gwax's rumblings

if you recall the last time that I tried to climb Moosilauke, you’ll note that I failed. Yesterday, how­ever, I set out for attempt two and succeeded.

I drove up to Concord on Saturday and then, bright and 6:30am early Sunday, I drove to Cambridge, grabbed Max and drove up to Lincoln, NH. In Lincoln, we grabbed break­fast and some snacks before dri­ving out the the trail­head. Our hike finally set off at 11am.

Moosilauke starts our rea­son­ably flat, with a slight rise over easy ground for a small frac­tion of a mile. After the very brief illu­sion of ease, comes the Hell that is going up approx­i­mately 2000 feet in about a mile, which for the math­e­mat­i­cally inclined is about 22° aver­age incli­na­tion. This rise is flanked, most of the way, by a series of very beau­ti­ful water­falls and con­sists pri­mar­ily of rocks. It should be noted that the steep part of the path begins and ends with signs warn­ing that it is very treach­er­ous and should be avoided when wet or icy. After using most of our ini­tial energy on the steep por­tion, we were happy to find that it became grad­ual and had a bit of soft dirt for a while, pro­vid­ing a very wel­come respite. After the grad­ual por­tion, we hit a num­ber of up and down por­tions, nowhere near as severe as the ini­tial por­tion of the trail, before begin­ning the final ascent to the sum­mit. We reached the sum­mit at about 2pm.

The sum­mit of Moosilauke is essen­tially a very large grass hill, with a great many blue­berry bushes and some rock shel­ters, reach­ing a max­i­mum ele­va­tion of 4802 feet (trail­head is at 1800 feet). The sum­mit pro­vides fan­tas­tic views in all direc­tions, unob­scured by trees or any of the smaller sur­round­ing moun­tains. The sum­mit pro­vided a nice cool­ing breeze, a good place to have lunch and a whole bunch of gnats. So far as I can tell, I prob­a­bly ate about a dozen of those gnats as they landed on my fin­gers and food. All in all, Moosilauke has a beau­ti­ful sum­mit that is rather pleas­ant to hang out on. We left the sum­mit at about 2:30p for home.

The upper por­tions of the trail were just about as easy to go down as they were to come up. The steep por­tion, how­ever, was not so pleas­ant or easy. Initially, the only prob­lem get­ting down the steep por­tion was that we were quite exhausted by that point and steep rocks are not easy to descend. Shortly after the steep por­tion began, our real trou­bles began, rain. At first it rained lightly, just enough to make all the rocks slip­pery and treach­er­ous, which makes for a won­der­ful addi­tion to a trail listed as to be avoided when wet or icy. The light rain was rather annoy­ing but then when it was fol­lowed by a rain heavy enough to drench us to the bone, it felt as though the moun­tain were spit­ing us and try­ing to make me fail once more. Eventually, we made it through all the slip­pery rocks and mud to the bot­tom, reach­ing trail­head at 5:30pm. From the bot­tom, we drove to the Ashland Burger King, The Burger King of New Hampshire moun­tain climb­ing, had some din­ner and pro­ceeded home. By the time I arrived back in Woods Hole, at 10pm, I felt as though I was going to col­lapse. Shortly there­after, I did col­lapse, thank­fully in my bed. Today, I still feel as though I am going to col­lapse, but I can prob­a­bly hold myself together until the afternoon.