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Posts Tagged: Hiking

Second April Camping Trip

On my way up North on Saturday, I stopped at an Army Surplus store in Milford, NH to see if I could find a decent survival knife. My old knife had a cheap stainless steel blade that broke apart last weekend while I was using it to start a fire with the magnesium fire starter. I found a nice fixed-blade Air Force survival knife with a heavy base that doubles as a hammer. It came with a sheath and a sharpening stone.

The weather was much colder than it was when I went camping last week, although a lot of the ice along the river had melted (compare the pictures of the ice from last week, to the pictures from this week). It was also a lot more windy, with frequent gusts of 25-30mph.

On Sunday morning, while it was still partially sunny and the wind was blowing, it started snowing heavily. It was very surreal (and very cold). Overall a great trip and a great way to spend my 27th birthday. Thank you to all who wished me a happy birthday. To everyone I’d like to say: Happy Everyday!

April Camping Trip

On Saturday I decided at the last minute to go camping in the White Mountains. I arrived at the entrance to the trail around 5:30pm. On my hike in, there were patches of half melted snow all around with moose and deer footprints everywhere.

That’s when I heard a stick crack and looked to my left. Standing not more than 20 feet off the trail and totally oblivious to my presence was a huge 8′ tall female moose. As I stood there admiring the huge creature, a sense of fear quickly settled in when I realized how screwed I was if she decided to charge at me. This was a seriously big animal. She noticed me standing there after about two minutes and after that she didn’t take her eyes off me. When she made a grunting sound, I knew she was nervous and uncomfortable, so I slowly started walking away. Much to my relief, she too turned around and walked in the opposite direction. From that point on, I made noise (made up songs and talked to myself) to help prevent any further accidental run ins with big game wildlife.

The rest of the evening was quite uneventful. The place I camped was next to a river where huge ice shelves had formed. Without much daylight left, I quickly started gathering wood and material for a fire. Using a magnesium fire starter, my knife, and a small piece of birch bark, I had a fire going within thirty seconds. The fire didn’t last long after I stopped feeding it and laid down to sleep.

The night was cold (<30 degrees) and constant gusts of wind made it worse. I woke up several times during the night from the cold, but managed to get about 5 hours of sleep. I awoke at 6:30am, shivering and freezing. It started to snow. I did some jumping jacks to warm myself up and then collected wood to get a fire going. Once again, the magnesium fire starter with some birch bark did the trick. I spent the next few hours feeding the fire and keeping warm before finally making the short one-mile trek back to my truck.

I didn't bring a camera, but I took a couple of pictures with my iPhone. (This is the picture of the moose, but she’s extremely well camouflaged. She’s standing behind the clump of trees in the long patch of white snow.)

Hiking Loverens Mill Cedar Swamp

On Saturday, I visited my friend Adam in NH and we spent five hours hiking in the Loverens Mill Cedar Swamp. The area was purchased by The Nature Conservancy in 1998 and the conservation was expanded in 2006.

There was a good amount of snow still on the ground and several days of mixed warm and cold weather left the snow with a firm crust but a soft core. We found ourselves randomly falling knee-deep into the snow where the crust was too weak to hold our weight, sometimes falling into hidden pools of water. (Note to self: Wear waterproof boots, not breathable boots, when hiking in the snow.)

We ventured far off the trail and found dozens of untouched boulders and amazing rock formations. These formations are commonly called glacial erratics, although there seemed to be a very strange consistency to them. Evidence of repeated camp fires scarring the rock hinted towards heavy use of the area by Native Americans hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. We even found stone arrow heads scattered around the many small caves that were created by these huge formations.

Both of us forgot to bring a camera, but I managed to take a few photos with my iPhone. We found a huge tree that had been split in half from the ice storm a few months ago and you can’t really tell from the pictures, but it was so big that both of my arms only wrapped half way around! I found an interesting fact about the area: Pollen studies have shown that the Atlantic White Cedar (which is actually a cypress, not a cedar) has existed in the area for more than 4,000 years, and its presence is rare because the species is usually found in much lower altitudes.

Mount Osceola

Mount Osceola (4,340′), named after an Indian war chief of the Seminole Indians in Florida (misappropriation of Native American names was not unusual in the 19th Century), was an excellent half-day hike. The Mount Osceola Trail branches off the Greely Ponds Trail and is accessible from the Greely Ponds trailhead.

The trail quickly started its ascent, becoming quite steep at times, with the East peak looming overhead. When I did finally reach the East peak at 4,156′, the in-your-face panoramic view was both incredible and dizzying. The East peak view point is extremely steep; a huge jagged clump of rocks angled in such a way they seemed to shout “don’t trip here, or it will be a painful slide down!”. Upper Greely pond is also visible from here and having visited it only an hour earlier made me appreciate the distance that much more.

After another short burst of unforgiving, steep trail, I reached the summit-with-views. I call it that because the true summit, which can be seen from here and is a relatively short and easy hike, has very limited panoramic views.

I didn’t stay at the summit long and decided to take a break at the summit-with-views instead. Amazingly, the Northwest side of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the American Northeast, can just barely be seen from here (center of picture, behind the foreground peak, just barely visible).

Also visible from here, and probably more incredible for me, is Mount Hancock, which I climbed the previous day. It has a distinguishable “V” rock slide, which can be seen in several of the pictures I took from Mount Osceola. The V can be seen in the center of this picture and here is a closeup of the rock slide I took the previous day.

Date of Hike
2007/09/03

Hiking Time
Parking Lot to East peak: 50 minutes
East peak to Summit: 30 minutes
Total Time: 2 hours 40 minutes
Book Time: 4 hours

Hiking Distance
Round Trip: 5.6 miles

Total Climb
2,250′

Upper Greely Pond

This hike was part of the three days of hiking I completed this past Labor Day weekend. I wasn’t actually planning to visit Greely Pond. In fact, I was on the trail to hike Mount Osceola (I’ll post that next). However it was only a short, 0.3 mile detour to Upper Greely Pond, so I decided to go for it.

The trail leading to Upper Greely Pond was simple enough, though it did require walking over log bridges and crossing streams along the way. Mount Osceola’s East peak soars above the pond and is where I was headed next.

The two ponds, Upper and Lower Greely Pond (I only visited the Upper pond) are nestled inside Mad River Notch. The Greely Pond Trail actually leads all the way across to Waterville Valley, about 3 miles away.

Posts Tagged: Hiking

Second April Camping Trip

April Camping Trip

Hiking Loverens Mill Cedar Swamp

Mount Osceola

Upper Greely Pond

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