Posts tagged 'hiking'

• Very Snowy February - February 13, 2017

  After not really doing much of anything all through January and the beginning of February, I was thinking this would end up being like winter 2016. What little snow we got last winter disappeared between warmups and rain. That’s how this winter started, too. However on February 9 we got a dump of about 15” at home, followed by another 8” or 9” on February 13. In between those two storms, there wasn’t enough time to get out and do anything big but I was able to spend some time in parks near my house. Here’s some quick cell phone pictures.

• My SOTA Gear - November 3, 2016

  I’ve spent the entire year hiking around with my radio participating in Summits on the Air. For the most part it’s been using a little handheld radio with a handheld antenna, but I’ve recently had enough success on HF to be encouraged by the gear I’m using. I thought it might be interesting for other people to see exactly what gear I am carrying with me. And since I spend a lot of time working on lightening my backpacking load, it would be interesting to see how much all this stuff weighs too.

• Finishing the New England 4000ers - October 16, 2016

  On October 15, I headed north to Sugarloaf one more time with Sarah and Rik to finish off the New England 4000ers. I had only three left - Abraham, Spaulding, and Sugarloaf - and they’re all along one ridge so it made sense to do them as one hike. Sarah came along to help with the logistics. I had her drop Rik and me off at the Firewarden’s trailhead and we would then just hike all the way back to the Sugarloaf Mountain Hotel. That would save us having to do any weird out and back stuff.

• Lava Beds NM (August 28) - September 20, 2016

  On our last full day in California, we took the long drive from Reading up north to Lava Beds NM to see yet more volcanic stuff. It was a lot of driving, but we were both interested in seeing a lot more lava tubes after walking through Subway Cave and we got to see Shasta a lot more up close. I also had plans for doing one more SOTA activation.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 26/27) - September 18, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the last three full days we spent in the area.

• Lassen NP day hikes (August 24/25) - September 16, 2016

  After our backpacking trip, we spent the next five days doing much easier day hikes in and around Lassen NP. Sometimes all four of us went, and sometimes it was just one or two people. We saw a variety of things - waterfalls, summits, thermal features, and lava tubes. This post describes the first two days worth of activities.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 3 (August 23) - September 12, 2016

  Our third day of backpacking in Lassen NP ended up being our last day, thanks to a surprise car ride. This day passed through some of the strangest terrain of the entire trip as we followed the lava beds for most of the day and climbed the Cinder Cone. When we got to Butte Lake Campground, we were able to get a ride back to our car at Summit Lake instead of having to go through with our plan of hiking across the park on day four.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 2 (August 22) - September 9, 2016

  On day two of our backpacking trip through Lassen NP, Lon and I got up early to do an activation of a peak near our campsite. We then met back up with Sarah at the campsite, packed up, and hiked past several more lakes and through a big burned area, then down through a long valley before hitting Snag Lake. This desolate looking lake is on the east side of the park. We hiked along its shore for a mile or two before reaching our campsite just at its end. Along the way, we also changed our plans for the trip.

• Backpacking in Lassen NP, Day 1 (August 21) - September 6, 2016

  In the months before our trip, I’d spent an awful long time staring at maps and reading guidebooks to come up with a good backpacking trip that would satisfy everyone’s requirements. I was looking for something that was about four days long, covered about 30 miles, and passed by at least two peaks I could activate for Summits on the Air. For Sarah, I was looking for something that didn’t have any major climbs or descents and in general didn’t have a ton of elevation gain. For the whole group, I was looking for something that visited several lakes, the Grassy Swale, Cinder Cone, and the Fantastic Lava Beds. I was also interested in a loop so we didn’t have to do a car spot.

• Hiking log now public - August 1, 2016

  For years, I’ve been maintaining private logs of all my hikes in addition to the lists I have up on this site. The difference has been that the public lists just show the first time I did some peak, while the log shows every hike, trails I took, who went with me, and so on. I didn’t really have any good reason for keeping my log private, and I’ve been asked often enough for details of some hike by other people, that I decided I should just make it public.

  It’s split up by year and is linked to from the hiking page, but you can also find it here).

  This probably isn’t the final format, though I expect all the URLs to stay the same. In particular I still want to add links to GPS tracks (which I only have starting in 2015, but still). A lot of older hikes don’t have any trail, distance, or elevation information because I didn’t keep good records then. I probably can’t do anything about that. I would like to add links to writeups I’ve done for some hikes and add more notes to all the others. And then I might change the formatting around a little bit.

• Mt. Clough bushwhack from Long Pond Road - March 23, 2016

  On Sunday, Tim and I set out to do a hike. We originally planned to hike Cannon but changed our minds on the drive up to Lincoln and decided to do Moosilauke instead. At breakfast, Tim got out the map and started looking for routes we could take. While doing that, he saw Mount Clough across from Moosilauke and said that looked interesting. After a few minutes of reading trip reports, we decided it looked doable and set out to bushwhack this New Hampshire Hundred Highest peak instead.

