Mount Jackson: June 4, 2016

Mountain: Mount Jackson
Elevation: 4,052 (New Hampshire's 38th Tallest, New England's 51st Tallest)
Route: Webster-Jackson Trail
Mileage: 1.6 miles from Mizpah Hut to Jackson Summit
Arya's Take: Why do have to stay on the planks?  The bog is so much better!


So our trip up Jackson begins with Arya and I at Mizpah Hut, and me tying her leash to a post in order to zip inside for TWO SECONDS to refill our water.  I didn't even need to use the restroom, so this really would be a surgical strike.

And after verifying that I wouldn't be needing a bunk, the friendly Croomembers got a confused look on their face when they heard the SQUEAKY DEATH YOWL of the dog they didn't know was even there, as Arya was convinced that I was abandoning her tied to that post (I may have commented on this before, but my dog has some breathtaking issues with separation anxiety.  It's kind of a problem that my wife and I need to work on).

After apologizing to the Croo and confirming that yes, that was my dog, I filled up our Nalgenes and headed back outside, to find Arya had looped herself around the signpost I'd tied her to several times, had somehow snagged one of her legs into the leash and snared it, and was furiously attempting to get free and run towards the hut.  I castigated her for making a scene, and when I reached her I realized that she had managed to complicate the simple knot I'd left her with, and the nylon extend-o-leash was seemingly fused together.

As I'd now come back, Arya was raring to go, though it took me like ten goddamn minutes to work the leash to a point where I could untie it.  Teeth and fingernails may have been involved.  After that, we set off up the Webster-Jackson Trail, which while only a mile and change to the top, would by book time take us around an hour.  After all, we had to gain back a sizeable amount of elevation.

We also helped direct a fellow hiker to Mizpah, as he was coming off of Jackson and was a little upset he hadn't found it yet.  I know the feeling well and was happy to let him know he was almost there, and asked about how Jackson was.  He said something about impending clouds, which made me worry about not getting much of a view when we were up there, and he headed off.

Actually it wasn't too bad.  The trail meandered up towards the summit cone, with a few helpful flat sections to give Arya and I a bit of a break, and to let us get a glimpse of how far we'd come, and how far we had to go (being able to see Mizpah during most of the ascent was handy).  This also gave me my second troublesome moment with Arya, as there is a stretch along the Webster-Jackson trail right before the last push to the top, where there is a bog.  It's a nice backcountry scene and very pretty, though it's deep enough that more wooden planks were set up to get us across.

Now Arya is usually a champ at these kinds of crossing (I used to call them Twix Bars as a kid), but they are mostly used on muddy sections where it's not exactly paramount that you stay on them or over streams where it's pretty obvious why you should use them.  On this bog, the ground at least looked solid enough for Arya to wonder why we weren't down on it, and at one juncture she decided to take the low road and leapt off.

I had flashes of the Swamp of Sadness from the Neverending Story, though thankfully one of the advantages of Arya's pack design is that it has a hoist handle on the top.  I flattened myself on the boards and was able to snatch her out of the muck, though her pack and her paws were a little worse for wear for the rest of the hike.  Lesson learned, I guess.

After the swamp adventure, we started to peak through the scrub ever so gradually, passing more hikers as the day wore on, as not everyone probably got as early a start as we did.  Arya did great over the rocks at treeline again (really, she's like a mountain goat).  I had to pause every now and then to rest my legs, as Jackson's summit really does get quite steep right at the end, being another thing that I'd forgotten about from when we'd turned that three-day trip into a two-day at summer camp.  Once we emerged at the summit, I was able to see what our passerby meant by incoming, as what had been nice and sunny through the morning on Pierce was starting to turn a not-quite-ominous-but-still-noteworthy grey, and the Northern Prezzies looked like they might get some rain after all.

