Mount Washington II

We got to the top of the ravine around four hours after setting out. We figured, the end must be near! Alas, it was a mirage. After the lovely but steep and tiring ravine was another forty-five minutes up a hill of semi-loose rock with little vegetation and no real trail. It was just, go up until you can't go up any more, and don't fall off the mountain. This is Peter's picture of that section:
I'd held up remarkably well until about twenty minutes from the end, when I started sagging a little. Jay caught a second wind and breezed up the last hill. Peter and Candice may have contemplated throwing us off the mountain for ever having thought up the whole hiking scheme. Finally, Jay turned around and said, "I see a car!" I thought he was kidding until someone hiking down informed me that he wasn't just joshing, the top was up ahead.

Topping out to a parking lot was a little weird, but no one really cared at that point. The actual summit was up a staircase, and we had to wait in line to stand on it. A nice lady took this picture of us.
We found Matt at the top. Since his feet are size 15, he couldn't find hiking boots to fit. He ended up with a pair of super sexy imitation Crocs (later, he noted that the Crocs "really are pretty comfy!" So cliche, Matt!). He wasn't quite gutsy enough to wear his new shoes around all the hard-core hikers though, and saved them for the privacy of our campsite.
Because of the Crocs, he wasn't able to hike down. Peter and Candice weren't up for it, Jay's knee was bothering him, and I didn't want to hike alone, so I couldn't hike down either. I would have liked to, but it was okay--we did the hard part, anyway. We ate a slice of pizza each--it tasted much better than it should have, by the looks of it--and hung out on the observation deck for a while.
I wasn't sure about my poor little car making it down the mountain holding all of us without spontaneously combusting, so Peter and Candice kindly took a hiker's shuttle back to the bottom. My car's brakes thank them. Matt, Jay and I got into the car for the trip down, which was much more harrowing than the hike up. The road was narrow and the drop-offs were steep. We had to pull over a couple of times when the brakes started to smell like burning. But we made it down okay.

Now we can say, we did it! We climbed the highest mountain in the northeast. Where to next? Rainier? Denali? Get your crampons ready!