Backpacking
the Pemi Loop

Dates: July 5-8, 2025

With: Kate!

Locations: White Mountains NF - Pemigewasset Wilderness

Total: 41.3mi, +/-11,828 elevation, 3 days
Peaks: 19, including 12 on the New Hampshire 4000ers list.

The Pemigewasset Loop, known just as the "Pemi Loop" is a famously difficult and scenic hiking loop in New Hampshire's White Mountain National Forest. The loop itself is cobbled together from various other trails to form a lollipop shape, and can be customized in length, elevation gain, peaks summitted, direction hiked, and locations camped. I actually put this trip on my dream backpacking trip list years ago when researching the best backpacking in the US, and forgot about it until Kate started working on the NH48 this summer. After tackling the Hancocks in May, I was excited to get back out in the White Mountains and do a real backpacking trip. 

At its base, the loop is 31 miles and includes 8 peaks on the popular New Hampshire 4000ers "NH48" list. We decided we would maximize and knock off every remotely reasonable peak in the vicinity of the loop, and our itinerary ended up at 3 (or 3.5, we weren't sure yet) days to tackle every spur trail to a 4000' peak, which stretched the mileage to about 40 and elevation gain to 12,000'. A daunting challenge for sure, but we had done our cardio and leg strength training, planning, and dialed our gear in and were ready to embrace every mile of the rocky trail. 

Day 0: Mt. Cardigan

I flew into Boston for 4th of July weekend, which turns out to be a pretty crazy time to go to Boston. Traffic was intense even late at night, but Kate heroically came to get me after work and I drove us back to Lebanon. She had two more days of work to go, so I spent the day before the Pemi getting my sea legs back with a quick trip to Cardigan Mountain State Park. The namesake mountain of the park is a bare granite dome summit with great views, and is just a 3 mile round trip hike with 1500' of gain - short but steep!

I timed it tightly so I had just an hour and a half to summit and get back to the car to pick up Kate after work, so I shouldered my light pack with just water, layers, and camera and set up at a quick pace. The trail started meandering through the woods and quickly picked up steepness into a staircase-like array of roots and rocks. I pushed myself hard through this section.

After a mile of that, the trees tapered off and I found myself walking straight up steep rock slabs with cairns as the only indicators of a trail. The views unfolded behind me of rolling green mountains lost in a haze, with a few refreshing looking lakes spotting the countryside. A cold wind picked up as well as I approached the granite dome that was apparently the summit. A fire watchtower secured with a ton of high tension steel cables looked ready to withstand the famously high windspeeds of the White Mountains. Leaping up the last few rocks I hit the summit just 40 minutes in, having gained 1500 feet from the car.

Leaving the summit, I clambered down the slabs and found a trail that led past an abandoned old AMC cabin and to the South Cardigan Summit just 15 minutes later. Then it was downhill, racing down the rooted trails to hit the car at exactly 1.5 hours later. 3.1 miles, 1500' gained, 2 summits down, and I felt ready to rumble!

Day 1: Bond, Mount Bond

Stats: 11.6 mi, +3834/-801 elevation, 7.5 hours
Peaks: Bondcliff, Mt. Bond

We left Lebanon at 7am, with a few stops on deck - breakfast on the road, grocery store for a few last minute essentials, and the White Mountain Visitor Center, where we bought a waterproof map. By the time we found parking at the zoo of a trailhead, we were walking at 10am. A final weather check decided for us that we would go counterclockwise, to have good weather on the exposed Bondcliffs and get a longer day in while we could. Some late afternoon thunderstorm chances stood out on Monday afternoon for our 3rd day, but we'd keep an eye on things.

Immediately we crossed the Pemigewasset river on a cool suspension footbridge and crushed 2.5 easy miles on the Lincoln Woods "rail trail," a super flat, wide, shaded trail that leads to Franconia falls. It literally was a railroad at one point, and countless ties across the trail testified to that fact as we stepped over them.

Here, we continued on to the Bondcliff trail where the hiking truly began. 1.8 more miles of relatively flat but increasingly narrow, winding, and muddy trail lay in store before the climbing began. Then for 3.8 miles, the Bondcliff trail lead up from 1200 to 4000 feet. The uphill transitioned from dirt slope to root steps to boulder steps to boulder piles that we clambered up. There were no views yet, but we were feeling good as we ascended past many groups of clockwise hikers who winced as they clunked down the brutal rocks.

