Brooks, rivers and streams water levels are crazy

[SpencerVT]

I was up in the Adirondacks yesterday. The brooks and streams, etc were raging. Extremely dangerous water crossings, you just wouldn't want to do it, fortunately we found bridges and high water bridge crossings to avoid being stuck. How has it been in NH and other NE areas??
I imagine it must be the same, or even worse. NH had greater snowpack, so the runoff combined with the incessant rain we've been having must have rendered the rivers, brooks and streams raging dangerously high.

ps - Hiked in a snowstorm for about half the day yesterday.

 

[peakbagger]

Take look at this map. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nh/nwis/rt Its pretty self explanatory. Lots of blues down in southern NH and lots of cyan's in Northern NH. The tree buds are just popping up north which does increase the ground uptake but unfortunately everything is pretty well saturated, given the 10 day forecast it looks like crossing streams is going be a challenge.

 

[jniehof]

South fork of Imp trail yesterday, tiny little stream that is shown on the map as intermittent and starting below the trail was pretty tricky to cross. Every time we'd get a waterbar cleared out and the water off the trail, sheets of water poured in from the uphill side. There aren't really mountains right now; they're rivers/lakes with a thin coating of topsoil. In addition to the stream crossing risks, careless hikers could do a lot of erosion damage if they don't stay in the middle of the trail.

Belknaps are sounding drier, but haven't been over there this spring yet. Rollinsford trails are a mud pit, worse now than two weeks ago with the recent rain.

 

[SpencerVT]

I've been saying that Muck Boots are the best invention since like ebay. If I didn't have Muck Boots yesterday, I would have been soaked halfway up my shin within the first 10 minutes of the hike. My Solomon Quest hiking boots are great, but would have been saturated in minutes. The Adirondack bottomless mud pits and mini streams flowing down all the trails made encountering deep water and mud totally unavoidable. Thanks to the Muck Boots my feet stayed perfectly dry all day. There were waterfalls and streams in the ADKs yesterday where I've never seen water courses ever before up there.

 

[egilbe]

Saturday, with all the rain, waterfalls were epic in NH. Sunday, we hiked the Cataracts trails and Dunn's cascades and waterfall trails and the water levels were fairly normal, compared to three weeks prior. Ground is pretty soupy. Hiking up to Arethusa falls, I wore trail runners and happily splashed through all the mud and muck.

 

[alexmtn]

Belknaps are sounding drier, but haven't been over there this spring yet. Rollinsford trails are a mud pit, worse now than two weeks ago with the recent rain.

Did a Belknap diretissima yesterday. They're on the wet side with some squishy terrain and mud puddles at trail sags, but overall in good hiking shape. Nothing in the way of a stream crossing that's at all challenging. A couple of sunny days in a row would do wonders for the damp spots.

Alex