• Nothing happening this winter - February 23, 2016

  It’s been a really lame winter so far, which means I’ve not gotten out and done much interesting, which is why I haven’t written anything. We have had very little snow this winter, and every time it does snow it is 50 and raining the next day. I’ve only gotten out for a couple of hikes (nothing spectacular) and have only gone skiing once. Unfortunately, I had planned on doing an awful lot of skiing this season including in some more unusual places so the lack of skiing has really put a damper on the posts I was hoping to make.

  For this winter, I had hoped to hike eight 4000’ers including something in Maine. I’ve met half of that goal so far. I was hoping to ski at a cross-country center four times, and I had a list of maybe ten trails and backcountry areas to check out on skis. As I mentioned, I’ve only done one day at a center and no days in the more unusual places. There’s just no cover, or it’s ice.

  I should at least post something about the January VHF radio contest, a wrap up of my 2015 hiking, and maybe a preview of what I hope to accomplish in 2016.

• 2015 Hiking Tracks - February 23, 2016

  I keep meaning to write a big retrospective of my 2015 hiking, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Instead, here’s two caltopo maps showing most of my tracks from last year. One covers the White Mountains and one covers Southern NH. Everything before May is missing because I didn’t have a way of recording tracks, and my trip through Madison Gulf is missing because Backcountry Navigator had a bug in it.

• Fall 2015 hiking roundup - December 9, 2015

  I keep meaning to write in depth about all the hiking I’ve been doing this fall, but two things stopped me. First, I wanted to be able to link to pictures but I want to set up my new photo browser (which means setting up a new server) first. Second, after a couple went by without a writeup the backlog really got big and it became much harder to get the motivation. So instead of doing anything deep here, I’m just going to give real quick recaps of what I have been up to. There’s a lot more planned for the winter so I need to knock out the reports of these to make way for more exciting posts soon.

• Hike and activation of Rose Mountain - October 31, 2015

  I didn’t have a lot of time for a hike on Saturday, because we needed to be down at David’s house in the afternoon to help with antenna raising and passing out candy. Thus I needed to find something local and quick to do. I’m also a little bored of the usual Wapack peaks, so I had to figure out somewhere new to go. For reference, I figured I might as well use the Summits On The Air maps to find somewhere a little more obscure that I could also get some radio done from. Rose Mountain in Lyndeborough fit the bill.

• My first Summits On The Air activation - October 21, 2015

  It’s fun to combine hobbies. Recently, I’d been thinking about doing more portable radio operation and with the heel injury I thought it was the perfect time to get out and take a handheld radio on a quick nearby hike to see who I could contact. Of course, there’s already an organized group that does this, and it’s called Summits On The Air, complete with spotting and awards and rules and lists of peaks. So I joined a few Facebook groups, created a couple accounts, installed SOTA Spotter on my phone, and picked my summit.

• Out of action for several weeks - September 11, 2015

  I haven’t posted anything in a while, and that’s because I haven’t been doing much worth writing about. The week after climbing the Eaglet I went and did a pretty big hike up Mt. Madison via the Madison Gulf Trail with Sharon. I suppose that was worth writing about, but it’s too late now. On that hike I got some pain in my right heel. It feels like tendonitis and hasn’t gone away so I’ve been resting it ever since then.

• The Eaglet via the West Chimney (5.7) - August 7, 2015

  I’ve been wanting to take a day off work and do some really classic New Hampshire trad climbing. For a while we’d been talking about doing Weissner’s Dike on Cannon, but we decided that perhaps six pitches might be a little much for our first outing in Franconia Notch. After talking with Mike at the gym, we decided that a better trip would be the Eaglet, a free standing rock spire (perhaps the only one in New Hampshire?) by the west chimney route. This would be a three pitch adventure up a very old route.

• Hiking Zealand, Bond, West Bond, and the Twins - July 25, 2015

  For several weeks now, Lon and Sharon and I had been planning a backpacking trip across the Bonds and Twins so Sharon could finish up her NH 4000ers. We were planning on staying at the extremely busy Guyot campsite about halfway through the route. Unfortunately, the weather promised to be pretty bad on Sunday with rain all night and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Rather than pack up in the rain or skip doing it entirely, we decided on doing the trip as a day hike.

• Hiking the AT between North Carter and Moriah - July 4, 2015

  One of my big hiking goals for the year is to finish the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire. That’s about 161 miles of trail and before this year, I had about 108 miles completed. On this hike, I was looking to pick up the 3.8 mile stretch between North Carter and Moriah as part of a long day hike. I’d have to get up to the ridge to North Carter (all on trail I’ve already hiked before) and then come back down from Moriah (from which I’ve taken every possible descent trail already). In total, it ended up being a 13 mile hike to grab that piece.

