dms
Active member
Jim C., my son, Dan, and I had a wonderful hike/wack in Waterville Valley yesterday. We hiked to some very seldom visited peaks, found a "secret" trail, that led to an unknown peak, all in all, it was a great day in the woods. This trip had trail hiking, and a large dose of bushwacking thrown in for some real adventure. We started off up the Mount Tecumseh trail from Tripoli Road, it's a nice way to go in as there is minimal foot trafic from this end of the trail. The weather was spectacular. We went up to the col of West West Tecumseh and West Tecumseh, we bushwacked basically southeast towards the summit of the "former" 3k list peak of West West Tecumseh, the woods were open except for a nasty stick forest that I cooly managed to lead us into, Jim C. had the better sense to go around it instead. The summit was easy to find and is marked with a nice cairn of substantial age no doubt. I actually found the string that used to hold the summit register tied to a small tree. My Thomenen altimeter showed a total elevation differential of 200 feet from the col to the summit, so this peak must be close to qualifying. From here we wacked back the trail, and it was on to another disqualified 3k peak, West Tecumseh. This peak has a great viewpoint at the western end, the actual high point is on the eastern end, or at least that's the general consensus, we could find no evidence of a register. After visiting the main peak, Tecumseh, we took the Sosman trail to a point opposite the Tecumseh-Green Mountain col and started our wack to Green. These were by far the thickest conditions we encountered all day. Eventually we made it to the summit ridge which is a huge flat fern field, we followed the ridge to it's end where we found a 15-20 foot summit ledge which is the actual high point. It has one of the old original 3k signs which we didn't see until it was a foot in front of my face. Now it was decision time, keep going to Welch and Dickey, or turn around and backtrack? Well the rumors of a "secret" trail up the ridge in front of us kept our interest high, and off we went. The ridge down Green was basically open and easy to follow. After about .6 mi. we spotted an open area to the east, and low and behold, we hit the "secret" trail which we followed to the summit of Foss Peak, its about 3500 ft and is wide open at the top. After soaking in the views we determined that we would follow the trail and see where it would lead us. It was steep going down into the Welch/Dickey - Green col, but were we able to stay on the trail. However once in the col the trail became at first obscure, then it disappeared all together ( or we lost it). We spent a lot of time looking for it because we did not relish the thought of wacking up to the Welch Dickey Trail, but sometimes you have no choice. Finally at bout 6 pm we hit the trail, grabbed our last two peaks of the day and stumbled back to Jim's car which we had spotted early in the am. Although tiring, it was a fantastic trip right in our "backyard", it also gave us a true sampling of both the highs and lows of off trail travel. I will post some pics later.
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