we finish the hike, we might opt to camp for a second night at Sugarloaf campground and drive back the next day, if drivers are too tired to drive.

Cost. Expect camping to cost around $5-10 and transportation to be around $25.