April is the most difficult month to hike the White Mountain 4000 footers and hiking out to The Bonds is one of the most difficult hikes to complete due to the distance and early spring snow conditions. This April has been particularly difficult since it snowed an additional five feet earlier in the month adding to the snowpack and prolonging winter conditions.
The Bonds are a cluster of three adjacent 4000-footers including Bondcliff, Mt Bond, and West Bond Mountain. They’re located deep in the Pemigewasset Wilderness Area and extremely remote requiring either a 22-mile out and back or a 26-mile traverse depending on the route (in winter conditions). Most people do the route in one very long day. While you can backpack it, the added winter gear weight would make it even more challenging. That said, it’s a delightful backpacking trip in warmer weather and I’ve done it many times.
With a hard frost forecast overnight, my friend Karen and I decided to head out to the Bonds early in the morning to try and summit the peaks before the snow warmed and turned to slush. The wind forecast was moderate, which is good because these peaks all have considerable wind exposure. Karen and I have been hiking The Grid together for several years and she’s a solid companion. The Grid involves hiking all 48 of the 4000 footers in each calendar month of the year for a total of 576 summits. This was to be my 12th and last hike to the Bonds for The Grid, while Karen still has a few more months to complete.
We met at the Lincoln Woods trailhead and started at 7:18 am. The first 4.7 miles are along the Lincoln Woods Trail and Bondcliff Trail, which are the gateway to the Pemigewasset Wilderness. The trail, which used to support a logging railroad, still has embedded railroad ties on the surface. But it’s a fast and flat stretch of trail and we chewed up the distance in 2 hours.
For this hike, we’d each packed winter hiking gear with extra gloves, layers, and lots and lots of food. We also brought Hillsound Trail Crampons and snowshoes, which together add about 6 lbs to a backpack load. We both carried about 2L of water but planned to resupply during the day at the stream crossings below the peaks. I haven’t drunk enough water on my last several Grid hikes and I was determined to consume enough on this one.
We started climbing the Bondcliff Trail which was dry and snow-free, switching to Hillsound Trail crampons at 2400′ for more traction on the snow. The trail is well-shaded by trees down low and the snow was firm enough to support us without snowshoes. After several stream crossings and more climbing, we arrived at a rocky outcrop, known as the Hillary Step, at the south end of the Bondcliff Mtn summit. It’s usually a challenging scramble to ascend, but the snow at its foot was piled deep making it much easier to climb up.
The summit of Bondcliff was entirely snow-free, so we ducked out behind a boulder out of the wind and had lunch. Two women approached us from the north as we rested and came over to say hello. Both Karen and I knew Donna and her companion was the mother of another of my friends! If you hike in the White Mountains regularly, especially on the 4000-footers, you constantly run into people who do the same thing. It’s one of the charming things about hiking in the Whites. They’d spent the night at Zealand Hut and were hiking the Bonds from the northerly direction, the full 26-mile winter route.
We split up and continued with our hikes, Karen and I heading to Mt Bond next, which is the tallest of the Bonds. The trail to the summit climbs up the west face of the mountain and can get quite nasty if the wind is blowing because it’s completely exposed to the weather. We’d lucked out and experienced glorious weather sunny all day, with low wind.
Still, the climb to the Bond summit was a grind over a rocky trail and then back into our Hillsounds when we encountered snow higher up. As we headed toward the West Bond Spur, the trail our to our final peak, we encountered a heavily post-holed trail. But the snow was still cold enough that it held our boots, so we did’nt add to the mayhem that post-holing can cause.
Once at the trail junction, where we met another hiker, named Alan. I’d never met him before but we have a lot of mutual friends and we quickly put 2 & 2 together. We hiked out with him to West Bond and savored the views. It 2:30 and we’d been hiking for 11 miles in 7 hours, almost continuously, except for our short lunch break on Bondcliff. Now it was time to hike back the way we’d come.
This involved submitting Mt Bond and Bondcliff again, before making our way all the way back to the Lincoln Woods trailhead. That took another 6:30 hours and we were wearing headlamps at the end.
But we’d had a great hike and I’d gridded out the Bonds. Not only that, I’d finished hiking all 48 of the 4000 footers in April, leaving only 5 more summits to climb in May to finish the Grid (571/576). It’s hard to believe that that multi-year effort is about to come to an end, and while I’ve loved it and the comradery, I’m looking forward to hiking new territory.
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