We spent a magical day in the mountains this weekend. All the more magical for me, because I haven’t been in the mountains in way too long at this point.
Getting our elevation legs back is just a good excuse to schedule too many trips into the White Mountains over the next few months. We decided to start with something a little less steep, less long, less grueling – the Pumpelly Trail to Monadnock it was.
Monadnock isn’t my first choice on a regular day – true to it’s reputation, even on the worst days, the summit can be pretty packed full of people. But most folks opt to go up the White Dot/White Cross trail that starts in the southeast corner of the mountain. At 3.7 miles round trip, it’s a pretty accessible hike, albeit with some pretty serious steep sections. The last time we did a snow hike to Monadnock, we chose White Dot and it was a layer of powdery snow over a sheet of ice, all the way up.
The Pumpelly trail starts at the northeast corner of Monadnock’s base, a trailhead that’s barely a clearing between a few houses on a residential road, and marked with a tiny sign that you can’t even see from the street. We were lucky that a few cars haphazardly balanced on the shoulder snow drifts marked the spot. Pumpelly rises much more gradually to the summit, covering 4.5 miles in one direction, and treating you to a couple false summits along the way. For us, it was perfect to test out the legs for tweaks and see if they’d last the day.
I skied when I was younger, but it’s been at least 10 years now, and the thing I miss most about it is getting off the lift at the top of the mountain and seeing all the crystalline trees, iced over and sparkling like a glass-spun forest. It’s scenery like you never see at sea-level, and we got a taste of it again this weekend. Like walking out of a drab New England wardrobe and into Narnia.
We didn’t actually make it to the summit. The ethereal, light, fluffy snow that had been dusting us brought along a dense grey cloud that obscured basically everything. So after hitting on more vista, we made it to the sign below and decided it was prudent to turn around.
No regrets. It was a beautiful day with breath taking views and a great first hike to get back into it.
On to the next one!
