22 December 2005 Mount Cabot, New Hampshire
Bob & Geri and MtnMagic and his four-legged friend Ghost Dog joined me for my first winter peak of the season yesterday. We met at the York Pond trailhead around 8:00. The road there is in excellent condition and the only tricky part was finding the bridge at the fish hatchery.
Mountain Magic makes his way up the trail
My original hope was to fashion a loop hike but it was clear that we'd be breaking trail the whole way and soon decided that up and back would be best. We started walking up the Bunnell Notch trail at about 8:20 and found the trail to be easy to follow the whole way except for some confusion on the ridge. More about that later. There were several deep drainage dips across the road in the first ~1 mile that required a bit of care to cross and we all made it with dry feet. The trail then left the gentle road and entered the woods vertically. The sky was blue, the ground was white, the forest was beautiful and the going was slow. The trail gradually steepened as we followed a stream with many flatter sections, little stream crossings, and some short descents thrown in. We matched altimeter readings to map a few times on the way up to confirm that we were, in fact, moving slowly. We gained the ridge and the Kilkenny Ridge Trail at about 12:30. That's 4 hours to move 2.8 miles and climb about 1400 feet. We took a short break and pictures at the sign which is incorrect and set us up for about 40 minutes of confusion.
Re-entering the woods on Mt. Cabot
The sign correctly points out the Kilkenny Ridge trail heading south (left) to Terrace mountain and the Bunnell Notch trail back 2.8 miles to the road. But the arrow for KRT heading north to Cabot (1.8 miles) points to the right. This is not correct. We nosed around for several minutes looking for the trail but found nothing but dead ends. My map from the most recent WMG showed that we should continue straight (which was not an option on the sign) and turn right in a tenth of a mile or so to contour over to the climb up Cabot. After more confusion we found that to indeed be the case. We proceeded straight ahead from the Bunnell Notch trail to the second junction, turned right as the sign correctly indicated and after a few tenths of a mile and more descent than expected we came to the climb up the Cabot summit cone at about 1:30. To our great elation we found it to be packed out!!!! We continued up and soon met the group who had saved our day. A mid-week group of about a dozen hikers including Mohamed was returning from the summit. They had come up from the west side. We chatted for a few minutes then continued on, soon to find a very short side trail to Bunnell Rock which offers a lovely view. We finally reached the cabin shortly before 3:00. We adjusted layers and dropped our packs for the ~10-minute trip to the summit. More pictures and some summit-sign hugging on my part comprised our brief visit. We returned to the cabin for lunch and hot drinks and began our descent at about 3:45. Headlamps went on for most of us at around 5:00. We got back to our cars at 6:30. Bob of Bob&Geri took a lot of pictures and wrote a trip report on their website a few days later.
