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Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee, NH | | |
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| Hiking | 15.00 Miles |
5,000 AEG |
| | Hiking | 15.00 Miles | 9 Hrs | | 1.67 mph |
| 5,000 ft AEG | | | | |
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| no partners | | After driving from Tucson to Colorado for Uncompahgre/Wetterhorn and later a great hang around Boulder, I left the car in Denver and flew to New Hampshire. I grew up hiking in the White Mountains of that state and it was nice to be back.
Squeezed in a good number of smaller hikes with family and old buds during the week I spent up there, but I'm just posting the biggest for posterity (with best guesses of distance and gain).
The Franconia Ridge Trail runs parallel to I-93 and Franconia Notch, and traverses four major peaks: Flume, Liberty, Lincoln, and Lafayette - all of which I've done before, but never in a day. The Flume Slide Trail, which takes you from the notch up to the ridge, begins with a long and leisurely woodswalk, and then shoots headlong up the mountainside in a pugnacious stretch of trail that felt like a muddy, leafy Pusch Peak.
The ridge trail begins below tree line and becomes more open (and more crowded) as you head north. Famous views up there. Famous wind too - even on a fine day such as it was I faced gusts that must have exceeded forty miles an hour. As planned, I met my mom on the summit of the last and highest peak of the day, Lafayette. She's out to bag all the four-thousand footers in New Hampshire (the class of peaks one bags in those parts) and had come with a friend up the Skookumchuck Trail, a little hiked and delightfully named route that approaches Lafayette from the north. I went down with them, and they took me back to where I'd parked in the morning.
What I adore most about that region are the enchanted forests. A fanciful way of putting it perhaps, but when you get into those dense and ancient woods, animated by rushing water and sunlight that shines in shafts through the rustling canopy, no word feels more fitting. |
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Route Editor
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