• Mt. Washington via Henderson Ridge (5.4) - June 20, 2015

  Elsewhere on this site, I’ve discussed how this was not going to be a place where I would discuss every single hike I went on, since there are plenty of places to get that kind of information. Instead, I was going to post more about lesser visited places and multi-sport adventures. Despite how busy Mt. Washington can be on a sunny summer day, our ascent still managed to fit these criteria perfectly.

• Sandwich Mountain - May 14, 2007

  Yesterday, Lon and I drove up north to hike Sandwich Mountain a 3980’ peak in the middle of the Sandwich Range wilderness. With the days getting longer and warmer, we decided to take a leisurely start, hitting the trail just before 10am. We made a couple stops to eat, buy lunch, and pick up White Mountain National Forest parking passes. It also took a little while to find the trailhead.

• Monitoring progress - May 10, 2007

  I’ve posted a variety of links to some maps and tables showing my hiking progress. Keeping track of lists is a pretty common thing to do up here so I thought I’d join in. I’m tracking four different lists of peaks right now with two tables. The purpose of this is to get me hiking more and in new places. It’s not to focus all my attention on having to complete some list to the exclusion of everything else.

• Winter hiking - January 30, 2007

  Well, look who forgot to update the blog for a whole month? Yes that’s right, it’s me. Since it’s been so long, I don’t think I am going to try to cover all the Christmas and New Year’s activities. Maybe I will do a quick review of those later in the week if I keep up the writing again. Since this is the first entry in a long while, I will just cover the latest big thing I did. I’ll cover the smaller events tomorrow I think.

• The year in hiking - December 22, 2006

  Hm, I sure have been silent for a while. I don’t know why that is except for the generic being busy answer. Anyway since it is just about the end of the year and I’m not going to get another hike in, I’ve decided to present this quick retrospective on my hiking this year. It was quite a season for me. We started hiking in March on Monadnock, and finished up just last weekend on the same mountain. I still managed to take two whole months off. I also had some forced time off due to a knee injury. This is way more hiking than I’ve done in many many years, and is even more than I did when I was in scouts and did this sort of thing regularly.

• One last hike before winter? - November 26, 2006

  I meant to go hiking on Saturday so I could spend today making beer. Instead, I decided to get to bed late Friday night and wake up several times so it was basically impossible for me to get up when the alarm went off at 5am. So I went hiking today instead. Of course, I also overslept today but not too badly. Luckily I already had my gear ready and was out in the car at 6:30am. My only stop was in Concord, NH for fuel, breakfast, and lunch supplies. By 9:30, I was in the parking lot at Crawford Notch getting my warm clothes on and my pack ready.

• Moved, etc. - November 24, 2006

  Well it has been a very long time since I last updated things here. In the last week and a half, a whole lot of stuff has happened. First off, I moved into the new place at Clocktower last Wednesday. David and I rented a truck to move all our furniture and large boxes. It took the entire day (as in, we were still moving my furniture in around 9pm) and we got a $100 parking ticket because of it, but we got it done. It was a horrible chore involving walking several miles and lifting everything we own at least four times. But we got it done. With this stuff moved, I was able to stay in the new place that first night. I got all the other essentials like kitchen things, clothes, and bathroom stuff moved in fairly quickly too. Most of the nights since then have involved trips to and from Royal Crest with my car full of junk. I almost have it finished now - just a couple more trips plus cleaning and I’ll be all moved out.

• Back to Franconia Notch - November 6, 2006

  Another weekend, another trip up Franconia Ridge. This weekend, Lon and I hiked Little Haystack via the Falling Waters trail. This is a 3.2 mile trail that climbs 3000’, passing several waterfalls at the bottom before a fairly steep final ascent going up above treeline. It was colder and windier than my last hike a couple weeks ago but we were well prepared with lots of warm clothing. From the parking lot, the peaks all appeared to be covered in clouds though this would pass as the day went on until it was quite sunny. We got lucky with the weather yet again.

• Equipped - November 3, 2006

  In preparation for some upcoming hiking, I added a few more pieces of gear this afternoon. I picked up a long sleeve insulating shirt for under my sweater, a headlamp, and iodine for emergencies. I think this covers me from head to toe for the whole winter, unless the conditions get really ridiculous. I’m not planning on heading out into anything too crazy this year so I can probably go without an ice axe, snowshoes, goggles, or a balaclava. Maybe if this year goes well, I will pick up some of those things for next year and try heading into the alpine regions.

  I’m also quite tired of spending money on this stuff. The sweater was really cheap and a great buy, but I’ve shelled out money for the insulating pants and shirts. Hopefully what I’ve got now will carry me through the whole winter as long as I stay inside when it’s storming and don’t try to tackle something like Washington. Of course, the problem here is that you don’t expect conditions to get bad but you should always be prepared for that possibility. I think I am adequately prepared, however.

• Welcome to winter - October 23, 2006

  Yes, I know it’s only October, but yesterday’s hike was wintry enough. I knew it was going to be cold and snowy in the mountains and I was prepared for it but it was still an experience. I left from my house at 7am with the intention of hiking Mt. Liberty. It’s a tall but not too tall mountain and is approached by a relatively straightforward 3 mile trail. I thought that would be a good test of my winter gear without getting me into too much trouble. Unfortunately as I approached Franconia Ridge, I happened to look up towards Mt. Lafayette which is the big mountain on the ridge. It looked so inviting with all the snow and wind that I just had to try it.

• Denied by the thrift store - October 13, 2006

  I went looking for cheap clothes today. I need to get some good midweight and heavyweight layers for winter hiking, but all the stuff at EMS and similar outdoors stores is too expensive. Sure, the microfleece might be really warm and really soft, but is it worth $50? I can’t bring myself to spend that much on a simple fleece jacket. So the backup plan was to start searching around in thrift stores for wool and fleece. Those are pretty much the only materials I can use because of the heat-absorbing properties when wet. That’s a critical property in winter and why cotton is so dangerous for hiking.

• Chocorua II: Electric Boogaloo - October 9, 2006

  Yesterday, Lon and I took advantage of the perfect weather to drive up north and once again hike Mt. Chocorua. It’s not an exceptionally tall mountain, but it’s a great hike and has excellent 360 degree views from the bald top. It’s also extremely picturesque due to the lake sitting down in front of it that you must cross on the way to the trailhead. We went last went up Chocorua in April as one of our intro hikes when there was still snow and ice on the trail. I was looking forward to getting up to the top of this mountain again as well as seeing what sort of difference a season of hiking would make.

• Winter, you're on notice - October 4, 2006

  Last April, we were nearly defeated by a giant ice sheet on the back of Cannon. Our lack of traction aids on ice meant a long, difficult slog up the mountain with a real chance of injury. This winter it’s all going to change. I now have 10 point crampons for my boots. I’ll be the one speeding up the mountain grinding through the ice while everyone else toughs it out grabbing onto trees to prevent sliding away. But this is only the start. I’ll also be getting an ice axe and lots of warm clothes. I won’t have to take the winter off, because I’ll have the gear to get to where I want to go.

  Consider yourself on notice, winter. I’m not backing down from the challenge this year. And if you push me, I might just spring for the showshoes and cross country skis, too.

• This body climed Mt. Washington - September 17, 2006

  Today, I finally climbed Mt. Washington with my friend Lon. It was an amazing experience, and full of strange contradictions that I’m still sorting out in my head. It was perhaps the most difficult hike I have done this year. While the Franconia Ridge hike might have matched it for elevation gain, the Mt. Washington hike took a few fewer miles and was therefore much more steep.

• No hiking this weekend - September 10, 2006

  For a change, I’m not going hiking this weekend. Earlier in the week, I was thinking about going up Washingon and Monroe. I was probably going to have to solo it too since my usual hiking partners are out of town. Well, on Wednesday or Thursday I started to get sick and today I’ve got all sorts of symptoms. I figure it’s not a wise plan to solo the tallest mountain in the northeast in the middle of a cold front (isn’t that always?) when I’m weakened and ill. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t enjoy it much. So hopefully next weekend will be better. It’s been about a month now since the last hike, and there’s not too much time left before winter sets in up in the mountains.

• But who's chasing me? - February 22, 2006

  At work, we’ve been talking about this grand plan to be hiking up in the White Mountains every weekend this summer. And a lot of those hikes are going to be pretty intense trips across entire ridges. So, it figures we have a lot of training to do before we’re able to do that without dying.

• That didn't work so well - January 9, 2006

  Well, that sure was a failed experiment. However, it’s a new year so let’s try this again like that means something. The last several months have been pretty crazy at times but since I’m so far behind writing about them and most people already know about everything, I’m just going to ignore talking about it. Ask if you want to know.

• Hiking Mt. Flume and Mt. Liberty - June 27, 2005

  Since it was over 90 degrees and really humid yesterday, we decided it would be the perfect day to hike up two more 4000’ peaks - Mts. Flume and Liberty. I went with a couple guys from work (Lon and Jeff) and some friends of theirs (Steve, Ruth, Christina). The route we chose started out at a visitors’ center, followed a bike path for a while, broke off that on the Liberty Springs trail, then headed up the Flume Slide trail to the top of Mt. Flume. Then we walked up the Franconia Ridge trail over to Mt. Liberty where we picked up the Liberty Springs trail again and walked back to the car. Overall, a 10 mile hike with over 3000’ of total elevation gain. We reached the visitors center just after 9:30 and were on the trail before 10.