Date: 2017-07-23
From: Jeffers Brook Shelter

To: Kinsman Notch
Miles today: 8.4

We got moving early this morning, before most of camp was awake, including Rebel Bear and Woodstock. Though we had technically entered the Whites yesterday (actually... I think we've been in White Mountain National Forest since just after Vermont, but whatever), today would be our first taste of the mountains. We headed up and out of camp, Lost leaving a couple minutes ahead of me while I finished packing, distance that I'd close as soon as the hill started. Just up the trail from camp I got waylay-ed by some raspberry bushes on the side of a short roadwalk and ate as many as I could find for a while. The bushes picked as bare as I could manage without wading into the thorny middle, I continued on, though had trouble finding the trail. I headed a bit farther up the road and then turned into a small parking lot at a trail head, but for the life of me I couldn't find a blaze. I ended up headed back down the road, back to the raspberry bushes, where I found a blaze painted onto the road directing hikers into the woods. I look up at the blaze just up the road, which I had followed, confused, before realizing that that wasn't in fact a blaze. I think it was just intended as a road reflector. But it was the right size and shape, and it was visible from the trail. Of course, had I been on the trail and not across the street picking raspberries I would've hit this first blaze before getting to the reflector blaze, but anyways.Back on track the trail headed through some fields filled with tall grass and then into the woods and started climbing. I passed a junction for another trail which the sign indicated led to the summit of Moosilauke, but in double the distance. Guess which way the AT went? The steeper one. So up I went. I caught up to Lost shortly after and hiked with her as we pulled ourselves up the mountain. We put on my Disney playlist and tried to have a sing-along, to distract from the hill we were climbing, but with the climb won as it had taken all of our breath and we didn't have enough left to make sound that actually resembled singing. So it turned into kinda a talk-along. We climbed slowly but could see our progress by glimpsing back behind us through the trees as we first surpassed the surrounding mountains and then the lower peaks of Moosilauke. Eventually the trail met up with the carriage road, a wonderfully flat piece of trail which connected the two summits of the mountain (and presumably connected to somewhere carriage accessible down the mountain, but who knows). This was probably the best trail we had hiked in 500miles... wide, flat, slightly muddy but not deep enough that you actually had to worry about it, and with fantastic views out to our right side through the short trees struggling to survive up here. From our position we could see our goal up ahead, the summit of the mountain, and the trail that we'd take up there winding through the pockets of brush and trees which existed in sheltered hollows of the summit terrain. The trail up here was marked with carins, some taller than Lost, since the trees could not bear any blazes. The summit of the mountain was marked simply with a sign proclaiming the elevation, stuck into a crack in the rocks, and all around the landscape laid out before us. Wispy white clouds flowed through the steep-sided valleys which separated the titanic hunks of rock which jutted into the sky and on which we now stood. The sun shown and even on this calm morning the wind blew enough that we took cover behind one of the small rock snowball-forts that had been erected by hikers over the years in the same position as we. We enjoyed a snack and Lost joked that she couldn't show the summit picture to her friends at home because they, being from Colorado, would make fun of her and dispute calling a 4000ft peak a mountain at all. There were a couple of other hikers up on the summit on this beautiful morning, but thankfully not too many and everyone took in the scenery peacefully. We eventually got moving, having only a couple hours to get down the other side of this mountain before my friend was to pick us up. It was a little sad to dive back into the tree-line and loose the fantastic views of the Whites to our east and the flat terrain (at least compared to the Whites) to our West, but we kept moving downhill and started passing a ton of people heading up. It was obvious that it was a weekend from the sheer quantity of hikers this morning, and I was very glad we had summitted as early as we had and avoided the crowds which would be forming at the top. We passed a couple people and in a brief exchange they lamented how there was no warm up period for this hike... they left the parking lot and immediately started going straight up, which we found funny. Soon, the trail turned steep and we started descending in earnest, having to pick our steps carefully and use the surrounding trees for support. The trail followed a stream down which turned into waterfalls every so often but the water flowing off the mountain left the rocks the trail traversed wet and fairly slick. The trail maintainers had mounted wooden steps to some of the steeper faces by driving giant bolts into the rock, but using the slim steps with no handholds the descent still felt precarious despite their best efforts. On the way down I met a family on a day hike, sitting and enjoying a waterfall. I got to talking with them, while I waited for Lost, and they were super curious about the details of thru hiking... how did I get food, how did I not have to work, where my trail name came from, etc and I was happy to answer as the father tried to egg his son into saying he wanted to thru hike. They were fun to talk to and ended up pulling a beer out of the lunch they had packed and gave it to me, which I very much appreciated and Lost looked a little jealous of as she passed by. It pays to be friendly! And hike fast and take breaks...The family continued up the mountain and I down it, but I instantly realized that I couldn't descend and hold a beer at the same time, not while walking down the widely spaced and somewhat slick wooden blocks that were serving as steps. I took a few more minutes to enjoy the falls, finished half the beer, dumped the rest into an empty water bottle, and continued down to catch up with Lost. She gladly accepted the rest of the beer, having not wanted to jump into the conversation with the family to try to get her own beer, though we both agreed that drinking beer from a water bottle was not the ideal way to consume it.The descent ended up taking a couple hours, longer than I was hoping, but it all worked out because my friend ended up running into traffic and being late. Lost and I got to the road about 30min before she was expect to arrive and so walked down the road a quarter of a mile to a scenic overlook/pond where we laid our stuff out on a picnic table to dry. We both waded into the pond and washed off a bit, hoping to knock down some of the hiker stank before my friend arrived. The sun felt great as we dried off and we were intentionally oblivious to the looks from the day visitors were around for this, though a couple of them were familiar with thru hiking and joked about it with us as we waited. My friend said that she drove a Subaru, which turned out to not be a very helpful description as almost every other car that pulled into the lot ended up being a Subaru, but it was easy enough to pick her out when she arrived. We drove back to Southern NH with her, stopping at a grocery store to resupply and get ingredients for dinner. Once home, showers we had and she offered spare clothes to wear while we did laundry. Lost and I tried to help cook, but she had it covered, and whipped up some pasta and homemade, family recipe pasta sauce