Mount Pierce: June 4, 2016

Mountain: Mount Pierce
Elevation: 4,310 (New Hampshire's 27th Tallest, New England's 30th Tallest)
Route: Crawford Path
Mileage: 3.0 miles
Arya's Take: Was that it?

With the season underway after Mount Passaconaway, I wanted to set my sights for Arya and I on some bigger and better things.  After some contemplation (and using the fantastic build-a-trip tools offered by the online version of the White Mountain Guide) I decided on attempting Mounts Pierce and Jackson in one day.  First, they are some nice and very accessible peaks in the Southern Presidentials, and Crawford Notch is not too far from my house in Vermont to be beyond reason (just about two hours!).  If we planned right and were able to get out early enough, we might even be home at a reasonable hour.

I'm really quite familiar with Crawford Notch, having led many a summer camp trip on its various trails, and so it intrigued me to do a bit of intermediate car-stashing.  See, the most direct way up Pierce, the Crawford Path, has its trailhead only a couple hundred yards from the Crawford Depot, a stop on the Conway Scenic Railway.  The Crawford Depot, then, is only a couple hundred yards from a rock formation called Elephant Head and the start of the Webster-Jackson Trail, which as you would expect leads to the summit of Mount Jackson.  From other summer camp hikes, I knew that Pierce and Jackson are connected via the Webster Cliff Trail, and that I'd be able to stop off at the Mizpah Spring AMC Hut for my troubles.  So, after plotting the timing and making sure it'd all work (Arya being a nutjob along US Route 302 and getting hit by a car was my primary worry with the distances between my car and the trailheads), we headed off from home with an ETA in Crawford Notch of 6:30, and a start at the Crawford Path by quarter to 7.

And I really have to hand it to the AMC in general and to Abel and Ethan Allen Crawford in particular, who (as I've briefly mentioned previously) cut their trail in 1819, making it the oldest continuously used hiking trail in the United States.  The signage getting from one part of the notch to another is first rate (see, I could have made a top-notch pun there, but I didn't), and you always know how best to get from point A to point B.  And second, the Crawford Path is a fantastically well-thought out trail that not only gets you to the highest points in the Whites, but gets you there in style.  This actually is because it's not only been around for the better part of two centuries, but it was actually widened into a bridle path in the 1840s.  It's not terribly steep, it's nice and wide, and it really is the best way to do a Presidentials traverse (more on that in a bit).

The morning was clear and still, with nary even a breeze to speak of until we started gaining more elevation.  In fact, in a reversal of my usual bitching about being painfully aware of gaining our elevation, the Crawford Path meandered up the side of Mount Pierce, to the point that I was surprised when we started emerging from the scrub to the treeline.  

I couldn't really speak to my memory of Pierce either, as it has an unfortunate position as one of the "also-rans" of the Presidentials.  Don't get me wrong, it's a nice little hike, but it's situated between Mount Eisenhower which, as chronicled previously, is a prominent and easily accessible peak, and Mount Jackson which, as the southern-most and smallest Presidential, is a popular climb in and of itself.  Pierce is just kind of...there.  A mountain most people only climb in conjunction with Eisenhower or Jackson, or as part of that full traverse. And that's not really fair, I guess, since it's a fun climb on its own.


I mean, part of me feels like this is perfect for a mountain named after one of our most forgettable Presidents.  I bet if you asked the average person, they wouldn't even be able to tell you that Franklin Pierce was a president, let alone anything substantive about his administration.  My memory tends to lump him in with the other Antebellum one-termers who all tried their hardest not to get stuck with the looming Civil War hot potato.  You would think that as the only President who hailed from New Hampshire his home state would give him a more impressive mountain, but maybe they're just being realistic.  That, and with the names of the surrounding peaks, it's obvious that most of them were named by the mid-19th century, as if given the full list of names today, there's no WAY they would waste a Presidential Peak on Pierce.

There's even some dispute as to the name, actually, because when the original surveyors were naming the Presidentials, there weren't enough Presidents yet to name all the peaks.  That's why Mount Clay is named after a Speaker of the House, and Mount Eisenhower was actually Mount Pleasant (an apt name for a lovely hike) until the 1960s, when they honored Ike after his death.  In fact, it's still called Pleasant on the original 4,000 big board that my dad made when he was a teenager.  Along the same lines, Mount Pierce was called Mount Clinton initially, named after New York Governor DeWitt Clinton.  Of course, when we hiked Eisenhower and Pierce in 1993, I asked my dad why they renamed it since it was already named after a President, because I was an idiot.  To this day the jury is undecided as to what the official official name is, and a lot of people end up calling it "Pierce-Clinton" as a compromise.  But nuts to that, DeWitt Clinton wasn't a President, so to me it's Mount Pierce.

