The summer of 2019 was already well along, and heading toward high time
for me to get myself up some more serious mountains. I had been out
pounding around local parks quite a bit over the spring and early summer,
so I felt like I was already in decent hiking condition and up for some
grander challenges.
After getting through May/June and the usual batch of events I participate
in, July was looking fairly clear for planning some longer-range
logistics.
I was also keeping an eye on the local
AMC chapter
website, to either find outings to directly participate in or at
least get ideas for where their trips frequently went to.
The popular White Mountains areas are quite crowded on summer weekends, but I had the fortunate leisure to go for mid-week trips. I was still concerned that I'd try heading up for a day-trip and find everything full to capacity, with no place to park at trailheads. The canonical advice seemed to be "arrive before dawn!", and I wasn't exactly into the idea of stumbling out the door at 3am to drive a couple of hours. Perhaps staying somewhere local would allay this problem. There seemed to be a lot of unknowns to solve and specifics to figure out. Either way, I needed to stop being afraid of the whole concept and do *something*. |
It had been a while since I had put the
Prius camping rig
together and used it, so a local campground seemed like a reasonable
and low-cost option.
And you can't get much more local to "big hiking" than the Lafayette
Place campground, right in the heart of Franconia Notch with trailheads
connected right to it including the exact one I wanted to be near.
I found their website, and was of course pointed toward
ReserveAmerica
to handle arranging any sort of stay.
That was a doomed prospect right out of the gate. It is unfortunate that 1> Reserve America has a strangle-hold on almost every major camping site in the nation, and 2> their web site totally sucks wet moose testicles. I could barely coerce enough out of it to view Lafayette's per-campsite "reserved" vs "available" grid and try to select something, but any further attempts to interact and proceed from there simply wouldn't respond. |
<rant>
The back-end company is something called "Aspira", which in turn appears to be an arm of SalesForce, so it's no wonder that their site designers probably make way too many assumptions and think the entire world is either Microsoft or needs a custom "app" to get anywhere. And they're careful to put NO general corporate phone numbers on the website, just per-state ones for their various "contracts", which isn't useful when you're dealing with a centralized website problem. I dug hard and found some contact info anyway, and eventually reached someone I could describe the problems to. When part of the conversation goes "are you using Chrome? We have some support issues with Chrome" and I have to launch into my usual schpiel about general *simplification* being key to cross-browser compatibility regardless of what the client platform is, you know it's pretty hopeless to actually get anything fixed. Long story shorter, I finally called the campground, and the folks there were able to manually intervene and reserve me a site for a night. It was during this that I learned that ReserveAmerica already had an "account" for me, indexed by phone number, which must have been leftover data from *years* back so far I don't even remember. That was pretty creepy, and more proof that corporate Big Data never forgets. Now I had to figure out what mountains to wrap around that camping stay. The Lafayette/Lincoln loop over Franconia Ridge seemed like quite a lofty target, but I had already decided that with items like Cardigan and Monadnock and Osceola already in the bag that year, that I was probably ready for this and if anything it would be a nicely rigorous test of my capability. With the whole preceding day free before I expected to arrive at the campground, throwing something a bit easier in ahead of it seemed perfectly reasonable. On the AMC website I had spotted a group trip up Welch-Dickey a week or two before, which was waitlisted about five deep so I gave up on trying to get in on that, but having heard good things about that hike in general I settled on it as the warm-up destination to just go do on my own. So I had my Plan, and more importantly had committed to a schedule for it all by reserving the campsite. Now there was no room left for indecision, and I could concentrate simply on getting my stuff organized and getting on the road at the right time. |
A major travel facility along the way is located beyond the tollbooth, of course, and is the recently rebuilt all-in-one Welcome Center and huge state liquor store in Hooksett. Except that when I walked up to the main door into the northbound-side building, I was faced with some distinctly unwelcome and discriminatory signage. I had also been at its southbound-side twin a week or so before and found a similar affront, after which I'd started researching and reaching out to get this fixed. | |
State-affiliated establishments functioning as part of New Hampshire's
tourism industry should never be displaying this sort of thing, and
their governing institutions now seem to agree with that.
As noted under my Osceola trip, the state "economic development" division
had already taken my cue to apply this thinking to the regular
rest areas.
Just before this trip, I had introduced the notion to the general
manager of the Common Man managed facilities here, who had promised to do
the background research and take my removal suggestion seriously.
