Coe Slide when wet

[Peppersass]

Heading to Baxter Park tomorrow to finish my last three HH.

After much research I've come to the conclusion that the Coe Slide to Mt. Coe and the Brothers is a great experience only if the slide is dry.

If it's raining I should head to S. Brother and Mt. Coe via the back way, correct? It appears that's the general consensus but I have a few hiking friends who indicate if the slide is wet it's still okay to go up, just head far left and grab vegetation.

If it rained the night before or in the early a.m. do I assume that by 9 a.m. the slide will still be quite wet?

 

[nartreb]

I've only been on it when dry, and I didn't pay much attention to any vegetable holds at the margins. It's not the steepest slide in Baxter, but it's plenty long. It's an annoying mix of loose gravel and smooth slabs; I was very happy to have the dry slab in order to avoid the pebbly ball-bearings.

It faces mostly south but a little west. 9AM would be too early for me to be confident after a rain. Much easier to take the Marston trail if there's any doubt.

Note that the slide splits; staying to climber's left may still require you to cross a few open spaces at the top of these branch slides. From my 2007 photo there *may* be enough scrub to do this on vegetable holds, but things have probably changed since then.

http://www.davidalbeck.com/photos/baxter_2007/i31.jpg

 

[Daniel Eagan]

About three years ago we descended the slide as it started to rain. We found the rock itself sticky enough. The problem in the dry parts was that the grit was very slippery. I think the AMC guidebook compares it to ball bearings. (nartreb does too.)

We descended mostly to our left, which would be your right ascending. Most of the time we stayed on the verge of vegetation. I'm guessing ascending would be easier as you're leaning into the slope. And I can't speak to heavy rain.

 

[jniehof]

I went up it after a damp (not rainy) day and it was...okay. It's really a fairly shallow climb, and it's fairly exposed to the weather so it would dry faster than something in trees. Offsetting that is that it's very smooth slab, not blocky, pretty much a pure friction climb. It depends on your balance and level of comfort with that sort of thing.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it wet, but I wouldn't categorize it as "nobody should ever consider it." I rather enjoyed it (also the lower bits before getting to the slide proper); if it were a crappy trail it would be easier to just say come around the other way.

 

[peakbagger]

I came down it one day in October with melting ice on it, not recommended but we survived. The Marston Trail is bit longer but no exposure (although some significant erosion between the top o the slope and the T intersection with the North Brother spur.

 

[Peppersass]

I came down it one day in October with melting ice on it, not recommended but we survived. The Marston Trail is bit longer but no exposure (although some significant erosion between the top o the slope and the T intersection with the North Brother spur.

When you write "a bit longer but no exposure" does this mean this would be a preferred route if t-storms were looming?

 

[peakbagger]

The Marston Trail approach from the junction with the Mt Coe trail is about 2 miles longer than going directly to Mt Coe up the slide (roughly 3.5 versus 1.5 miles from the junction). It is entirely in the woods mostly in a spruce fir tunnel so the potential for a lighting strike is far lower than on an exposed slide. Of course the extra hour on the trail offsets some of the advantages of lower exposure. Its your call on what is the better option. Last time I was out there I located and climbed the Marston Slide in damp conditions but got an early start to avoid potential nasty weather.

 

[egilbe]

Gf and I just did North Brother after changing our minds on Coe and South brother. Everybody I talked to last weekend said we made a smart choice. It had rained a bit the night before and the hikers we talked to going up the trail, we met coming back down and said Coe was pretty bad. Two days later, with no rain, it was still wet, according to a couple women we spoke with on top of Hamlin. If you have a choice, go up Coe.

 

[bikehikeskifish]

I did it in 2013 and it was still wet in large patches 48 hours after the last rain. https://picasaweb.google.com/102470229665583617112/Baxter2013#5920855375770794322 is the first picture on the slide and there are a few...