With little warning,a solid rock wall stood ahead of us at the level of the final trees. A section of class 2/3 scrambling put us suddenly above treeline and on top of Bondcliff, our first mountain and first views of the trip! Bondcliff is famous for a rocky outcrop you can stand on and have your picture taken with Mt Bond in the background and hundreds of feet of sheer drop below your feet. We traded group pics with the only other counterclockwise hikers we saw, a group of guys from Boston.

Slideshow of our arduous climb up to Bondcliff and Bond. A huge day!

Then it was down into the saddle between Bondcliff and Bond, before a painful climb up to the summit of Mount Bond proper. This was actually worse in my mind as the seemingly endless rock steps through a narrow slit in the pines made us feel the heat of the day. We were keeping ahead of the Boston boyz (TM) and I wanted to keep it that way because Guyot Campsite, our endpoint, is made up of a series of wooden tent platforms built onto the sloping side of the mountain and I was worried about not getting a space. I had read a lot of online trip reports talking about crowding issues here, and no available natural sites nearby. It was the 4th of July weekend after all! We pushed ourselves to reach camp quickly, which meant bypassing the spur trail that would give a 1 mile round trip to summit West Bond. We decided to just hit that after setting up camp.

Finally we reached the sign for camp, when the most unpleasant surprise of the day was revealed - Guyot camp lay 300 feet downhill, another torturous set of rock steps for our tired legs. When we finally made it down, there turned out to be plenty of platform space but we decided no way did we want to go up/down that again so we would just do West Bond in the morning. We set up our tent next to a lovely French couple who Kate chatted up as I got our dinner cooking. They gave some great tips on moving to France... anyways, a short time later we were tucked into our tent for bed. A solid 12 mile day behind us and many more miles to come!

Day 2: Rocky Spurs

Stats: 14.7 mi, +4404/-4735 elevation, 12 hours
Peaks: West Bond, South Guyot, Mt. Guyot, Zealand, South Twin, North Twin, Galehead, Garfield Ridge East and West

Morning light woke us up and we broke down camp and shuffled down to the dining area to make breakfast and fill up water for the day - 3L each for lots of peakbagging. A bit of chatting with the french and the michiganders and then we were hiking back up the rocky steps to the main trail. There we dropped our packs and quickly backtracked the quarter mile to the spur for West Bond that we should've done the prior evening. While the spur was easy at 1 mile round trip, I didn't carry water and the early morning humidity was brutal. We were both very warm by the time we topped West Bond's small exposed summit (4,540') with views of Bond and Bondcliff. One down, lots to go! We didn't dally getting back to our packs and water.

Another mile and we went over the summit of South Guyot, which is actually NOT one of the official 4000ers as it doesn't have the separation in prominence from Bond. The views were great though! The trail then merges with the Appalachian trail as it continues toward South Twin Mountain, but we needed to hit a few more peaks first. We dropped packs again after just a mile, and took the side spur for the true summit of Mt Guyot (4,560'), which did not have any views to speak of, before continuing 1.3 miles of up-down to get to Zealand. Most people do not do Zealand on their Pemi, but the mile/summit ratio of just doing it while you're there is unmatched if you have the time. We made great time and were up on Zealand in about 40 minutes. This was the most disappointing summit (4,265') of the entire trip, with literally zero views - but at least there was a sign! We ate our snacks and raced back down and up to Guyot, where storm clouds appeared to be massing off in the distance.

Turning onto the Appalachian trail, we were now following the famous white blazes. A gentle descent off the slopes of Guyot led us to the first really brutal climb of the day - 500 feet up endless boulder piles and over fallen trees to gain the summit of South Twin (4,902'). The summit was made up of huge granite blocks, and should've provided a nice relief from the humid heat of the woods, but the wind was intermittent and when it didn't blow, hordes of gnats mobbed us as we tried to eat lunch. 

We debated with the weather looking a bit grim, but decided not to back out of our plan to do all the spur summits we could. Dropping packs again (and covering them for rain) we took off down the other side of South Twin on the 1.3 mile trail that leads to North Twin. This trail was overgrown, very muddy, and claustrophobic at points, so I can't imagine it gets a lot of use. With time pressure and no weight on our backs we were standing on top of North Twin (4,760') in half an hour! The views were great, looking back on the huge descent we had coming off of South Twin with a small white speck at the base- Galehead hut, where I hoped to get a break and a snack.