We had the summit to ourselves for a few minutes and I was able to snap some pictures of Arya (one of which may or may not be the desktop background for my computer at work).  After a bit we were joined by another hiker ascending from the other side of the summit, who chatted with us for a bit on how the day had been and where we were headed.  It turns out that he was also peak-bagging, but having already completed the New Hampshire 48 (and not having a dog to bag with), he had settled on the idea of doing each of the 48 in every month.  That is, hike all 48 in the month of January, hike all of them in February, and so on.

Not that he was trying to hike 4 mountains in 30 days or anything; he was trying to get as many as he could for June, but he had a grid that he could mark off so that next June he knew where he'd left off.  A pretty clever idea, I'll grant him, but a little bit bonkers as well.  I know that as someone who finished the 48 and then basically stopped hiking for a decade that might come off as a bit callous, but it doesn't strike me that you'd be able to really enjoy them if you had to work so hard at making it a challenge for yourself.  At least, it would for me.

After splitting a Nature Valley granola bar with Arya, we packed up our stuff and headed back down towards Crawford Notch, aiming to get back down to the car around 12:30 or so.  I was met with the same steepness of the summit cone going down, though, and we had to take it easy to start off with.  This part of the Webster-Jackson trail around the summit is really, really steep at times, with large rock formations and boulders making easy going basically impossible.  I remembered coming up this way many times, both as a kid and as a camp counselor, and knew that it would be a while until Arya and I would be able to get some nice strides under us.  It also drops away from treeline rather suddenly, too, so we'd have to enjoy the views of the notch while we could.

Apart from that, though, I was reminded why we usually chose this route up Jackson when planning trips at camp.  Arya and I passed some nice hiker right as the steep stuff ended (I remarked on a Snowbird t shirt one of them was wearing, because My God what a nice ski area), and as we were approaching the middle of the day, more and more seemed to be starting up.  The rest of the trail was a nice grade through moderate scrub, eventually evening out into the pine forest and moss that typifies most of the White Mountains.  Arya did her thing of mostly staying on the trail, though as the trees started to thin out a bit (and turn back to deciduous ones) she did get herself tangled a couple of times, and snag her pack on a branch.  It exacerbated a previous tear along one of the seams, to the point where you could see her food and water even when the pack was zipped.  I tried to apply some duct tape to it, though it didn't really stick, and I gave up after about five minutes and vowed that I'd fix it later (spoiler alert: I did not).

Arya took the opportunity of an open pack to go swimming in the Flum Cascade Brook, ensuring that her remaining dog food was reduced to a brown mush that was super fun  to clean out at the end of the day.  I guess it was a testament to how much hiking we'd ended up doing that she uncharacteristically took every chance she could to go swimming.  Or, at least wade up to her chest.

We reached the spur for Elephant Head not a moment too soon, as I was getting both hungry and tired, and was ready to get in the car and take my boots off.  From there, we emerged onto US 302, right by Saco Lake (headwaters of the eponymous river that bends through New Hampshire to coastal Maine), and Arya went for another dip.  I also started to get a little nervous, as my original plan to walk along 302 to the Crawford Depot had not taken into account the idea that the parking lot our car was in was now full, and people had taken (as they often do around peak hiking hours) to parking along the side of the road.  So not only would we have to walk several hundred yards along a semi-busy stretch of road, but we wouldn't even really be afforded the breakdown lane.

But it wasn't anything that ended up being a problem.  After her swim, Arya calmed down, and I locked the extend-o-leash into its shortest length, and we prattled along.  We even had some company, as a family with small kids was heading from Elephant Head to the Depot too, so if drivers wouldn't stop for the 30-something with a dog, maybe they would for the 30-somethings with toddlers.  Useful, that.  There were also a fair number of people taking a cut-off trail around Saco Lake in the woods, and I briefly thought of doing so as well to avoid the road, though I saw several people running the trail, and figured we would just get in their way.  The only tenuous bit was waiting for a large enough gap in traffic both ways to cross 302 to the car (the AMC Highland Center near the Depot has really become a destination in its own right), and before long we were on our way back to Vermont, windows cracked to help with the smell, and the Hamilton Original Cast Recording blaring.

Up next, the ultimate anti-climax.

-M