Day 3: June 2, 2007

Plan: Walk to Franconia Brook Tentsite, and from there likely head out to the road and hitch a ride into town for a real meal. Either we'd find a place to stay in Lincoln, or we'd just hitch back up to the car and head home early.

The day's walk: 7.8 miles of flat, easy trail and about 1 mile of road.

Here was a fun shot.

Another great feature of my camera is the built-in Shake Reduction. It allows me to get by pretty well without a tripod in borderline situations, which is nice since I wouldn't want to lug even a light tripod on my back for a difficult trip like this! For the above shot, I was able to stop down the aperture to f/16 to get a broad depth of field, and slow down the shutter speed to 1/8 of a second to get the water to blur a little, all while not worrying much about camera shake.

Along this flat, easy, soft section of trail we did encounter a few obstacles. The first were three big stream crossings, which were still swelled pretty high with snow melt from the mountains. At the second crossing, we came across the ruins of a former bridge, and had to find a long way around that involved some rock-hopping and wading.

Down at this low altitude, we saw a lot of moose droppings and even some tracks. This swamp would be an ideal spot to see a moose, but I think we'd have to come by at dawn or dusk for a better chance.

Perhaps the most intimidating obstacle of the day was when the trail went straight underwater amidst moose tracks and chewed logs.

Beavers had built this dam right next to the trail, submerging the entire path! I debated bushwacking around the beaver pond, but Dan pointed out that the water extended pretty far to the left, around a bend and beyond where we could see. His idea was to wade through the muck with sandals, which I wanted to avoid at just about any cost. I made my way along some fallen trees to the edge of the dam, where I took this shot.

From there I walked right along the top of the dam. I had done this once before, actually. I think it was when I was a Boy Scout, but I honestly can't remember. All I knew was that I was pretty sure I remembered that beaver dams were stable enough to cross, if you had really good balance. Hiking poles helped a lot!

Once Dan saw that I'd made it without collapsing the dam and falling into the muck, he followed.

We saw lots of Trillium flowers.

This one was a huge one, and with the mushrooms next to it I thought it would make a good photo. You can see that the lens was a little foggy still, but the hazy effect is sort of nice, I think.

We also saw a lot of Lady's Slippers—white and yellow ones too, in addition to the usual pink.

As we got within a few miles of the road, we started to see lots of other people. First there was a couple, with the guy carrying all the gear and wearing jeans, a tee-shirt, and a baseball cap (not good hiking clothes!). Then we saw another man and woman at a precarious stream crossing (he fell in and soaked his butt!). Soon we started to see day hikers without camping gear at all, so we knew we must be fairly close and that the trail must be pretty easy from here on out.

When we finally reached the end of Franconia Brook, where it meets the Pemigewasset River, we stopped for lunch.

Across the river was a day-hiking couple eating lunch with their rotweiler. People kept coming across the bridge on bike, with no backpacks, and with small children. It looked like the road must just be a short walk away (it was in fact almost 3 miles, but they were easy miles along a straight, flat trail with no obstacles).

While we were eating lunch at the brook, two kayakers put in and one came over to talk to us. He was very friendly, and when he found out that we were about to come out at the road a long way from our car, he offered us a ride. Actually, he offered that his female companion who wasn't kayaking with them would give us a ride! He and his kayaking buddy left, and we suspected that with them boating (or biking, in the case of the woman) and us walking we'd never get there in time to actually get the ride. But a couple hours later, when we came to the Lincoln Woods Visitors Center, there they were with their 1980s Volkswagon convertible!

It's a good thing that car had no roof, because by this point we smelled pretty bad.

The plan was to drop us off at a sandwich shop in Lincoln, near the onramp for I-93 North, so that we could eat and then hitchhike back up to our car. Dan got excited by the prospect of a full meal, though, and asked the lady to drop us off at a steakhouse we saw. As she started to drive away, Dan realized that we left our hiking poles in the back of her trailer!

By the time I realized what was going on, there was no hope of me being any help by running after him, so I snapped this photo. He did manage to catch her in time, thankfully. That would have been a very expensive thing to forget!

After Dan rescued our poles, we realized that we'd been a little too hasty with our meal decision, and now we had a ways to walk to get to the highway. I decided that with our giant packs and having recently eaten lunch, I'd rather just focus on walking across town to the highway and hitching back to the car, and then we could drive into town for dinner later.

Eventually someone did stop for us. He was a veteran hiker of the White Mountains—in fact a member of the 4000-footers club, meaning he's climbed all 48 of the 4000'+ mountains in NH. It's not surprising that a fellow hiker was the first one to stop for a couple of dirty hitchhikers with lots of gear: he's probably the only one who would realize that we were safe to pick up, and could probably even sympathize. This guy made me feel a lot better about having shortened our route.

He commented that many people hiking the entire Appalachian Trail (as Dan did most of: from Georgia to New York) slow down from somewhere near 20 miles/day for most of the trail to as little as 5 miles/day in the White Mountains, and told us a few stories about hikers getting killed by storms. He also had the air conditioning on, which was very nice. The final lesson I learned about planning this trip was summed up nicely by the guy giving us the ride: "You've got to respect the White Mountains".

Finally, we ended up back where we started.

Here's the view from the Cannon Mtn. parking lot. This is Eagle Cliff; Mt. Lafayette is obscured behind the cliffs and in the clouds—but we couldn't even see these cliffs on the first day!

While the weather was a little more reasonable, we decided to take the tram car to the top of Cannon Mtn. and look at the view. Though it rained a little on the way up, we did get just enough of a clearing of clouds to catch a glimpse of Mt. Lafayette.

Seeing it made me feel a lot better about not doing the entire ambitious loop I'd set out to do initially. What we did was actually pretty impressive considering that we were relatively out of shape and unfamiliar with the rocky terrain of the white mountains. It turned out to be a great trip, in the end, anyway. I still want to come back and do this loop, but next time I'll budget more time and plan on a more reasonable pace, and I'll get in much better shape beforehand!