arghman
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This trip report has been brought to you by sapblatt, Tom Rankin, Double Bow, and the letters V F T T.
1. Meet sapblatt at Concord bus depot at 5am. No problem (fortunately -- car is getting a replacement speed sensor for the transmission this Weds). I'm kind of warming to the idea of these early starts. Maybe one of these days I will see the aurora borealis as an early-start bonus.
2. Drive to Stony Brook trailhead. We were trying to meet skiguy at Welsh's in Gorham, but the place is closed and for sale
and didn't see the car he had described.
3. Hike up to Moriah. Wow, I like this mountain. There are lots of ledges with great views of the Presidentials and the Wild River Valley & the hiking is very enjoyable once you get onto the AT ridge.
We met a N-bound thru-hiker from Pensacola relaxing on one of the ledges; we chatted with him for a while, then went on & told him we'd probably see him when we came back down.
4. Enjoy Moriah summit. sapblatt's thermometer said 52 F. A little chilly, but it was sunny and a great viewpoint. There were three other people when we got there around noontime, one guy with a mustache and an older couple who got there just before we did. I was surprised the USGS marker with "MORIAH" was still there, most summits with those things have had them vandalized & when there is one it's usually a nondescript marker w/o the mountain name or elevation. We left after a while when it started getting crowded (only a dozen or so people but there's not much room at the summit).
5. Hike back to car. We went back by the same trail. Never saw the thru-hiker again. He must have skipped the summit & went on towards Rt 2. The guy with the mustache came down also and passed us. sapblatt and I were talking about something and I made a comment that I wish people would post things like Welsh's being closed rather than worrying about green squares and red squares. The guy with the mustache was just up ahead and turned around and said something about alligator eggs... aha, another VFTTer! It was skiguy! He'd come up the Carter Moriah trail to work on redlining. We hiked down together, a good thing as I was starting to run out of conversational energy.
We saw a bunch of little potholes along the ledges, skiguy called them "solution pockets". They looked like horseshoe prints in the stone:
6. Get ride from sapblatt back to Lyons Hospitality in Twin Mountain. sapblatt was going to be camping on Haystack Rd. I'm kind of a camping wimp so decided to try the bunkrooms at Lyons. More on this in the cheap sleeps thread. I had one of the bunkrooms all to myself, slept fairly well except for one nightmare I had, the only part I remember was seeing some laptop computer which I removed from a docking station only to find out that it was the VFTT server and that crashed it and I didn't know what to do... glad when I woke up from that one.
7. Get ride with Tom Rankin to N Twin trailhead. Luckily I was able to meet up with Tom Rankin and Laurie, who were doing the N Twin Flags-on-the-48.
8. Hike up to N Twin, help set up flag. Nice hike. (I see Tom has already posted a report so I won't add much here.) Only a few unnecessary ups&downs that may have added 50-100 feet of elevation gain. Crossings of the Little River were interesting but not difficult. Not sure how one would ever do this trail in spring / early summer, though. Tom and Laurie mentioned there was supposed to be a Troop 58 helping out w/ the flag, but they never showed up.
9. Hike over to S Twin. A nice trail down to the col & back up again. Not as difficult as I was expecting. Here's a picture looking back at N Twin & the flag there.
10. While looking down at the diapensia on S Twin, get the living crap nearly scared out of you by a fighter jet coming right overhead from behind. This hotshot was doing barrel rolls, etc. Definitely an awesome sight (in the pre-'80's sense of the word "awesome"). I managed to recover my composure & get one picture before it flew off.
South Twin has a fair bit of alpine habitat, lots of mountain sandwort (Minuartia groenlandica), some of which was still in bloom. North Twin at 4761' is essentially the same altitude as Eisenhower but is nearly all wooded. I only found a very small patch of crowberry and mountain sandwort there.
11. Go back to N Twin and hang out until 2pm. A nice day for it too. Tom had a huge pair of binoculars, good for looking at flags on other peaks. We had lots of time to identify the various peaks.
12. Help take down flag and head down trail. On one of the river crossings (probably the one closest to North Twin), I saw an interesting-looking rock which I call Scream Rock, am still thinking about whether I should use it for my avatar or not. (Think Edvard Munch.)
13. Get ride to Mooseland and eat dinner. I have no idea how many people were there in total. Lots. We got there fairly early.
14. Get ride back to Concord with Double Bow. Double Bow had done flag duty on Mt Liberty with a large group. Despite knowing him for a year or two we still haven't hiked together.
This was an interesting (and slightly anxiety-ridden) exercise in connect-the-dots logistics, some of which I had arranged beforehand and some of which was spur-of-the-moment... I'm sure seasoned international travelers are used to it but I'm certainly a beginner. Thanks again to sapblatt and Tom Rankin and Double Bow, to whom I am very grateful for the transport. Am looking forward to a more functional car (knock on wood) this week.
