Memorial Day weekend had arrived with the pandemic still a major concern
in everyone's minds, but going outdoors for walks in the woods was still
one of the safer activities people could keep up with.
I wanted to continue the fourth year of my now "traditional" hike up Monadnock
over that weekend, and it required a bit of extra planning this time.
The NH state park officials wanted to have the parks open but limit the
number of people present, and so had set a reservation system in place
to limit the number of vehicles arriving.
This was all being sent through the popular "ReserveAmerica" service that
handles campground and recreation booking country-wide, and as much as I
dislike some of how their website works it has improved a bit over the
years.
So
reserving for Monadnock
turned out to be fairly straightforward process, and also allowed me to tie
together a couple of loose details about the account I already sort of
half-had in the Reserveamerica system.
Before even tackling that, however, a week out I called the park office to get a sense of how *they* felt about any of this. The rangers actually sounded fairly upbeat and positive about it, seemingly confident that their visitors knew how to distance themselves and stay safe. They encouraged me to reserve and show up and enjoy the mountain, so I went ahead with it. But then as the weekend approached, the news had a bunch of rhetoric from NH governor Sununu about how Massachusetts residents should *not* come flooding into NH, since Mass. had been one of the virus hotspots. Well, that was something to give pause. Would the park people now be hostile to non-residents after that? Would I get turned back at the state border or something? There was nothing negative or restrictive on the NH parks website. I tried to call again a couple of times but nobody answered, so I decided to just charge the car and go. As I arrived at the turn into Poole Road, I saw a cluster of cars just coming *out*, and from the "traffic body english" I could see, the drivers were angry. You can tell a lot about the human inside from how a vehicle moves -- it's one of those things you could never teach in Drivers' Ed, you only get that sixth sense from years of on-road experience *if* you're paying attention. At a minimum, they were bunching up on each other in a fairly aggressive way at the stop sign, perhaps now in a hurry to go try some other park instead and everybody ahead was in their goddamn way to get there. This didn't bode well, but I headed up to the gate to find out. |
On the
2017 hike
only one of our party had seen Lost Farm trail, so I wanted to finally
go that way myself.
I soon reached the junction and took a right.
So many visitors seem to be all about an out-n-back to bag the summit, but really, this mountain has a whole lot of different places to explore. |
In front of me was a surprise stand of low bushes with lots of flattish white flowers, all clustered into one spot, striking against the constant brown duff on the ground. |
I found a Scroll of Ancient Wisdom! Perhaps reading its spell could guard against COVID-19? |
This is supposed to be Bald Rock, so I'm not sure what this chiseling is trying to tell us. Nice view of the Pack Monadnocks to the east. |
The flat boulders are almost like a concrete sidewalk through the scrub, but actually feel much nicer than concrete. Again, something about the granite up here is just so foot-friendly. |
Tag! Very un-like last year, when we had a whole circle of feet around one of the survey markers. I gave it the token brief touch to note the moment, and then got the hell out of Dodge heading toward Pumpelly trail. |
The way toward the trail contains infinite possibilities for getting there
across this big rocky playground.
I was having plenty of fun exploring the wonderful granite grip.
I'll note that those white quartz veins are considerably more slippery,
so don't rely on those for holds on the steep!
The thing swinging off the front of me is my little bottle of sanitizer on a lanyard, which I'd brought with me along with whatever else qualified as PPE. |
Given that I was on my own and up for adventure at my own pace, my primary target for the day wasn't really the summit. Rather, I wanted to go find the storied "Pumpelly Cave". There are basically no trails to it, documented or otherwise, it hides somewhere in an area of dense woods on one of the steeper slopes of the mountain. I was up for a bit of bushwhacking, and had most of the day still ahead. |
Okay, so here I was basically right on top of the thing -- it had to be right down there someplace! Couldn't see any hint of it or a likely way through. |
I picked a spot where I could see a few more open boulders through the
trees and gingerly started winding my down.
It was steep but doable; the only dicey parts were soft areas of leaf-litter
or pine carpet that were either solid or had a hole underneath and you
can't tell until you step down.
Being barefoot gives much better surety of knowing what's under there, and
certainly destroying far less stuff underfoot as I go.
I continued getting closer on the GPS, but had to keep skirting a few sheer drop-offs to find a safe way down. It was half-climb, half-scramble, half-slide. Note to self: do not grab dead rotten pines to slow a descent... Then I started hearing *voices* drifting up through the woods, and they weren't coming from the other trail farther below. It quickly became clear that I wasn't the only visitor with this idea today, and I soon popped into a clear area just north of the cave entrance and saw a couple of people hanging around. |
The inside hadn't changed much from the various online references. Someone had hung a larger flag, and in fact hung it wrong with the blue field pointing south instead of north. I wonder how long this roof will hold up as built; someone must keep it maintained because most of that wood is *not* a hundred years old. |
But I eventually emerged onto the real trail.
Whew.
The second half was definitely more difficult than the upper one.
A review of my track later clearly shows a greatly diminished speed through
that whole section from ridgeline to Cascade [orange], and 400+ feet of
elevation drop in about a quarter mile straight-line [blue].
The pink dotted lines show the track correspondence.
I wonder if going up from below would have been easier -- the main problem
is finding anything like a viable path through all the growth that doesn't
lead to a steep cliff.
[This is all using OSMAnd, the Android Open Streetmap implementation] |
Yearly mission accomplished, and a nice little adventure had in the process -- 6.5 miles in all according to the GPS. The trip wasn't anything like the nightmare that various doubters had anticipated, and sure beat the heck out of sitting inside the house glued to the news. Still, it was clear that "shelter in place" had not been good for my hiking chops, despite a few short local jaunts in the interim. I felt more drained after today than any prior Monadnock run, but maybe that also had to do with keeping my own blasting-along pace instead of being with a group. Frankly, what probably burned my quads the most was all that careful slow-stepping down on the downhill bushwhacks. Somehow my knees came through it without complaint, which I attribute to the IT-band and other stretches done before really getting into it. |