Hiking to East Pond (White Mountains, NH) - August 8, 2013

Hike to East Pond on 8/8/2013

Our last day camping in the Whites, we woke up to rain. We were still tired from our hiking earlier in the week so it was just as well that we would not be doing any long-distance mountain hikes. After visiting the overrun-with-people Franconia Notch area, we headed back towards our campsite area in Waterville Valley and tried our luck with East Pond (from Tripoli Road).

It's somewhat amazing that I ended up with so many photos of a hike that I didn't really enjoy. Well, not so amazing because I just take so many photos no matter what.

The trail mostly followed old woods roads. Woods roads are always my least favorite hikes. They tend to only be destination trails with not much interest along the way, as they were originally built with a different purpose. Generally, to get somewhere straight and fast, usually "up". This trail was no exception. While you can't tell of any real elevation in the starting photos, it was slightly up the whole time. I thought the trail would be easier on us rather than a mountain climb, but it still knocked the wind out of us because unlike cars, humans generally need to rest from time to time. There are no points at which the trail levels out. It's either "up" or "more up".

 

The beginning of the trail isn't very interesting. Just a wide woods road. You can even see double tire tracks for quite some distance as it is wide enough for a car.

 A few interesting berries along the way. I did find some plants to take photos of that came out quite interesting. Because we were only going for a short hike, I only took my one new lens with me, the 70-200 mm. this meant great close-up shots, but no wide angle shots later. Also, the camera defaults to the lowest 2.8 aperture so there is very little Depth of Field.

The husband browses on the native berries as always. I had a few as well and they were actually quite tasty. The only thing that concerned us was that there were so many ripe berries, we kept looking around us for bears. 

After a while, the trail starts to look more like a "trail" and less like a "woods road".

I do love birch trees. There is one area on the trail that turns primarily to birch trees and looks quite nice. Unfortunately, a 2.8 default aperture on the camera does not turn this into a world-class photo. Only later I learned how to override that default setting. An aperture of 5.6 does much nicer...

It looks purdy, doesn't it??

Another little forest flower along the way. Pretty, but I'm not into identifying wild flowers and fungus. I just think they make cool photos.

The joys of woods roads converted to hiking trails: bits of the trail were a swampy mess and just a pile of leftover rocks to hop across. Here, one section actually had a plank to guide hikers across.

 For much of the way up, we followed a stream that we could hear but was just out of sight. It's a shame. Again, a fault of woods roads designed for other purposes. The designers of the woods roads would not have wanted a vehicle carrying a load of trees to fall into the water so they kept the road just far enough away from the stream. For hikers, you really want to just bushwhack a little to go see it and snap a few photos.... what's a little tick bite and Lyme disease anyway!

Here, we finally came up to the stream that we heard trickling just out of sight. I stood on the bridge and snapped a few photos of the stream.

 Of course one of the perplexing things about this bridge was the width and size. It seemed large enough for a car or some heavy vehicle, certainly much more than a hiker or two. But the prior path had stepping stones and a hiker boardwalk. Not sure how a vehicle would have gotten this far up the trail. According to some other hiker reports, it may be used as a snowmobile bridge. This might make more sense.

 A nice view of the stream from the bridge, but again the f2.8 aperture did not capture this scene well. It really needed a tripod and a large aperture.

 The slightest (and only) hint of a view to prove why our legs felt so tired on the way up.

Another view of the trail. It doesn't quite capture any "up" at all and makes it appear flat. I assure you, it was not flat.

I still love me some birch. Paper birch peeling off this tree. Sigh!! It did make a beautiful photo.

Husband walked ahead while wife with large, heavy camera lagged behind to snap photos and catch breath. Meanwhile, I had weird feelings like big foot was going to jump out of the woods here. I can't explain why I felt that way. 

Another view of the woods where big foot lives:

Random photos of the woods along the trail. There seems to be some biological/ecological changes going on in the woods. Some trees are dying out and others are sprouting. Moss is growing thick everywhere. Not sure if change is happening because logging has stopped and nature is taking back what it had lost, or perhaps some of the recent hurricanes and storms toppled over huge masses of trees and left room for new ones to grow. Another possibility is that the pine beetle infestation happening seemingly everywhere is killing the mature pine trees and leaving open areas here and there where only young trees not yet infested are growing.