1. Meet sapblatt at Concord bus depot at 5am. No problem (fortunately -- car is getting a replacement speed sensor for the transmission this Weds). I'm kind of warming to the idea of these early starts. Maybe one of these days I will see the aurora borealis as an early-start bonus.
2. Drive to Stony Brook trailhead. We were trying to meet skiguy at Welsh's in Gorham, but the place is closed and for sale
and didn't see the car he had described.3. Hike up to Moriah. Wow, I like this mountain. There are lots of ledges with great views of the Presidentials and the Wild River Valley & the hiking is very enjoyable once you get onto the AT ridge.
We met a N-bound thru-hiker from Pensacola relaxing on one of the ledges; we chatted with him for a while, then went on & told him we'd probably see him when we came back down.
4. Enjoy Moriah summit. sapblatt's thermometer said 52 F. A little chilly, but it was sunny and a great viewpoint. There were three other people when we got there around noontime, one guy with a mustache and an older couple who got there just before we did. I was surprised the USGS marker with "MORIAH" was still there, most summits with those things have had them vandalized & when there is one it's usually a nondescript marker w/o the mountain name or elevation. We left after a while when it started getting crowded (only a dozen or so people but there's not much room at the summit).
5. Hike back to car. We went back by the same trail. Never saw the thru-hiker again. He must have skipped the summit & went on towards Rt 2. The guy with the mustache came down also and passed us. sapblatt and I were talking about something and I made a comment that I wish people would post things like Welsh's being closed rather than worrying about green squares and red squares. The guy with the mustache was just up ahead and turned around and said something about alligator eggs... aha, another VFTTer! It was skiguy! He'd come up the Carter Moriah trail to work on redlining. We hiked down together, a good thing as I was starting to run out of conversational energy.
We saw a bunch of little potholes along the ledges, skiguy called them "solution pockets". They looked like horseshoe prints in the stone:
6. Get ride from sapblatt back to Lyons Hospitality in Twin Mountain. sapblatt was going to be camping on Haystack Rd. I'm kind of a camping wimp so decided to try the bunkrooms at Lyons. More on this in the cheap sleeps thread. I had one of the bunkrooms all to myself, slept fairly well except for one nightmare I had, the only part I remember was seeing some laptop computer which I removed from a docking station only to find out that it was the VFTT server and that crashed it and I didn't know what to do... glad when I woke up from that one.
7. Get ride with Tom Rankin to N Twin trailhead. Luckily I was able to meet up with Tom Rankin and Laurie, who were doing the N Twin Flags-on-the-48.
8. Hike up to N Twin, help set up flag. Nice hike. (I see Tom has already posted a report so I won't add much here.) Only a few unnecessary ups&downs that may have added 50-100 feet of elevation gain. Crossings of the Little River were interesting but not difficult. Not sure how one would ever do this trail in spring / early summer, though. Tom and Laurie mentioned there was supposed to be a Troop 58 helping out w/ the flag, but they never showed up.
9. Hike over to S Twin. A nice trail down to the col & back up again. Not as difficult as I was expecting. Here's a picture looking back at N Twin & the flag there.
10. While looking down at the diapensia on S Twin, get the living crap nearly scared out of you by a fighter jet coming right overhead from behind. This hotshot was doing barrel rolls, etc. Definitely an awesome sight (in the pre-'80's sense of the word "awesome"). I managed to recover my composure & get one picture before it flew off.
South Twin has a fair bit of alpine habitat, lots of mountain sandwort (Minuartia groenlandica), some of which was still in bloom. North Twin at 4761' is essentially the same altitude as Eisenhower but is nearly all wooded. I only found a very small patch of crowberry and mountain sandwort there.
11. Go back to N Twin and hang out until 2pm. A nice day for it too. Tom had a huge pair of binoculars, good for looking at flags on other peaks. We had lots of time to identify the various peaks.
12. Help take down flag and head down trail. On one of the river crossings (probably the one closest to North Twin), I saw an interesting-looking rock which I call Scream Rock, am still thinking about whether I should use it for my avatar or not. (Think Edvard Munch.)
13. Get ride to Mooseland and eat dinner. I have no idea how many people were there in total. Lots. We got there fairly early.
14. Get ride back to Concord with Double Bow. Double Bow had done flag duty on Mt Liberty with a large group. Despite knowing him for a year or two we still haven't hiked together.
This was an interesting (and slightly anxiety-ridden) exercise in connect-the-dots logistics, some of which I had arranged beforehand and some of which was spur-of-the-moment... I'm sure seasoned international travelers are used to it but I'm certainly a beginner. Thanks again to sapblatt and Tom Rankin and Double Bow, to whom I am very grateful for the transport. Am looking forward to a more functional car (knock on wood) this week.
