The Getaway

Cranky and I managed to get away for a couple of days for some great hiking! My mother is in town, driving me absolutely nuts, but she agreed to take care of the kids so we could go up to the White Mountains. It's only an hour and a half away, and we left Friday morning. When we arrived, we hiked up to Franconia Falls. This was our warmup hike to check out our boots and day-hike gear, as this was an easy trail. Once at the Falls, the sky opened up and we got to try out our ponchos! We sat under some trees that were providing a nice natural canopy and ate our lunch. The rain slowed and we made our way back to the Ranger station, making it 6.8 miles roundtrip. While looking at some maps to decide our next hike, the rain picked up again. We decided to call it a day and went to our hotel.

We stayed at a hotel on Loon Mountain, a ski area. It was a nice place to stay and we made plans for a more challenging hike the next day. Before hiking, I talked Cranky into going up the gondola to check out the view:

This picture was taken on the way back down. Cranky was itching to get on with our hike so of course the gondola stopped and we sat there, roasting for an extra 20 minutes. After finally reaching the bottom, we jumped in the car and headed for Mt. Hancock.

We parked at the Hancock trail head and cranked some tunes while lacing up our boots. We double-checked our gear and headed out. The trail started of rather easy for the first 2.4 miles, then became a little more challenging for the next mile or so, with several river crossings that were a little bit tricky. We headed for the North peak first which was a very steep .7 mile climb. Here's a picture I took of Cranky going up:

In the same spot, Cranky took this of me looking back down the trail:

The North summit was our first official 4000+ ft. peak we've conquered. There are 48 mountains above 4000 feet in NH and we hope to climb all of them. This one was 4400 feet and the South peak is 4274 feet. After a quick lunch with some fellow hikers, we headed to the South peak. It was only 1.5 miles away and not a bad hike, except that is started to rain. Argghh! The weather forecast was for mostly sunny skies! We donned the ponchos and continued. After checking out the South peak, we headed back down the mountain. It was a steep half mile, though not as bad as the trail up the North peak. The whole hike was 9.4 miles, with a total climb of nearly 3000 feet, and we checked off 2 of the 48 peaks on the list. It took us 5 1/2 hours, including lunch and photo stops.

We drove back home to reality, arriving at dinner time.

This morning, Cranky saw this deer walking up our driveway. It's the same color as our silly dog and it caught his eye. I guess we had some delicious leaves on our trees! I took this picture from an upstairs window. At this point the deer was on to us and was looking toward the house.

That's all for now. Time to take the kids to the beach...