 Hightailing it back up South Twin, we stole our packs back from the gnats and excitedly descended towards the Galehead Hut. Our excitement didn't last long when the trail devolved from anything resembling a trail into an avalanche slide of fridge-sized boulders. And for over 1500 feet it just kept going, and going, and going. The map says this is 0.7 miles, and it probably is, but it was the longest 0.7 miles of our lives at nearly an hour of bone crushing descent. For most of it we were using our poles like our lives depended on it, and often had to drop them to use hands and sketchy feet to get down onto the next wet slanted boulder.

Finally we reached the hut, just as it started to sprinkle. We went inside as the sprinkle became a downpour and fortunately hid out the rain while having some lemonade and coffee cake. A few people were relaxing in the hut, and they turned out to be AT thru-hikers and Kate struck up conversation with them while I mapped our remaining miles and elevations to get to camp. As the rain stopped, we jogged out of the hut to tag Galehead. A 1-mile roundtrip through the uncomfortably warm and wet woods had us on top of the wooded and viewless summit (4,024') in short order before returning to the hut.

Moving out from Galehead hut, we embarked on the next longest 2.5 miles of our lives. First the slick, boulder-laden descent picked right back up where we'd left off, leading to a bottom out next to Garfield Pond. We had considered camping here, but it would make our next day so much worse, and the pond looked bug-infested and hard to reach for water, so we just kept pushing. During this time, golden hour streamed light rays through the slim trunks of the forest, lighting up moss and ferns and painting trees and rocks with patches of golden-red light. It was truly magical.

Then the magic ended and the pain began anew. We had a thousand feet to climb (more or less) to Garfield, with camp just shy of the summit. The Garfield ridge was an exercise in pointless up-downs (PUDs) as we crested over three separate subpeaks. Then the hut-dwellers' promise came true as we found ourselves on the steepest part of the ascent, climbing class-3 terrain (using hands and tenuous footholds to climb up on boulders) up a small but active waterfall! Twilight moved in quickly but luckily we reached the sign for camp just in time... only to find out camp was another uphill from the water source! 

At camp we quickly set up on a platform of our own, then set about cooking dinner and hanging our wet clothes to dry. Darkness overtook us while eating, and we found out Kate's headlamp was dying and my headlamp was nowhere to be found. We chatted with some amazing people in the cooking area, including a woman hiking the Appalachian trail who had her son with her for the New Hampshire portion, and her 80 year old father as a support team for the hike! Then it was a rush to pack up food into the bear box and get into our sleeping bags as fast as possible, because we were dog tired. I was tremendously proud of the effort today though- doing all those spurs was a hit or miss proposition, and stretched our day into nearly 15 miles and 4500 feet of gain.

Day 3: Franconia Ridge

Stats: 15.0 mi, +3590/-6350 elevation, 12 hours
Peaks: Mt. Garfield, North Lafayette, Mt. Lafayette, Mt. Truman, Mt. Lincoln, Little Haystack, Mt. Liberty, Mt. Flume

We fully intended to get up at 5am, but somehow neither of us slept a wink all night and when sunrise came around, I was desperate for just a few minutes of real rest. This led to us not getting camp broken down until 6:30am, and then cooking up our full breakfast and filtering water took until 8:30 for us to be really moving on the trail. As we were leaving camp, the AMC camp steward warned us about the severe thunderstorm forecast for that afternoon, especially if we were trying to do the exposed Franconia Ridge. He just said any time after 12pm was a danger, which put some real fear into Kate and I, having not seen an updated forecast in 3 days. With weather danger in the forefront of our minds, we set out at a painful pace to resume our slog up the boulders to Mt. Garfield's summit.

In half an hour we reached the summit (4,501'), marked by a platform from an old firewatch. The views were great, but we were now too stressed about outrunning thunderstorms to linger. Franconia ridge with the rocky summits of Lafayette and Lincoln looked very, very far away and above us all at once. 

The descent off Garfield was almost as unpleasant as the descent off South Twin, dropping us 800 feet down huge, slick blocks of granite in an avalanche chute. It was slow going as we had to alternate grabbing trees, downclimbing with hands, sitting and sliding, and vaulting down with our trekking poles to get to the bottom out. And then immediately it was right back up again with our longest climb since Bond - 1600 vertical feet. The alpine zone came up quick and we were above the trees much sooner relative to the summit than for any other mountain so far - Lafayette is that much taller. The heat in the exposed sun was even more brutal here, and we had to take frequent water breaks, wearing down our 6L supply quicker than expected.

