This year’s hike was bittersweet. Everyone was in NH preparing for and celebrating the life of Mom who passed away in April. In turned out to be a loving tribute to Mom with many friends and family travelling from all over, coming together, and sharing in the love she gave so many.
Jacob and Lauren came up a week prior to the celebration. We got a break in the record rainfall NH had in the month of July in order to get in a hike and knock off a couple peaks from out list. There had been torrential rain a couple days prior and the entire month it rained every other day, so we figure the trails would be wet. What I didn’t count on was that everyone else was waiting for a decent weather day to get out…including the umpteen teen camps in NH for the summer.
I’m glad Jacob was still willing to do these hikes with me. He seems to enjoy it, even though it is quite a workout. He is 18 turning 19 in October and will be heading to UVA in a couple of weeks. I won’t see as much of him anymore but I hope he will keep these father-son outings going each summer so we can finish what we started. My goal is to finish the summer he finishes college. Hopefully we can make that happen but will have to get in multiple hikes each of the next summers. Doing only one hike in a summer won’t let us complete the list in the next 4 summers.
There wasn’t a lot of planning for this trip, we chose Flume-Liberty loop because it was close (only 30 minutes from sister house in Campton). The books warned that if we were doing a loop, to go up Flume Slide Tr as coming down that trail in other direction is very dangerous. That would be an understatement on a day were ascending Flume Slide Tr was treacherous. Descending would have been impossible. We didn’t leave Campton til around 8:45 and we stopped at Chesley’s convenience store to get some munchies for the top of the trail. In addition to the eight 12 oz bottles of water, we added a Gatorade, cheese, nuts, energy bar, etc. We both had light backpacks for the 6.5 hour 10.1 mile roundtrip hike. The weather was beautiful with cooler morning temperatures still hanging around and a high at the trailhead that day of maybe 75. The top of the mountains were colder with a 5-10mph breeze, but we didn’t mind with our bodies hot from the hiking.
At the Liberty Springs Tr parking lot at 9:30, the lot was surprisingly only half full. When we got out of the car I heard “Hello Mr. Chesley”. For the life of me I couldn’t imagine who would be calling me that up in the mountains of NH. It was a teenage girl about 25 feet away and for the life of me I didn’t know who it was. Jacob helped me out and told me it was Jack Zoltak’s sister. She and Jack had been coming to NH summer camps since kids and Jack was now a counselor, his sister was doing a hike but I don’t think it was the Mt Flume hike. We shared a few words and got on our way at 9:50, after I had a call from the minister for Mom’s graveside.
We walked the 0.9 miles on a flat trail from the parking lot to the Liberty Springs Tr. This walk was along the upper Pemi river. This is at an altitude of 1411 feet, it would be 2900 more feet to top of Mt. Flume. When we reached the Liberty Springs Tr. this is actually an intersection with the Appalachian Tr which crosses the road and follows the Liberty Springs Tr. up to the top of the Franconia Ridge just down from the summit of Mt. Liberty. At the top of the ridge the AT will head in the opposite direction from Liberty and Flume and will go over to Jackson and Lafayette. We would leave the AT and the Liberty Springs Tr. in another 0.6 miles to head up the Flume Slide Tr. to Mt. Flume. It would be 3.3 mi from this intersection to Mt. Flume
As we started up the Flume Slide Tr. we met a young woman who passed by us. We ended up hiking with her for the first mile and having a good chat. She had been in Jupiter FL with a boyfriend that was a professional golfer during the past 6 months. She was from up in NH graduating from St. Anslems and had done quite a bit of hiking of the 4000 footers and working on completing her 3rd set of all 48 4000 footers. She was in shape and moving fast, when I stopped to get a drink of water and cross a stream, she left us in the dust. At this point the trail started to steepen and Jacob took the lead and set a fast pace. I was feeling pretty good even though it had been only 2 months since I recovered from the pneumonia and COVID.