Here it was only a few days later, though, so no surprise -- there
probably hadn't been enough time for him to pursue anything.
|
Shortly thereafter I found the northern trail and got going for real, finding several places where big embedded slabs form the walking surface. |
The northern-ridge trail ascended fairly evenly, eventually running along some very pretty rock ledges. |
As the ridge curved around I could look southward, and see a section of I-93 pointing right at me. |
There were occasional seams of some different rock once in a while, but most of it was the uniform smooth but sandpapery grey slab, very grippy under bare soles. |
Hiking literature and lore [such as this post] is full of warnings about wet slippery rocks, which this mountain has its share of. As noted in other sources, they're far less concern for barefooters because we can *feel* exactly what's going on with regard to friction. That's not to advise against due caution, but for the most part I could blast right over the supposedly-tricky wet spots with absolute confidence that my feet weren't going anywhere but where I intended. If anything, just the right amount of moisture temporarily increases a foot's grip on the dry rock beyond. | |
There's precedent for this at Welch-Dickey, according to an article I found from 2015 or so. Ms. Landry expresses many of the other benefits of barefooting on these mountain outings, and if you think about "happy and child-like" in the context of your own earliest adventures in the woods, it all makes more sense. |
Monster footprints in the rock?? There are quite a few random eroded holes like this here and there. |
As I neared the bottom I noted that people apparently mountain-bike parts of this trail, but I'm sure they aren't riding up some of the steeper scrambles near the top of Welch. |
Looks like runs of neatly bent conduit. Well, in a way it is, but not placed by human hands. |
I arrived back at the trailhead without incident, having blitzed the loop
in about 2 hours actual-moving-time and minimal sitting around.
It was just early afternoon, leaving me plenty of time to head up toward
the campground and maybe catch some touristy stuff along the way.
Into Franconia It had been years since I'd been up to Franconia Notch, and at the time probably for a single-purpose ski trip over to Loon or something. Now I had the leisure to poke along and check out some of the other salient points of the area, continuing with my little voyage of discovery. I wanted to see exactly what all those online info-pages about trailheads, hiker shuttles, local sights, and parking restrictions were really talking about. The highway right-of-way is so narrow through the stretch that it goes down to one travel lane in each direction, without full interchanges, so to get to an exit on the opposite side one has to to go past it to the next full interchange and double back. Thus, coming northbound I would necessarily have to go up at least as far as the Cannon tramway exit and turn around, so I decided to stop into everything along the way for a quick lookaround. Even on a weekday afternoon, the big Flume Gorge visitor center lot was fairly busy and very sun-exposed with no shade to park under, not to mention the fact that visitors are charged stiff fees for a short wander up the walkway into the Gorge to see the waterfalls. I decided to skip dealing with any of that for the nonce, and continued on to the Basin lot [one of two, there's one on each side of 93]. |
The next stop was one of the spots I was most concerned about: the Lafayette trailhead parking, which has a fairly large lot but is frequently jam-packed full. The overcrowding has been a sticky problem for years, and this year the park officials began clamping down on parked cars unsafely overflowing onto the shoulders of the highway, as described in this article and others that it points to. The bollards and rope were part of the interim solution; shuttle service to bring hikers between the larger lots up at Cannon and the trailheads was another part of it. | |
Regardless, the exact loop I intended to do from here is said to be
*the* most popular White Mountains hike.
I pulled off and tooled through the Lafayette lot just to have a
look; it was fairly full but not completely.
Of course this was about 3 in the afternoon, after some number of the
early-morning hikers had likely come and gone, so it was hard to tell.
I continued onward to said Cannon lot, which is off the next full interchange and the opportunity to turn around. I wandered through the main lot and saw the little gravel extension pointed to by signs saying "hiker parking" -- making it feel like hikers get treated in a sort of second-class manner, reserving the *nice* parking lot for the lazy tourists who just want to take the tram ride. See, snobbery can work both ways. |
Right next to the Cannon lots is the Old Man viewing area, which used to be the spot to see the iconic New Hampshire "Great Stone Face", until it fell off the mountain a few years back. That caused great consternation for a while, but local groups pulled together and came up with a solution to memorialize the Old Man's presence. The little viewing park now has structures that re-create the silhouette when viewed from behind, which is rather clever. Line up the image with the remaining outcrop, and the Face returns. |
Humans really are wired to try and see faces and body figures in just
about everything; it's part of our running recognition firmware.
I remember reflecting on this when roadtripping out through the Black
Hills in South Dakota, in the area around Rushmore.
Many of the rock spires look like bodies and limbs and heads, and it was
easy to see someone getting inspired to carve faces into those particular
hills.
The funny thing is, when you drive around to the back side of Rushmore,
a lot of what's around you starts looking like penises.
