Young and Unshod: Hiking Mount Washington Barefoot (And Why the Kids Won)
A family ascent of New England's highest peak via Lion's Head and Boott Spur — featuring three barefoot children, two adults who should have known better, and a mountain with a reputation for killing people's dignity
The mountain ahead. The shoes, dangling from backpacks. The adults, quietly questioning their parenting decisions.
Let me establish something important before we begin: I am not a reckless parent. I am a creative parent, which is an entirely different thing, and I'd thank you to remember that distinction when I tell you that my three sons climbed Mount Washington — the highest peak in the northeastern United States and self-declared home of the world's worst weather — in bare feet.
To say the boys love their "bare footing" is to understate the matter considerably. Our youngest, Zev, treats the suggestion that he wear shoes the way most seven-year-olds treat vegetables: with a suspicion bordering on moral outrage. Kai, fourteen, and Cove, eleven, are not far behind. These are children who have spent years treating the ground as a direct conversation partner. So when we hatched a plan with PopPop (their grandfather) and Great Uncle Dave to climb Mount Washington, the response was immediate, unanimous, and entirely predictable.
"Yes. Let's go barefoot."
There was a beat of silence from the adult contingent. Then a brief conference. Then the negotiated settlement that characterizes all successful family diplomacy: "Fine — but the shoes go on the pack where everyone can see them, so people know we own shoes."
This was less about safety than about optics. We are, it turns out, vain enough to care what strangers on a mountain think of our parenting.
A Brief and Alarming Introduction to Mount Washington
The White Mountains of New Hampshire doing their best impression of a place that does not care about you.
Before we go further, a word about the mountain itself — because Mount Washington is not merely a large hill with an access road and a gift shop at the top (though it does have both of those things, which somehow makes it more unsettling).
The mountain sits at the confluence of three major North American storm tracks, all of which, through some meteorological spite, converge directly over its summit. The Presidential Range funnels wind from west to east. The peak intercepts this moving air and, through what is known as the Venturi effect — imagine putting your thumb over a garden hose — accelerates it dramatically as it passes over the cone. The result is a summit that experiences hurricane-force winds more than a hundred days a year and has recorded the most extreme wind chill in United States history: minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit.
The treeline on Mount Washington is the lowest for its latitude in the world. This is not a boast. This is a warning from the trees themselves — they have assessed conditions above 4,000 feet and voted, collectively, to stay lower.
We were bringing children in bare feet.
The Route: Lion's Head Up, Boott Spur Down, Sanity Optional
Above treeline. The granite stretches on. Somewhere ahead, the summit. Somewhere behind, our comfort zones.
We chose to ascend via the Lion's Head Trail and descend via the Boott Spur Trail, creating a loop of just shy of 10 miles with approximately 4,790 feet of elevation gain. This is the kind of sentence that looks perfectly reasonable in a trip report and feels, approximately halfway up, like a confession of poor judgment.
The Lion's Head Trail departs from the Pinkham Notch AMC Visitor Center and climbs through northern hardwood forest before the trees begin their aforementioned retreat. It is steeper and more rugged than the better-known Tuckerman Ravine Trail — more of a scramble, with rock faces that require three points of contact — which means it sees fewer crowds but more commitment. It rewards this commitment with superior views down into Tuckerman Ravine from above. It also rewards it with the opportunity to haul yourself over a boulder field in the final approach to the summit, which the trail's description charitably calls "demanding."
🗺️ The Route: Lion's Head Up, Boott Spur Down
- Start/End: Pinkham Notch AMC Visitor Center, off NH Route 16 in Gorham, NH. Parking is pay-and-display — bring cash or a card.
- Distance: ~9.6 miles loop
- Elevation gain: ~4,790 feet
- Typical time: 8–9 hours. Start early — afternoon weather on the summit is notoriously unpredictable.
- Lion's Head Trail: Steeper and less crowded than Tuckerman Ravine. Multiple rock scrambles requiring hands. Excellent views into the ravine from above.
- Boott Spur Trail: Longer and more gradual descent, with extended above-treeline views. Harder on the knees going down than it looks on paper. It always looks easier on paper.
- Summit facilities: The Sherman Adams Summit Building has food, water, restrooms, and a visitor center — open mid-May through mid-October. The Mount Washington Observatory is staffed year-round by people of exceptional fortitude.
- The Cog Railway: Yes, there is a train to the summit, running since 1869 — the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway. You will pass hikers who took it down. You will have complicated feelings about them.
On the Matter of Bare Feet and the Science That Vindicates Our Children
This is what three children with properly hardened feet look like on a granite mountain. We have no explanation.
At this point, I should address the eyebrows. Not the boys' eyebrows — those were untroubled — but those of every other hiker we passed on the trail, which ranged from mildly raised to fully vertical.
"Are they…barefoot?"
Yes. Intentionally. Shoes on the pack, as per the agreement.
The thing is, and I say this as someone who was wearing excellent hiking boots and still developed problems we don't need to discuss in detail: the boys were right. Not just aesthetically right, in the way that confident wrongness sometimes wins social situations. Actually, scientifically right.
Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman — who is the chair of Human Evolutionary Biology and therefore more qualified than any of us to have an opinion on this — published research in the journal Nature in 2019 demonstrating that callused feet, developed through regular barefoot walking, provide protection from impact without any reduction in sensitivity. The callus transmits mechanical information from the ground directly to the nerves in the deeper skin layers with exactly the same fidelity as uncallused skin. Meanwhile, cushioned shoes — which seem like they should be helping — actually increase the force transferred to joints higher up the leg, like the knees and hips.
Your feet, the research suggests, contain more than 200,000 nerve endings. They are extraordinarily sophisticated sensory instruments. Shoes, in this framing, are well-intentioned noise-canceling headphones that you've put on your feet. The boys, having spent years without them, had essentially built natural mountain boots from their own skin.
We passed other hikers. We received looks. One man stopped, assessed Zev's seven-year-old feet on the granite, shook his head slowly, and continued upward without comment. This felt correct. Some things are beyond comment.
The Climb Itself, Including the Part Where We All Suffered Differently
The first two miles run through beautiful northern forest — birch and fir and the particular September light that makes New England feel like a painting that's trying too hard. The trail climbs steadily, and early on this is satisfying in the way that difficult things are satisfying when they haven't yet become genuinely painful.
Treeline on Mount Washington arrives at around 4,000 feet, which is unusually low for the latitude — lower than anywhere else in the world at this distance from the poles, in fact, because the summit weather is so severe that trees have simply declined to participate above that elevation. This is where the character of the hike changes completely. The sheltering forest falls away. The wind appears. The granite stretches ahead, marked by painted blazes and cairns, and the summit appears to be right there, close, almost reachable — an impression that is completely false and will remain false for the next two hours.
Above treeline, the boys became something extraordinary to watch. Where the rest of us were picking careful lines, testing footholds, wincing at sharp edges, they moved like mountain goats who had been told there was no hurry. Their feet, pressed flat against the granite, read the rock in a way that boots cannot. They didn't slip. Not once. The proprioceptive feedback loop — foot to nerve to brain, thousands of adjustments per second — was operating at full resolution. They were, in some irritating and biological sense, better at this than we were.
The Summit: Where Hikers Meet People Who Took the Train
The summit of Mount Washington is a peculiar place. It is the highest point in the northeastern United States — by a significant margin — and it feels like it. The views on a clear day are staggering: Vermont, Maine, Quebec, and the Atlantic Ocean visible simultaneously in a single slow rotation. The Sherman Adams Summit Building contains a visitor center, a cafeteria, restrooms, and a gift shop selling t-shirts that say "This Car Climbed Mt. Washington," which is a reference to the 7.6-mile auto road that allows people to drive to the top, which has been there since 1861.
The auto road means that the summit is shared, on good weather days, by people who have spent eight hours ascending on foot and people who drove up in forty-five minutes. These two groups regard each other with a complex mixture of emotions that I will leave to the philosophers. Also present are passengers from the Cog Railway — the world's first mountain-climbing cog railway, operating since 1869, which carries visitors to the summit in about an hour at a grade that averages 25% and peaks at 37%. The railway was inspired by its inventor, Sylvester Marsh, who nearly died in a summit storm in 1858 and decided the appropriate response was to build a train to the top. He applied to the New Hampshire Legislature, who reportedly added an amendment to his charter granting permission to extend the railway to the moon. This was a joke, but only barely.
We ate summit food that tasted magnificent in the way all summit food tastes magnificent — not because it's good, but because you earned it with your legs. The boys ate rapidly and with the unsentimental efficiency of people whose feet felt fine. The adults ate more slowly, with greater appreciation, having experienced the hike differently.
