Where: Wachusett Mountain When: 3 May 2021 With: Wilma I had nothing on my schedule, everyone else was busy, and the weather was due to turn stormy later, so I grabbed Wilma for a hike at Wachusett Mountain. I had a vague goal of redlining some trails I hadn't walked before, but the primary priority was to get out and put some more miles on my new hiking boots. I didn't know how much Wilma (two months away from 14 years old) would be able to handle - she'd come up lame in the past after vigorous hikes - and figured we'd just do whatever we could. The ride to the mountain was uneventful, and I pulled into the parking area at the base of the Stage Coach Road trail. It gave us a number of options for routes, but I wasn't sure where I wanted to go. I pulled out my map and decided to continue on a bit further to the Harrington Trail trail head. I'd walked the upper portion of the Harrington before, but not the lower section. It was just a few minutes down the road, a...
In the summer of 1985, at the end of my first week-long vacation from Meditech, I hiked what's known as The Pemi Loop . I wasn't aware that the route had any special significance...it just looked like an interesting loop to spend a few days walking. Sometime on the first day, I summited Bondcliff, one of New Hampshire's 48 4K peaks , and I went on to top seven more 4Ks on that hike. Like the Loop itself, I wasn't aware at the time that those peaks were regarded as anything special. In the years that followed, I climbed more of the 4K mountains, but not as part of any effort to get all 48. I found a mention in these reports from 1991 of specifically "bagging" a 4K peak ( West Bond ) and another in 1999 ( Galehead ), but it wasn't until 2018 that I really began focusing on the list, following a group hike up Mt. Eisenhower that brought my peak total to 20. I'd recently retired and I got inspired. My first priority was three "orphan" peaks...
Where: Mt. Watatic, Wapack/Midstate Trail When: 25 March, 2021 With: Solo I had a new pair of hiking boots to break in, and this seemed like a good place to go. I last visited in 1984 , when I was breaking in a new car. Then, I was driving from the outskirts of Boston. Today's ride was some 30 miles shorter, and took about an hour. The remains of an overnight storm were still around, which worried me a bit because I hadn't brought rain gear, but it cleared up by the time I reached the trailhead. The parking area was different than I recalled - a full-on parking lot vs. the roadside pull-off in the picture from the 1984 hike. I figured I'd either missed the old lot, or my recollection of the location of the old hike was wrong, or perhaps things had changed over the past 37 years, but no matter. I pulled in to a rather muddy spot, laced up my new boots, and was on my way within a few minutes. There were maybe a half dozen other vehicles sharing the lot, and two more came in ...