For a bit, trail finding got harder as we navigated vast slabs of rock and clambered into notches between boulders. It felt pretty wild, made moreso by not seeing any other people the whole time. Finally at ~11am we came up to what we thought was the summit, but was a subpeak (North Lafayette, 5040'). Normally a false summit discourages me, but seeing the incredible views from North peak made the climb's pain vanish for me. Even more important, I had a panoramic view to see that no threatening clouds were massing, so we definitely had time before any possible storms. 

As we pushed for the true summit, a group of trail runners came blazing by us, leaping down the rocks like a herd of mountain goats and making us laugh at how slow we were going. It made the climb suddenly seem quicker, and we were on top of the high point of the Pemi before I knew it - Mt. Lafayette at 5,249'. We hid in the shade of a boulder and ate lunch to restore some strength.

For the next mile, we were blessed to hike the Franconia ridgeline in perfect weather - sun, fluffy clouds, and a light breeze to keep temps tolerable. We rode the ridgeline like a roller coaster, the narrow trail winding up and down through alpine grass meadows between the summits of Lafayette, Mt. Truman (5000'), Mt. Lincoln (5089'), and Little Haystack (4760'). The trail here was so much easier than what we had endured to get there that we could really soak in the views as we walked.

After Little Haystack we had another gruesome descent to go back below treeline, and a shockingly long 1.8 miles to Liberty Springs campsite - the only guaranteed water source between Garfield Ridge and the rivers just a few miles from the end of the loop. We were running hot at this point and low on water - about 1.5L of our original 6 left. However, the water source/camp was 0.3 miles and several hundred feet downhill, sure to be an hour detour in our tired state. We decided to mix up some electrolytes and then ration the remaining 1L until we could get river water in hopefully just a few more miles. The electrolytes brought strength back and carried us up the half mile to the summit of Mt. Liberty (4459') in no time.

Liberty's cliff views afforded another look at the Franconia ridgeline behind us, as well as another assurance that weather was going to hold. We could see the end in sight now, and pushed on.

Another down-and-up (500 feet down, 400 feet up) brought us to the summit of Mt. Flume (4328') at 5pm, the last summit of our loop! It was bittersweet knowing it was all downhill from here, but SO rewarding to look around and take in the expanse of the loop around us. We could see clear across the basin to Bond/Bondcliff where we had begun, and follow the undulating ridgeline as it went over every summit in this massive circle that we had taken on with our own two feet. Garfield looked incredibly far away, and we had started there this morning!

I was more than a little dreading the long downhill to go from 4300 to 1200 feet, but somehow we were blessed with the only (mostly) boulder-free descent of the entire trip! Most of the trail was spongey ground with a nice bed of pine needles softening it further, and when it got steep, wooden "ladders" that were really steep staircases were placed. These were so easy to go down compared to a wet pile of chaotic boulders, and we thanked our lucky stars we were going CCW the whole time.

Water did run perilously low, finishing off our last few sips where the map showed we should have converged with a stream, but the stream was simply not accessible and forced us to go 2 more miles than expected without water. Though it continued to get flatter and flatter, our knees were getting sorer and sorer. Fortunately, the stream finally met the trail right as Kate's knee and blister pain peaked, giving us a break while I filtered water. We drank down nearly 2L of water and electrolytes, took a short rest, and felt good enough to continue. Moments later, we were back on the road-like expanse of the rail trail, and the 1.8 miles to the car flew by as we chatted with other hikes coming down from a bushwhack of Owl's Head. 

A change of clothes later, we were on our way for pizza and wings to celebrate. 41 miles, 12,000' of gain and loss, and 3 long hot days later, we had ticked 12 mountains off Kate's NH48 list and 19 summits total. We certainly pushed it a little (safely!) but I am proud of the effort and reward we'd reaped. Very few people do spurs on the Pemi, and we had done all of the spurs! 

Though this was supposed to be my last trip up here for Kate's current contract, I knew immediately (when my feet were a little less sore) that I was going to end up back in the White Mountains again to tackle the Presidential Traverse before she left. So farewell for now, New Hampshire, but not goodbye just yet.