As soon as I catch up to him, he starts to race ahead again. Damn my short little hobbit legs.  You can slightly see the "up" in this photo, although I probably still pointed the camera "uphill" by habit and eliminated some of the perspective.

 I believe this may be looking backwards down the hill. This would give a much better perspective of the hike up to the pond and why we were sweating on such an "easy" trail.

Just in case you wanted a flat, easy path, we thought we'd throw some boulders in the middle to break up the monotony. And break up your ankle. Watch your step! Finally getting close to the pond at least.

Here it is! We finally made it to the upper crossroads with the East Pond Loop Trail and within view of East Pond itself. Being that we were tired and it was threatening rain again, we elected to bypass "Little East Pond". It also looked more "up" and we'd done enough "up" for the day.

This may have been a view of what the East Pond Loop Trail looks like. More of a hiking trail and less like a wide woods road, at least. But lots of roots and rocks and not good for tired people on a rainy day.

I suppose East Pond would have wowed us a little more under different circumstances. Maybe a nice day, we would have been more in awe of the view. Instead, we kind of looked at it like, "We came all this way... for THIS?" Perhaps our own local Lake Sonoma is more to write home about. But also, the trail only gave you a glimpse of the pond at one end.

Another thing to notice in the photo is the number of dead trees. At first glance, you think it is a Spring or Fall photo, but it's August. I am thinking that the pine beetles have killed all these pine trees.

We tried to walk around the edge of the lake (no trail) but the rocks were very large and loose and would wobble when you stepped from one to the other. We were afraid of falling and injuring ourselves (or my new camera lens for that matter). 

There is of course no sky in the photos whatsoever. Completely white. At least it's only grey and not black with ominous rain clouds, but it threatened to rain nonetheless. 

 The new lens at least allowed me to get some cool close-up photos I would not have been able to get otherwise. I wasn't very close to this rock and yellow flower. At this distance, the f2.8 aperture gives just the right amount of blur to the background and foreground to add emphasis to the rock square in the middle.

Fish kept taunting the husband. We could see something ripple the surface of the water but could not find one fish close enough to the shore to see what kind of critters they could be. To Frank's dismay, he did not have his portable fishing pole.

Instead, husband threw in bits of leftover bread crust from our lunch and bits of snacks to see if he could see a fish bite and figure out what it was. No such luck, nobody took the bait, so to speak.

Well, somebody keeps jumping at the water! I guess they just don't care for ham and cheese. No real chance of walking along this shoreline past where the husband was standing. There's too much tall brush and then the rocks are too big and unstable. I suppose if you were staying for longer, you'd wander out slowly and find a spot. With rain drops hitting our hats, it reminded us it was time to start turning back soon. 

The water was so amazingly clear, we were surprised not to see a single critter in the water.

Some interesting closeups of the single, yellow lily flower on the pond.

I got some photos of some interesting water flowers at least.

Still hoping to find a fish hidden in the water somewhere in the distance. 

Any moose? Kay is always looking for moose. Everywhere. Being almost run over by one in Montana just wasn't close enough, apparently.

One strange, disappointing part of this hike was nearby the pond.  The park does not allow camping directly on this lake for environmental reasons. But unfortunately, people don't seem to acknowledge this. The good, environmentally friendly folks obey the requirements, but the party animals disregard the regulations. There were bits of garbage as well as a huge area just beyond the pond of used toilet paper. It was a bit obvious that area was the privy, but they didn't even dig a hole. They just left everything on the surface, and quite a bit of it. I think the "party atmosphere" and the inability to walk around the pond left us feeling empty after the hike, as well as the constant threat of rain and high humidity.

Any moose? On this trip, I never did get to see a moose, but I'm fairly certain this was a giant moose track. While there are plenty of moose in New Hampshire and many in the White Mountains, we visited the southwest side of the park instead of the moose-filled northeastern side. Next time, I am sure to go to the moosy side of the park! (Murphy's law, I still won't see one. )

We rushed back to the truck. Easier on the way back since it was all downhill. No photos of course. Hard to hike really fast and take photos with that huge lens. But once we got near the truck, the  weather cleared back up a little bit and we slowed down long enough to find a huge raspberry patch. Frank and I probably spent 20 minutes foraging.

