This was the first day of our July group trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. After a comfortable night at the AMC Highland Center, our group of 9 hikers started bright and early at the Pine Bend Trailhead on the Kancamagus Highway. The weather was perfect with great visibility from the many view points on our loop hike of North Tripyramid and Middle Tripyramid Mountains. Continue reading
Our group of 4 planned to bushwhack Friday and Balsam Cap on a very warm humid day. There was a threat of thunderstorms during the afternoon and rather than push our luck, we settled for just Friday and a shorter day. At times the clouds obscured the summits and the haze dulled the views into the valleys, but it didn’t rain while we were on the mountain. Continue reading
We had a group of 6 for this hike of Plateau and Sugarloaf mountains in the Catskills. We hiked the Devil’s Path over both summits. The ascents and descents on both sides of both mountains are very steep, but the weather was perfect for great views from the viewpoints. Towards the end of the hike we introduced the stone chair temple construction at Dibbles Quarry to some of the group who had not seen it before.
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Halcott is one of the trailess peaks required for membership in the Catskill 3500 club. We’ve led a number of groups to the canister over the years. Halcott is a relatively short but steep bush whack.
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It was a small group and we hiked four Catskill peaks, or was it six? Starting from the trail at Denning, we hiked to Table and Peekamoose, then left the trail and headed over to Lone and Rocky, then backtracked the way we had come, passing over Lone and Table again. We wore snowshoes the entire way and the going was pretty easy because someone else had set a very good track on a good bearing and we merely needed to follow it, although we did Continue reading
Hiked Starr King and Waumbek with David. It was one of the best rainy day hikes ever…partly because it didn’t rain. The snowshoe track was obvious, but it had a few inches of new snow and sleet covering it that had only just finished falling. It was a fairly warm day (but without rain) and snow balling on the snowshoes was an issue, but manageable. Thought there would be no views, but visibility was excellent under the clouds. Continue reading
This was a successful bushwhack of Leavitt Peak (Southwest Hunter), although not exactly in the manner planned. The mountain and the December weather were very much out of character and provided a good, if unexpected experience. No photos were taken (also out of character and unexpected), but our snarky musings on the days events hopefully provide a few good nuggets on expecting the unexpected in the mountains.
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We had a full group of 12 hike the three peaks of the Blackhead Range on a beautiful autumn day following an early snowfall. Due to the trail conditions, we wore microspikes for the first time this season.
We hiked Halcott Mountain a beautiful fall day. For MK, this was #38; the next to last peak on his quest to earn his 3500 patch.
From the parking area we crossed the creek above the waterfall on the north branch of the Bushnellsville Creek. We continued through the cairn fields and then stayed on the north side of the next creek, paralleling it while climbing mainly towards the west-northwest.
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On Sunday of our Columbus weekend outing we led a hike to Esther and Whiteface Mountains. The weather was unseasonably warm (in the 70s in Lake Placid!) and most of the group wore shorts.
