North Twin, South Twin, & Galehead

Date: 7/21/2020

North Twin Elevation: 4,760’

South Twin Elevation: 4,902’

Galehead Elevation: 4,024’

Miles: 11.8 miles

Time: 8 hours, 13 minutes

Trails: up North Twin Trail, up Frost Trail to summit of Galehead, Garfield Ridge Trail to connect to Gale River Trail

Calories: 1,879 (my heart rate monitor messed up again…but between the ascent up to North Twin and some descent plus the ascent up Galehead this is what I got)

Average HR: 146 for ascent up North Twin, 127 for the second recording

Peak HR: 186 and 179

I am unfortunately writing this not very soon after this hike, but I’m going to do my best to capture it from my memory. Looking back this hike was amazing for so many reasons…I got to spend it with a friend I haven’t seen in a year, we hit three 4,000 footers, and we got to see some really amazing views. But as I sit here trying to pull everything from memory, I’m also remembering how happy we were to finish and how incredibly sore we were immediately after. But my ability to forget that feeling is why I’m able to keep going back to the mountains I think.

Anyways, on this hike I was blessed with the presence of David Korzeniowski—giving you his full name so you can look him up since he is super talented and is one of the best college broadcasters in the country. So check him out. For those of you who don’t know (which apparently is a lot of you based on the number of people who asked me who he was off my Instagram story), I met David three years ago and I simply cannot believe it’s been that long. We interned together on Cape Cod working for the Falmouth Commodores of the Cape Cod Baseball League and I’m so grateful that our paths crossed. For the sake of not getting away from the actual hike here, I will just say that David is awesome and I’m so glad to have him as a friend.

Okay so the hike. Fresh off a negative COVID test, David drove up from Andover, Massachusetts, and we met at the Gale River trailhead to arrange a carspot situation. We carpooled over to the North Twin trailhead and got going at 9. This trail started out very smooth—super nice walking along a pretty wide river. David actually forgot his keys, but happened to have an extra set in his backpack, so we were good to keep going. So you walk along Little River and you’re supposed to cross it three times, but, being the good hiker-researcher I am, I had read online that the better way to do this is to follow the path that’s been bushwhacked on the side of the river rather than cross it those unnecessary times. So David and I stayed on the left side of the river—occasionally questioning whether we were lost—until we had to cross on the third crossing. There was actually a man fishing there?? Unclear whether there was anything to be caught, but here's a pic David took to give you a sense of the size of Little River and why people avoid crossing it three times. If you’re using this blog to plan your own hikes, I’d avoid this trail if it’s rained a lot recently.

After we crossed Little River, the trail started to get steeper and harder and soon we were DRIPPING. My heart rate monitor says that I was really feeling it during this part, and I definitely was. We took a lot of much-needed breaks and we kept coming around corners thinking it would flatten out only to be horribly disappointed.

*red parts are when your HR is peaking, so you can see how long I was in that zone for

Then, what felt like out of no where, the trail spit us out on a bald-face top with amazing views (just after 11am and 4.1 miles later). We chilled here for a while and talked with a really lovely older couple, who informed us that this wasn’t the actual summit…of course. We continued onto what may have been the summit or maybe not, but .1 miles away off a spur trail we reached another amazing lookout spot.

Next up was South Twin, 1.3 miles away. This had more great views even though it was a bit foggy. Lots of great boulders as lookout points and we met the cutest dog named Pretzel. Like you’re kidding. Pretzel?! That’s too much. We stopped up here on South Twin to eat our lunch and got colder as our sweat dried in the fog. I hadn’t brought a sweatshirt because it was 85 degrees that day, but that was the temperature at the trailhead, not 4,902’ up.

A .8 mile trek down to Galehead Hut came next. This short section of trail was a major reason why we decided to do a carspot and hike in this direction. Fellow hikers in my trusty Facebook group had warned that this is one of the biggest butt-kicking sections in the Whites to ascend. It’s basically an unrelenting staircase that affords literally zero flat places to rest—just a steep incline for .8 miles. Luckily, we were going down it. We were chilling, having a great time and that honestly felt rude to the people we passed on their way up.

Pretty quickly we made it down to Galehead Hut, where we took a bathroom break and filled up on water. The hut keeper there warned us that the views from Galehead were not great, but we were still in a for a big disappointment. Another .5 mile took us up to the summit of Galehead, which was literally a pile of rocks in a forest. This kind of summit makes me wonder why someone ever thought it was necessary to create a trail just for that. I’ll never know. This trail made itself worth it with a small observation point halfway up; it overlooks the entire valley and was absolutely gorgeous.

After another short break at the hut to grab a brownie for the car, we headed out around 2:45pm via the Garfield Ridge Trail, which connects Gale River Trail. By this point I was pretty tired, but we still had 4.6 miles to go…lol. The last 1.5-2 miles were really flat, but they felt like it went on forever. We were definitely in pain, so when we finally spotted the parking lot (5:10pm) we couldn’t be happier. David stretched it out at the car and I just sat down because my feet hurt too much to stand. Ah…the joys of hiking.

Major shoutout to David for coming up for this. I don’t know if I would have seen him this summer if it weren’t for all this hiking I’m doing, so that’s pretty cool to me. We got to spend over eight hours together catching up and enjoying the mountains, and that always makes the sore muscles worth it a million times over.