Owl's Head: It's a Hoot!
There comes a time in every peakbagger's life when they must contemplate hitting a remote peak. For those tackling the New Hampshire 48 4,000 footers, that's Owl's Head.
Sure, it's a mere 4,025 feet. But it's smack dab in the middle of the Pemigewasset Wilderness and the traditional route ends up being an 18 mile day.
This was a peak that psyched me out. It's not well-traveled, there aren't a myriad of trails to choose from and there's very little chatter about it on the hiker bulletin boards. So tracking down beta or photos isn't the easiest to come by. Instead, you hear tales, snippets of information, _ and my imagination runs wild. The slide trail was my biggest fear. I'd never done a "real" slide before, and the few pictures I did see made it appear as though it was so exposed that one tiny slip would send you tumbling off a mountain.
My original plan was to hike to the 13 Falls tentsite to the north of Owl's Head, deep in the heart of the Pemigewasset, then hike down Lincoln Brook Trail the next day to meet up with SherpaK at the base of the slide. But the more I thought of it, the less it appealed to me to do any solo hiking. I really wanted to do the entire hike with Sherpa, to have time with a friend to gab along the way.
I tracked him down and we made arrangements to get an early start the next morning.
We got going around 6:30 a.m. on the Lincoln Woods Trail, a flat old rail bed that seemingly goes on forever. Now, this can be a tough mental exercise; ups and downs on a trail occupy my mind, but plain flatness becomes monotonous. And I remembered how the last few times I'd been on this trail, it became unbearable.
But we focused on boogying down this trail, getting the blood flowing. And within an hour, we'd made it to the Black Pond Trail.
Black Pond looked like a sweet spot to set up camp, but long ago, the lean-to had been taken down. We took a break here and admired one particularly big leach that wiggled among the rocks on the edge of the pond. Small salamanders bounded about the water. We hoped to spy a moose, but none ventured there on this morning.
Here's where the fun began: a bushwack through mud, spruce, roots, rocks and deep into the woods to cut off some mileage from the hike. It was amazing to think that not too many humans had been through here _ at least not enough to create a trail. We went past huge boulders covered in moss, the remnants of the ice age. And we frequently sunk up past our ankles in mud. My brand new canvas Asolo boots looked ages old at the end of it! Armed with a GPS unit and a trusty compass, we hooked up with the Lincoln Brook Trail and relished the idea of being on a well-tread path instead of breaking trail.
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