Close to the parking lot, I had the opportunity to photograph some more flowers next to the trail and a posing bumble bee.

In this case, the f2.8 70-200 lens completely kicks ass. The bee is perfectly focused and the green leafy background blurs into a beautiful artistic setting. But you can see how one flower is in focus but the others are not. At that range, the f2.8 aperture only gives you fractions of an inch of depth of field. If your subject is not on a flat plane, you'll blur part of your subject. In this case, the effect worked out fine.

Some blue berry things along the trail. 

And a closeup of the blue berry things:

At least the rain made the leaves all shiny for the photo. I think I prefer sun though!

The Welch-Dickey Loop - White Mountains, NH - August 2013

I don't have any recent trips to write about, so I'll have to catch up with some older trips. Besides, the weather has been quite uncooperative for many months and there aren't many places we can go with this much snow all around.


Back in August 2013, we finally visited the White Mountains in New Hampshire. A fabulous trail that we hiked (defined as moderate but kicked our out-of-shape butts) is the Welch-Dickey Loop.

To get to the parking area, drive up Route 93 in New Hampshire. Take exit 28 and head East on Route 49. The parking area is off of Upper Mad River Road. There appear to be a few ways to get there, but I generally recall seeing signs that tell you which way to go.  The only trail in the area (as far as the maps) was the Welch-Dickey Loop. This is only part of the parking lot, but it should give you an idea of crowds you might expect. Luckily, most of the people only go to the first lookout and then turn around. While we did see a number of people, it didn't feel crowded and we had at least bits of solitude here and there. (If you stopped to eat lunch, someone might walk by every 15-20 minutes.)

 The trail starts out following a small stream. No worry about fording deep water here as the stream is only a trickle and you cross it only once.

 The first mile or so of the trail is a rather steady climb upwards. There aren't too many places where the trail flattens out. It's either "up" or "more up". I guess they felt they were just getting the hard stuff out of the way before you get to the good stuff. Or perhaps once we were among "the good stuff", we didn't notice the elevation as much. (I believe it was the latter.)

 Once you get towards the first viewpoint, you'll find the start of "the balds". These are flat, rocky areas where no trees survive. In this case, there may have been moss growing on the rocks at one point, but hiker traffic wore what little there was down to the granite below. Apparently hikers have worn away enough sensitive and endangered vegetation that they have barricaded certain areas of the trail to let some of the natural vegetation grow back.

 At the end of the barricaded vegetation area, you get to the first viewpoint. Already it is a nice viewpoint. You think it's a pretty good view until you hike the rest of it and discover it's the bottom of the barrel. There's so much more to come for the next several hours.

 The guidebook we used for this trail recommended the hike in a particular direction stating that the balds are difficult to go down and easier going up. This seemed like a good recommendation even on a dry day. I can't imagine sliding down this. If you lose your footing, you can fall for quite some distance. The photo below comes at least partly close to showing how steep the trail was.

 You can't quite tell from the photo below, but the trail goes fairly steeply up the hill here. When you've already climbed in the heat of the sun for a bit, a view like this sure feels tiring.

 The trail eventually winds up on this bald as well. Each time we climbed higher and higher, we could see mountains farther away.

 Suddenly you can see the tips of the blue mountains far, far away in the background.

To guide hikers, there were occasional cairns here and there.

 There was occasional respite from the sun here and there in the form of small patches of pine trees. It was darker and cooler among the trees and they provided some welcome shade.

 Hard to gauge from the photo below, but this was a bit of a scary drop-off, especially when you are tired from hiking up and down mountains. The trail was angled slightly down towards the left so if you lost your footing, you might fall for quite some distance.

We started around 10:30am and finished around 4pm or so, stopping here and there (and there and there and there) for breaks along the way. The AMC hike book claimed we would finish in 3 hours. It took us closer to 4-5 hours with breaks, and we were tired at the end. There were a couple people who started after we did and passed us, and very few people who we passed. So we were probably among the slowest of the hikers that day.

All in all, a fabulous and recommended hike!