Join us on a bushwhacking adventure up the rarely experienced Mt. Deception!

There is no trail that leads to the summit of Mt. Deception. Instead of following a trail, we will be bushwhacking, which will involve extensive trail-breaking and navigation. If you've been itching to use your snowshoes in deep snow, this is the hike for you!

We will start at Bretton Woods and bushwhack up along the ridge to Little Mt. Deception and follow this line up to the two summits of Mt. Deception, then retrace our steps.

This hike covers ~8 miles and ~2500 ft of elevation gain, but because we will be trail-breaking/bushwhacking, this will be much more tiring than a hike with equivalent stats along trails. You can find a map of the route here.

Prerequisites

We don't have strict/inflexible prerequisites, but as a guideline, you should:

• Have done at least 1 MITOC B-level (below treeline, in the White Mountains or similar) winter hike (or equivalent) with >= 9 miles of distance and >= 3500 ft of elevation gain.
• Be in good physical shape: you should be confident that you can complete a hike much harder than this hike's stats suggest, either because you regularly run/do similar exercise or have hiked something with much more distance/elevation than this hike in the past few months.
• Be excited about joining an adventure with a lower-than-usual chance of reaching the summit.
• Have experience using snowshoes.

If you don't satisfy both prereqs above, you're still welcome to enter the lottery for this trip, but please email the leaders briefly summarizing your winter/3-season hiking experience, so we can make sure that this trip is a good fit for you. These pre-reqs are designed to maximize the chance that everyone on the hike has fun, not to prevent you from signing up! We reserve the right to remove participants from this trip after the lottery runs if we think they don't meet the pre-reqs, so please email us before the lottery runs if you're on the fence about whether you qualify.

Logistics

There will be a required pre-trip meeting on Thursday to review gear and logistics. We'll send details by email after the lottery runs. You can rent snowshoes and other gear at the pre-trip meeting.