Once we got to treeline, Arya and I were able to see the rest of the Presidentials to our North, and we left the Crawford Path for a spur to the summit, where we'd catch the Webster Cliff Trail.  Clouds were starting to form that would impact some of our views for the rest of the day (though nothing more than that, thankfully), and we passed a nice family of hikers coming down from Pierce on our way up.  Once we got there and had found the USGS marker, I gave Arya a little bit to eat and had some GORP myself, and chatted with another group who were stretching their legs.  After a few minutes I discovered they were hiking through, and were attempting to bag all of the Presidentials in one day.

This struck me as a bit odd at first, as most Prezzie Traverses I'd heard of go North-to-South, getting most of the elevation gain out of the way quickly, and enjoying a long descent after Washington (this is how I'd always done it on multi-day hikes at summer camp, too).  That's when they let me know the best part:  They were actually one group of two, all friends who decided to do a Traverse, and they were racing against each other.

This is awesome.  First, not only for the sport of it, but it was clear that my temporary companions had every intention of going balls to the wall (hence the leg stretching), so that they could meet their friends more than halfway along the ridge, for bragging rights.  In addition to being kind of jealous, I thought back to the group of friends I'd done the Franks with, and started dividing us up into teams on a hypothetical Competitive Hike.  I thought maybe grouping the siblings together at first, but then thought that it'd be more fun if I my younger brother and I were on opposite teams, if we ever do something like this.  As they packed up and headed off to Eisenhower, I asked them how they solved the car-stashing problem (that had caused so many headaches for me on the Franks day).  They simply said that they cut the Gordian Knot on that one, and had not stashed cars.  One group went in one car, the next went in another, and when they meet on the trail and find out who's ahead, they'd swap car keys.  Genius, I tell you.

After they left Arya was beginning to get restless again, and we set out down the Webster Cliff Trail towards Mizpah Spring Hut.  Some other hikers hollered after me when we left, though, as they'd noticed I'd left my hiking pole behind (as I'd set it down when I attempted to have them take our picture.  Arya was less than cooperative).  I thanked them profusely, as it would have been pretty much murder on my knee to descend to the Hut without it, and we backtracked a bit to get back on course.

The descent was actually not to bad, all things considered, and we didn't lose quite as much elevation as I was fearing we would.  I have only a glimmer of a memory of getting to the Mizpah Hut, as when I'd done this particular part of the Prezzies as a teenager, the trip we were on from camp decided to stretch ourselves, and try and complete a planned three-day trip in two days.  We'd started up Adams and stayed at Crag Camp the first night, with the second planned day being from there, across the rest of the ridge to Mizpah, where we were supposed to camp at one of their tent platforms.  For reasons I'm not quite clear on, we were able to convince the counselor in charge (I was 15 and part of the oldest group of campers) that we should just keep on going up and over Jackson, getting back to the Crawford Depot and calling the camp to come pick us up.  We made this decision in the mid-afternoon, and ended up cooking dinner by Saco Lake waiting for the bus.

Now, let me say that the camp administrators were NOT PLEASED.  The trips they coordinated were planned precisely to make sure that they had buses and vans where they needed to be, and they hadn't expected us until the next day.  After what I can only imagine was a very heated discussion with our counselors, they drove us back to camp and made us sleep in tents on the other side of the lake it was on.  So, even though I *had* seen Mizpah before, I really only remember blowing by it on our quest to one-up the other campers on three day trips.

And heading down to the hut, Arya and I found that the trail got fairly steep, fairly fast.  I mean, it wasn't anything to the degree of the East Osceola chimney, but the trail ended up heading diagonally down the slope, and in several places the AMC even put down wooden planks to walk along, as the ground was too steep to comfortably walk on.

At any rate, we eventually hit the hut clearing, and I was able to fill up my canteens with some nice cold water, before digging into an early lunch and considering my options for scaling Jackson.  And while unfortunately the Mizpah Croo had not made fresh pancakes like their Greenleaf counterparts when we were doing the Franks, they were nice and friendly, if a little concerned that I was planning on spending the night, having arrived mid-morning.

Also, as the picture shows, I had to leave Arya outside, as the High Huts don't allow dogs (the bastards).  When I've been hiking with her at other huts in the past, I was always able to hand her off to a companion in order to use the restroom or get water, though I didn't have that luxury this time around.  So, not quite knowing what to do, I tied Arya's leash around a signpost, and headed inside.  This, as it turns out, was not a great idea on my part.

But I think I'll save that for the Jackson post!

-M