We had two different large groups of boys from camps come up behind us and we made the mistake of letting them go by us when we stopped to rest and get water. Soon the trail steepened into its name sake of a Slide of very steep difficult to climb we rocks. The young boys seemed to be a little out of their league and thankfully they were being extra cautious figuring out footholds to get up the slide without someone getting seriously injured. This held us up quite a bit as we were at the end of all these boys and stood around for a while waiting on them. The last mile of this slide was probably the toughest we had done. From 3000 feet to the top at 4300 feet. While we had seen trails just as steep for a mile, when hadn’t been on one that was steep and large wet rocks for an extended period of time. Many places required tiny footholds and almost laying on the rocks as you traverse across and up. Finding hand and footholds was tricky.
About halfway up the slide the leader of line of boys got them off of the trail…I don’t think the leader was a counselor but just one of the teen campers. When we followed them up, I recognized they were no longer on the trail and told the counselor who was directly in front of us and bringing up the rear of the boys. We continued to the right up the trail and I’m not sure what the counselor did with the boys who had already gone a ways up the wrong path and would have been difficult to come back down…maybe they figured another path back on to the trail, we would not see them again.
Mt Liberty in the background
We made it to the top of Mt. Flume (4318 ft.) at 12:10 for a 2:40 hike from the parking lot. I couldn’t find a marker for the top of the mountain and there wasn’t a sign up there either. There were a lot of people up there milling about and many looked like kids from camps. The sky was clear and there was a good breeze. We were exhausted from the tough climb, sweating and soaked. We had lunch there because we needed the rest but as soon as we ate we headed out of the crowd and over to Mt Liberty which was very clear from the top of Mt. Flume. It was a beautiful day with visibility unlimited. The Presidentials to the East and all the other White mountains ranges spread out around us. Unfortunately I didn’t have a map to point out all the mountains we would see of which many we had already climbed.
We made it the 1.3 mi over to Mt Liberty (4439 ft.) at 1:15 pm…about 45 minutes for the down and back up from Mt. Flume
It was beautiful on the top of Liberty and there was a little more room to spread out but there were still a lot of hikers hanging out. This was a day we should have been relaxing up there for 30 minutes or so, but we wanted to get back down and back to my sisters for dinner that night. We headed down Mt. Liberty for the 0.3 miles along the Franconia Ridge Tr to the intersection of the Liberty Springs Tr (AT) at 1:40 pm.
Starting down the Liberty Springs Tr after about 0.3 mi we came upon the Liberty Springs tent site. These are wooden platforms for setting up tents. There was fresh water coming out of a spring and there was a building with a caretaker. Not sure if AT thru-hikers used it, but we would see camp groups coming up the trail who were headed to the tent site to stay for the night.
Jacob and I didn’t do much talking on the way down. We were beat from the climb and his thighs were killing him and my knees, achilles, calves, and shins were aching from the down stepping on all the rocks. It was 2.3 miles from the tent site back to the junction of the Flume Slide Tr we had cut off on in the morning. We would get there at 3:18 pm.
It took us 40 more minutes to get from the junction of Flume Slide Tr and cover the 1.5 mi back to the parking lot. Jacob was really dragging that last 0.9 mile flat walk to the car…he was beat. We arrived at the car at 4:00 pm and before I pulled out of the parking lot, he was asleep!
Not a flattering picture. The wound on the bridge of his nose was from trying to do a back flip off of a rope swing when we walked the Smarts Brook trail with Jennifer and Aunt Jamie two days prior.
An interesting observation, I was wearing my Apple Watch this trip and I had my heart beat on the steep parts of the Flume Slide Tr in the mid 150’s for most of that mile, but more interesting was that the Apple watch had me travelling much further than the hiking books said the trails were. I assume this is because when you hike you don’t go in a straight line and often go side to side on the trail or maybe the watch counts extra distance from up and down and the hiking trails measure it as if there was a wheel rolling in a plane above the terrain? I’m not sure but the distance can be significant. For example, from Mt. Liberty travelling downhill to the junction of the Flume Slide Tr the hiking books said that was 2.6 miles but my watch said I had travelled 3.0 miles. Similar things were observed climbing uphill.