kinsman notch to woodstock, nh

we were able to sleep through the night unmolested by park rangers. i slept pretty well. there was a nice cool breeze all night which kept any dew from saturating my tent.

i packed up and headed across the parking lot to the picnic table for breakfast. everyone was commenting on the cold, but i hadn’t really noticed.

maestro and i were ready about the same time, so we headed out together and ended up hiking the entire day. while the mileage on the day was low, 16.4 miles, the grade made it a really tough day.

all the hiking was spectacular however. the trail was challenging. at times i was having to use all four limbs to get up and over huge boulders. we discovered that the GPS coordinates must be mapped on a flattened plane when we checked to see how far we were from a mountaintop our GPS reported accurately .6 mile. we hiked for a solid 10 minutes covering quite a lot of ground, but quite steep and when we checked again, we had only gone .1 mile!

mt. wolf was our first peak, but it’s summit was overgrown with trees.

then we descended into some fantastically beautiful terrain on our way to the kinsman summits. we stopped briefly at eliza brook shelter for a snack. kick caught up to us and stayed with us for the rest of the day. the trail followed eliza brook for quite a time and we hiked past one waterfall after another.

we reached what i thought was south kinsman and snapped some obligatory photos.

i was glad i thought it was the summit because the actual summit which was oy 5 minutes away was again overgrown with trees. the three of us then had to do more steep descent and steep ascent to get to north kinsman. here again the actual summit didn’t have a view, but there was a lookout just below it.

as we were leaving, lyric and rocket showed up. we headed a half mile down trail to kinsman pond shelter for lunch. we had hoped there would be less muggles there, but it wasn’t the case.

after lunch it was a long arduous descent to a parking lot near where the AT crosses 93. maestro had a fall and then smashed his shin and the knee he hurt in the fall on a downed tree. there was some swearing and it definitely sapped his spirit. when we crossed under 93 and discovered the parking lot was an additional .6 mile off trail he looked pretty bad.

we made it to the parking lot and went out to the road to get a hitch. in about 10 minutes a guy by the name of rick stopped to pick us up. he brought us into lincoln to the price chopper to do our resupply, and then he waited for us, brought us to the outfitter, and then drove us across town to our hostel! amazing!

the hostel is like a dorm. there are rooms each stuffed with bunks. none of them are long enough for me, but the mattresses are comfy. rocket and lyric were already here when we arrived. rocket got a ride from a friend, and lyric got a hitch a little after us, but headed straight to the hostel without resupplying. bugs arrived a while later. she apparently had a slow day on trail.

some additional images from today: