The leaves have fallen, the days are short, and frost on the ridge lines is keeping casual hikers at home. I’ll refrain from the quip about cold shoulders, because temperatures have been wild this year.
A chilly Sunday morning took me into Franconia notch with rime ice picking out the trees and rocks atop Hounds Hump and Eagle Cliff. I didn’t go up very far this morning, but spent some time poking around in the woods and shores of Profile Lake.
I’m glad to have seen the Old Man before he fell off the mountain, but I also have great affection for the glacier-sheared face of Cannon Cliff as New England’s best example of an exfoliating granitic pluton. (Ooh I just love that phrase!)
With visitor centers locked up for the season and ice fractals forming on the shore of Profile Lake, it felt like one of the last bright days before true Winter.
The next weekend felt like Summer again, with the temperatures in the seventies. I set out to finish the hike I started in March but turned around because I didn’t have with me the right gear for conditions. This trip took me from the Kanc along Livermore Trail over Livermore Pass.
The trail follows old logging roads through meadow clearings that show the lasting imprint of log landings.
As I hiked uphill toward the pass, I had the very cool but somewhat unnerving experience of meeting up with a moose. The moose and I were using the same trail; I’m pretty sure he was coming toward me but when he spotted me he turned around and went back the way he came. I saw something ahead of me through the trees and around a bend as I was hiking uphill, but I interpreted it as another person and had to pay attention to where I was putting my feet just then. When I came around the bend, the moose was trotting away from me. I got a good enough look to see that he was on the small side (for a moose) and had small antlers, so I tentatively identify him as a yearling male. He disappeared from view pretty quickly, but for the next half mile or so I took the precaution of intentionally making noise so that I wouldn’t come upon him or his friends unexpectedly in a way they perceived as a threat. Practically, this meant singing verse after verse of “Hey Moose” to the tune of “Hey Jude”.
I saw clear moose tracks in both directions on that trail but I’m not a good enough tracker to pick out how fresh they were or even if they were all from the same animal. Nonetheless I came away with the impression that that stretch of trail gets more moose traffic than human.
Moose aren’t stupid: they realize it’s much easier to go between the mountains than over them (they aren’t particularly known for peak bagging) and using an established trail takes less energy than bushwhacking through the forest.
At the top of the pass the trail goes through a boggy, swampy area that’s a classic moose habitat, and even in November brings to mind the home of the Forest Spirit.
On the Waterville side of the pass, the trail widens into a legitimate forest road, but I didn’t stay on it for long, veering back into the forest to visit Waterville Flume.
Along the trail back into Waterville Valley, I stopped to admire Mt. Osceola (which I’ve stood atop) and Mad River Notch (which I’ve walked through). I like the fact that I’m building in my brain a three-dimensional map of the National Forest as I walk through it and learn to recognize the peaks and passes from different angles.
New weekend; new hike, and cold once again. This time I started with a visit to Beede Falls— popular in the Summer for swimming, but on a chilly November morning I had it to myself.
My trail took me up and over Mt. Israel, where I took in the summit, the vista over the Sandwich range, and the sunshine on curiously rippled granite without another person in sight.
As I hiked down the clouds rolled in and the wind started to pick up, and even though I was moving fast enough to stay comfortably warm in just my base layer, I wan’t inspired to linger and take pictures of the back side. I was glad for the past few days of freezing temperatures because they made the muddy stretches solid enough for good footing, unlike the previous weekend when an injudicious step submerged my boot up the cuff. I’m also glad I kept moving— I made it back to the house just as it started to spit rain.
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