“This is why we do this,” David Baum said as he and the small group of hikers paused at a vista, the first colors of dawn lighting the forested landscape below. Less than an hour before, in the dark, the aptly-nicknamed 6:30 a.m. crew had begun their daily trek up the access road of Pack Monadnock.
“I’ve been up here 2,000 times at least, and it’s always fresh,” Baum said. “Something about the conversation, the oxygen, being in nature. It just isn’t just about cardio. It’s about mental wellbeing.”
Every day Baum walks the road, he sees something different that delights him.
“It’s either this or go to a gym and look at a wall or a TV,” he said.
Baum was inspired to hike Pack Monadnock daily during the year that a friend, Mike Gordon, started it up. We passed Gordon, already on his way down as we were headed up.
Gordon started hiking Pack Monadnock daily more than 20 years ago, when he was 40.
“I was really interested in doing longer hikes in the White Mountains,” Gordon said, and was looking for ways to train locally. He describes the hike as an “outdoor Stairmaster.”
He remembers the first time Baum asked to join him. Baum was 42 at the time and had recently undergone open-heart surgery and was looking for an exercise routine for recovery. Gordon said that even though they were keeping the pace Gordon had developed over months of climbing the route regularly, “he wouldn’t say he wanted to stop or slow down.”
Baum said that hiking the road is his primary exercise source, and agrees that it’s worked out well for him, despite traveling a lot for work. He said he can see the mountain from his house on Cunningham Pond Road, “so every morning I look out my window and watch the sunrise over this mountain, and it reminds me to get up out of bed and get going.”
Baum and Gordon said they will alternate with longer hikes in other places, but the group finds the road an especially conducive route for daily walks.
“When you’re on the trail, you’re single file and looking at someone’s butt,” one walker said, a situation that wasn’t very conducive to conversation. On the road, walkers can be side by side, and the easy footing requires little attention and makes it safer in the dark.
“Sometimes you can’t see very far at all but it’s always beautiful,” Gordon said, and that the road remains accessible in almost all kinds of weather, “unless the snow’s too deep to get there.”
“Almost everyone in the group, we were friends before and they thought ‘Oh hey, this is a cool thing,” Gordon said.
Many of the regulars are in their sixties now, and many others have been walking on a daily basis for more than a decade or more.
“There’s been a bunch of people that have been in and out of it,” Gordon said, noting that his current work schedule keeps him from joining the group.
When the hikers arrived at the summit, the early morning vista framed a full moon over Mount Monadnock, and the hills were ablaze in fall foliage.
“I don’t love getting up at five of six, I do not love it, but I gotta tell you, when you get up here, you say “OK, I’m glad I did that,” said Jeannie Connolly, who’s walked with the group for 15 years.
She said she walks with the group for the camaraderie. “We solve the problems of the world. We laugh a lot,” she said.
“We say, what happens on the mountain, stays on the mountain” adds Baum.
In their hikes, the 6:30 a.m. crew has seen a snowy owl in the middle of winter, as well as fisher, deer, moose, and once, a bobwhite quail walking up the road after escaping from a hunt.
The walkers said that fewer people walk the road daily in the winter, when pre-dawn starts necessitate headlamps, and ice on the roads sometimes require spikes on boots. A snowcat operated on the road during the winter makes tracks to walk in after snowstorms, members said, and there’s usually enough people hiking the road that there’s a well-beaten path through the snow.
Many mornings after a snowstorm, there will already be footprints on the road by the time they start walking, one member of the group said. Connolly said a group of women start walking at 5:30 a.m., and some swim at a gym after climbing the mountain. Yet another regular walking group is frequently starting up the mountain while they are coming down, Baum said, who estimates about thirty people use the road on a daily basis. Groups will warn one another about icy conditions, wildlife and pass off found items to their owners. Gordon said the road “gives people that don’t think of themselves as outdoorsy types or hikers a very beautiful walk. … It’s so accessible for so many people.”
Baum was a representative of local user interests in a recent revamp of a utility upgrade project for Pack Monadnock and he expressed satisfaction at the cooperation between agencies.
“If any of us had painted ourselves into a corner, and saw the people we were working within a negative way, there would be no progress,” he said. “The paradigm shift was to not see this as a road, but a walkway… potentially the most high traffic one. … That was a real eye-opener for them.”