Daniel Doan - Explorers Guide 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire: Day Hikes and Backpacking Trips from Mount Monadnock to Mount Magalloway

AN INVITATION TO THE READER

Developments, logging, and fires all take their toll on hiking trails, often from one year to the next. If you find that conditions on these 50 hikes have changed, please let the publisher know, so that corrections can be made in future editions. Address all correspondence to:

Editor, 50 Hikes Series

The Countryman Press

P.O. Box 748

Woodstock, VT 05091

Copyright 1978, 1983, 1991 by Daniel Doan

Copyright 1998, 2006, 2014 by Daniel Doan and Ruth Doan MacDougall

Sixth Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages.

Series design by Glenn Suokko

Maps by Erin Greb Cartography The Countryman Press

Interior photographs by Robert J. Kozlow unless otherwise noted

Frontispiece photograph: View of the Presidential Range from Owls Head on Cherry Mountain, Robert J. Kozlow

Explorers Guides 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire

ISBN: 978-1-58157-156-1
ISBN: 978-1-58157-729-7 (e-book)

Published by The Countryman Press

P.O. Box 748

Woodstock, VT 05091

Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10110

OTHER BOOKS BY DANIEL DOAN

The Crystal Years

Amos Jackman

50 Hikes in the White Mountains

Dan Doans Fitness Program for Hikers and Cross-Country Skiers

Our Last Backpack

Indian Stream Republic: Settling a New England Frontier, 17851842

OTHER BOOKS BY RUTH DOAN MACDOUGALL

The Lilting House

The Cost of Living

One Minus One

Wife and Mother

Aunt Pleasantine

The Flowers of the Forest

A Lovely Time Was Had by All

A Woman Who Loved Lindbergh

Mutual Aid

The Snowy Series:

The Cheerleader

Snowy

Henrietta Snow

The Husband Bench, or Bevs Book

A Born Maniac, or Puddless Progress

50 More Hikes in New Hampshire at a Glance

FROM RUTH DOAN MACDOUGALL

My thanks to everyone who has helped me keep this book updated, including: Donald K. MacDougall, Marjorie M. Doan, Penelope Doan, Thane Joyal, James P. Gibbs, Hamish Gibbs, Kirk Dougal, Steven D. Smith, Amy Gumprecht, Mary L. Kibling, Hal and Peggy Graham of Trailwrights, Rick Blanchette of Friends of the Wapack, Doug Mayer and Mike Micucci of the Randolph Mountain Club, Kathy Thatcher, Gary Montgomery, Ben Haubrich, Ted Bonner, Charles Winterling, Norma Reppucci, Kelly Teevan, the Over the Hill Hikers of Sandwich, New Hampshire, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the U.S. Forest Service.

FROM DANIEL DOAN

I am indebted to many hiking friends, old and new, for their experience and companionship on these trails.

I have had many helpers. The impossibility of listing them all tempts me to a solution once used on old posters for farm auctions. These advertisements, detailing livestock, farm machinery, household furniture, and the cords of wood in the shed, always concluded with the words and other items too numerous to mention.

I shall begin this list with Chris Lloyd, editor. His mountain experience, skill with computers, and editorial deftness provided acute filtering of revisions and cheerful tolerance of my jotted notes.

Next, my wife, Marjorie, for listening to me reviewing the hikes that she knows all about anyway.

Next our pal, Mary Kibling, who checked the southerly trails and summits that are a good distance from my home in Jefferson.

Now for friends and members of institutions who helped:

Bill Appel of Friends of Pisgah, Vera Smith for Pawtuckaways North Peak, and Julia S. Mawson, former director of Odiorne Point Visitor Center.

Members of the AMCs New Hampshire Chapterthose I have not named, and AMC personnel at Pinkham Notch Visitor Center.

Members of the U.S. Forest Service in all the Ranger Districts of the White Mountain National Forest.

Members of the New Hampshire Department of Parks and Recreation.

Hal and Peggy Graham of Trailwrights, Rob Nesham, Dave and Marita Wright, Roioli Schweiker, Peter Crane, Steve Smith, Ruth and Don MacDougall, Kirk Dougal, and the Over the Hill Hikers of Sandwich, New Hampshire.

Many names, Im afraid, escape me. I extend to those people my gratitude, and conclude with the same for all others too numerous to mention.

Were a letter-writing familyand a letter-saving one. My sister, Penny, treasures especially a letter from Dan, our father, written to her on May 26, 1990, describing a drive he and our stepmother had recently taken and the memories it evoked of a hike hed done after World War II ended.

As usual, he typed his letter and corrected the inevitable typos by hand (he had taught himself to type, and the results were predictable, a family joke). It read:

Im writing to let you know why your father was so much in the mountains. Discounting my youthful entry, in 1945 Claud [Claud Sharps, Dans friend since boyhood and lifelong hiking companion] and I climbed Mount Carrigain and camped out thereabouts, using I presume his gas coupons to get there in the old Mercury. Its the valley and Sawyer River where we camped with Ruthie on her tenth birthday (promised on her March birthday, maybe), when you slid at night out from under the tent, sound asleep.

Well, yesterday Marjorie and I, needing a change of scenery, toured Crawford Notch, and among other former haunts drove up Sawyer River Road and looked for birds and old trailheads, sites of AMC excursions with friends.

But in my mind I was back there in 1945, released from four years of prison in Scott & Williams [the manufacturing plant in Laconia, New Hampshire, where Dan worked for twenty-five years] and that Academy Street houseboth of which had great advantages, such as not being shot or bombed. But hardly any woodsy freedom. It was a very emotional release. I thought yesterday that it must have hooked me into the mountains for life, or revealed their importance.

If youre interested in Carrigain Mountain, see the East Branch Region/Mount Carrigain backpack in 50 Hikes in the White Mountains , Hike 48.

The youthful entry that Dan mentioned in his letter occurred in Orford, New Hampshire. He was born in Summit, New Jersey, in 1914. His father was a Unitarian minister and author. The family moved from Summit to Iowa City, then to Rochester, New York, and then Winchester, Massachusetts. But summers were spent in Orford, where Dans maternal grandmother had been born and branches of the family still lived. Here he and Claud explored the woods and climbed Mount Cube (see Hike 16 in this book) and Smarts Mountain (Hike 47 in this book and Hike 15 in 50 Hikes in the White Mountains ).

In 1929, two years after his fathers death, 15-year-old Dan and his mother moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, and Dan became a permanent resident of New Hampshire. When he turned 16, he got his drivers licensewithout a road test, Dan later wrote. My mother was very lenient about my use of her Ford coupe. Before long I provided transportation to members of the DOC [Dartmouth Outing Club]. This was excitingall those trips to add to my growing exploration of the woods and mountains.