Motivated by what we considered to be a very smart, if somewhat disheartening, decision, we made very good time back over to our descent line. On the way down to the JBL trail we ran in to a party of four guys who had been trying to bushwhack up to some of the ice flows on Hedgehog, apparently, and had, as they put it, "gotten spanked."

One of them asked us how the skiing was. We just laughed and explained what we'd been through.

"Well, it's good to carry them, right?" the guy joked.

Good one.

By the time we intersected the JBL trail I was ready to be doing anything other than walking. We put the skis on and attached skins for the rolling but mostly easy downhill sections to come. We tree-skied down the narrow trail to The Garden over packed snow to rutted path to sheer ice, with downed lumber all the way. My feet were killing me, and most of my toes are still numb due to nerve damage several days later (I need to look into custom liners). When we reached the creek just before the Garden we noted that almost all of the ski tracks headed down a trail marked simply: "TRAIL." We decided to give it a shot. It wasn't on the map, but we figured just by orientation that it should drop us off a little closer to our truck than just coming out The Garden to Keene.

After a short while the trail opened up into a road, which was in fact a new-ish development off of what was once the Interbrook Trail, and is now the Interbrook Road. We took the skins off and skied the horribly punked out and icy road until there was nothing left to slide on. The bases on my poor little approach skis now look, as James observed, "like topo maps." Just destroyed. James and I walked out the last two miles or so to the truck. We beat nightfall by about five minutes.

When we got to the lot we were glad to see that the rented Blazer was still there. James was so happy that - inexplicably - he fell quite violently and roughly at the speed of light down onto his back onto the iced-over trailhead. It happened so fast that I thought he surely must have hurt himself. I made my way over to him and found him laughing wildly at himself.