Streetview it
for yourself...
Next stop was the campground, and check-in was all very straightforward since I'd reserved and paid in advance. I drove around the loop and found my spot, conveniently right next to the river. A quick wet-rag wipedown therein was a vastly preferable alternative to overpriced pay showers, and with the evening already nicely cooling down I felt amply comfortable for the night's sleep. I set up the Prius-camping basics and then took a bit of a wander around the grounds, logging my track after noting that my Open Streetmap snapshot from a couple of years ago had fairly wrong data about the campground roads and where the river was. [Someone appears to have fixed it in the interim.] |
My stroll took me out by the front entrance, where I could gaze
up at the next day's big challenge.
The phone even grabbed a reasonable shot of it.
The peak in the middle is Lincoln; most of Lafayette is hidden behind
the shoulder of its own ridge, and I'm not sure which bit toward the
right is Little Haystack.
Another thing I observed is that the on/off ramps through this stretch can be total death-traps, as the merge and decel areas are fairly short and most of the single-lane thru-traffic gives *absolutely* no consideration to drivers wanting to exit or enter. Even with the local speed limit down to 45, navigating around here can be its own kind of exciting. Assuredly, the Yuppie Button had gotten its share of use that afternoon. |
For how busy and populated it may get in season, the Lafayette campground
is really quite lovely.
Heavily wooded and shady, with *paved* access roads which were easier on my
feet as I walked around -- I had, after all, put them through some bit of work
that day and had to let them rest up for the next big haul, right?
There were also very few bugs around today, even as dusk started to fall.
I found that the previous site occupants had left some quantity of unused firewood next to the ring, along with some bits of discarded paper and cardboard in the ring itself. It looked like enough to get a modest fire going with, and after collecting a bit more small deadfall in the woods between me and the river I decided to go ahead and entertain myself by burning it all. | |
I finished configuring the car rig for overnight and ate some equivalent of
dinner, while utterly failing to find any whisper of data connectivity
available -- no wifi, no cell.
A fellow a couple of sites down had been on his phone earlier, and at one
point I asked him what carrier he had.
He said he was local and knew for 100% certain that Verizon was the *only*
carrier that had any usable service in the area, so that's what he had.
Even T-Mobile's own
coverage-comparison map
pretty much shows that, with T-Mo itself distinctly dark through the
valley north of Lincoln
(view animation)
, and there are even posts on T-Mo's "community
support forum" site griping about it.
Well, not that I needed to get online anyway, I kind of expected to stay
unplugged for a couple of days and that was just fine.
|
Tending a fire, even if for no particular purpose than "hiker TV", is a rather zen thing. Normally I don't bother with campfires, but tonight it was not only convenient, it almost felt ceremonial in a way and brought on a bit of introspection. Here I would neatly burn up all the available resources I had found, and doing so effectively would require a bit of paying attention. Tomorrow would be a rite of passage for me, in which I would probably use up a lot of *my* resources going for a significant accomplishment. | |
Welch-Dickey hadn't been particularly difficult, sure, but
what I was about to tackle next is considered on the gnarly end as far
as day-hikes in the Whites -- maybe not super-long, but over rather
rugged and strenuous trails with a lot of height gain.
The two destinations I'd chosen had a nice relationship in my mind --
similar general layout and loop strategy, but
the Franconia loop would be about twice the distance and twice the
elevation change as Welch-Dickey.
I could try to imagine doing my first day's hike twice in a row as
equivalent to what lay ahead.
A big part of this would be to prove myself to myself, and that was very clearly in my mind as I gazed into my little creation here and pushed parts of it around to keep it going. If I, my feet as well as the rest of me, could handle the Franconia loop then I was probably ready for whatever else the Whites could throw at me -- in the warmer seasons, anyway. And it wasn't just the hikes, it was the whole process -- deciding on destinations, arranging for the campsite, getting my shit together in general, in the fairly short timeframe that I'd set for myself. Not to mention making time to re-acquaint myself with some of the touristy stuff and investigate the real-life parking situations. I needed to do this in part to convince myself that productively getting up to NH mountains in general wasn't such a big deal after all. Once I got to know the roads better, I figured the drives would start to at least *feel* shorter as more of them occurred. The fire eventually consumed itself down to low coals, and it was time to tuck in. Because as they say, a great hike begins with a great night's sleep! It felt a little strange being back in the "sleeper berth" after so long, and one minor disadvantage at Lafayette is hearing the traffic on 93. But other than one or two loud jake-brakes overnight, it wasn't really a problem. Continue to Part 2: the Big Day |