Tim

 

[1SlowHiker]

I did it in 2013 and it was still wet in large patches 48 hours after the last rain. https://picasaweb.google.com/102470229665583617112/Baxter2013#5920855375770794322 is the first picture on the slide and there are a few...

Tim

I don't recall it being particularly difficult (I'm the red dot in Tim's 2d picture). Just had to do some zigging and zagging for good footing rather than straight up.

 

[Mike P.]

Years ago I did it and while the day was dry, the slide had some damp spots. I did slip and slide down about 20 feet coming to rest on my back, no injuries but my pride. Switchbacking & finding good footing prevented a second fall and I remembered it when doing Allen several years later which helped. (Allen's purple slime on it's slide was far slicker)

 

[Peppersass]

An update. It rained for two days and after a drenching slippery summit up North Brother and Fort we decided for the next day that a wet slide did not sit well with us. So we went the back way, 11.2 miles RT. The last thing we wanted to do was go back up that wet muddy Marston trail.

This goes without saying but park rangers have varying knowledge of the area. One ranger at the gate told us it would be no problem but she also didn't know that North Brother needed to be summited to get to Fort so we immediately discounted the value of her info and asked another ranger who said that yes the slide is slippery and with this much rain and rain in the forecast he would not recommend it. Tired legs prevailed and though we missed the fun of the slide, the reports from 7 people we met who'd done it sounded like on this day the slide was not fun - lots of running water and slippery slope.

 

[Raymond]

We went up Coe slide and back down again with my then-5-year-old son in October 1996. We didn’t cross it at the very top, because of ice, but the slide itself didn’t seem all that bad to me. The non-ledge terrain was kind of spongy, is my memory. I would step on a rock and it would sink into the ground.

 

[Raymond]

Tim, on the Google Earth image, it looks like you went over North Brother to Fort Mountain, but your photos show you visiting Fort before North Brother. Did you just avoid the tippy-top rocks on North Brother so it would be Number 100? Still looks like you climbed it first (well, 99th).

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Raymond.... yes and Eric Savage asked me the same question - "How'd you get to Fort without going over North Brother?" I don't think you required to count the peak the first time you cross it - I have seen it written (although not in the current AMC4000 FAQ) that you can count a peak only once per trip, but it's not explicit about which time

Tim

 

[Raymond]

I figured, if it’s been climbed, it’s been climbed, and can’t be unclimbed. So it seems like a sneaky way just to get a unique finishing peak, but I guess it doesn’t do any harm, unless the AMC is (secretly) compiling statistics about such things. (‘‘Secretly’’ because I haven’t seen any published data on first and last peaks on the New England lists, as I have with the Forty-Sixers’ list or its Boulder Reports.)

 

[bikehikeskifish]

Is it climbed if I didn't go to the recognized highest point? It's all honor system anyway, right? How far out of my way should I go to avoid the summit? All this was because I wanted to finish both lists at the same time and because of the weather, North Brother was the only NE67 left. If I had to turn around at any point on the first crossing of North Brother, I wouldn't have counted it as climbed because I didn't get to the recognized highest point.

I got the impression that maybe I was either the first, or more likely the second and whomever was first was ticked I did tell Eric that if he felt it was more correct, he could swap them, but he didn't.

Tim

 

[Raymond]

I wasn’t speaking with any kind of authority, just sorting through my own feelings about it. There’s a fine line, I know, between counting or not counting an ascent. Missing the summit but counting it anyway, or intentionally missing it by a little bit for the sake of not counting it now, but later. People have done and continue to do both, I believe. How close does one have to be for it to count and how close can one get without counting it?

For example: There are undoubtedly many people who have failed to climb up and touch the top of North Kinsman’s summit rock, but counted it as climbed anyway. Are there others who have known that the summit is the top of that rock — eight or nine feet, whatever, off the ground — but walked right past it so they wouldn’t have to count it? Merely so that they could ‘‘bag’’ South Kinsman first, without having to approach South Kinsman from the south? Maybe. I think I remember someone doing something similar on Donaldson.