The Descent: Boott Spur and the Slow Reckoning
We descended via the Boott Spur Trail, which is longer and more gradual than the Lion's Head ascent and rewards that extra distance with extended time above treeline and a ridge walk with excellent views of Tuckerman Ravine from the south. It is, the guidebooks suggest, slightly easier on the body than descending Lion's Head. This is technically accurate and practically irrelevant, because descending 4,790 feet is going to conduct a thorough inventory of your knees regardless of which trail you choose.
The boys descended at a pace that I can only describe as cheerful. Zev was narrating his footstep choices aloud, which suggested he was still finding the whole thing interesting. This is the kind of thing that would be annoying if it weren't so impressive.
PopPop descended with the dignity of a man who has hiked many mountains and knows that dignity is something you recover at the bottom. Great Uncle Dave descended with stoicism. Heidi descended with competence. I descended while composing mental notes about what I would do differently, which was: exactly this, because it was extraordinary, but perhaps with slightly more ibuprofen in the pack.
The Final Tally (Or: When Were the Boys Right)
We covered just shy of 10 miles over some seriously rugged terrain — 4,790 feet up, 4,790 feet back down, granite boulder fields, above-treeline exposure, wind. When it was over, the damage assessment was as follows:
The barefoot boys: no blisters. No detached toenails. No cuts. No scrapes. No complaint of any kind from their feet, which had been in direct sensory conversation with every rock, root, and cold granite slab on the mountain. They were, by all objective measures, fine.
The adults with shoes: I would prefer not to go into specifics. Suffice to say that the word "bloody" appeared in my mental description of at least one person's situation, and that it was not a person under the age of fifteen.
"Those barefoot and injury-free boys. I do wish I could say the same for the rest of our bloody members."
This is one of those parenting moments that arrives without warning and reconfigures your assumptions. You begin with shoes because shoes are responsible. The children arrive at the summit, having navigated the same mountain in bare feet, looking like they could go again. The shoes dangle from the backpacks, functionally decorative. The mountain, which has recorded 231 mph winds and wind chills of minus 108 degrees, says nothing. It doesn't need to.
Planning Your Mount Washington Hike: What You Need to Know
🥾 Essential Planning Info for Mount Washington
- When to go: June through September for the most stable conditions. August and September are ideal — lower chance of lingering snow on the trails, spectacular fall foliage in September.
- Start early: Be at the trailhead by 6–7 AM. Afternoon thunderstorms are common and dangerous above treeline. The summit collects weather fast.
- Pinkham Notch AMC Visitor Center: The main eastern trailhead. Has parking, restrooms, trail information, and staff who will assess whether your plan is sensible (take this seriously — they are correct more often than you are).
- Weather: Check the Mount Washington Observatory forecast specifically — not just local weather. The summit can be 30–40 degrees colder and 50+ mph windier than the valley. This is not an exaggeration.
- What to bring: Rain gear, warm layers, at least 2–3 liters of water, high-calorie food, a map (cell service is unreliable above treeline), and a headlamp.
- Summit facilities: The Sherman Adams Building has food, water, restrooms, and shelter — open mid-May through mid-October. Outside this window, assume nothing is available at the top.
- Parking: $5 fee at Pinkham Notch. Pay-and-display. Fills on summer weekends — arrive early or midweek.
- Dogs: Allowed on trails (unlike Baxter State Park — Washington is comparatively permissive on this front). Keep them leashed and ensure they can handle the technical terrain.
The Mountain Doesn't Care About Your Footwear
Mount Washington has been humbling visitors since long before it was fashionable to be humbled by mountains. The Penobscot and Abenaki people knew it as a place of powerful and unpredictable forces. Nineteenth-century tourists came by carriage and left, frequently, having been reminded that nature does not organize itself around human comfort. The summit observatory staff live up there through January and February, measuring the wind with heated anemometers and writing it down in logbooks with the calm professionalism of people who have made peace with something most of us will never quite accept.
We were there for a day. We were a family of five adults and three children, in mixed footwear states, on a mountain that has seen much stranger things. We made it up and back in good time, in good weather, with all members of the party intact — some more comfortably than others.
The boys came off the mountain exactly as they went on: bare feet, shoes on packs, entirely unbothered. The rest of us came off the mountain changed in the specific way that mountains change people — tired, grateful, and quietly aware that we had underestimated something.
Not the mountain. The feet.
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