Woods Wind Wander

One of the things that I have been most excited about on this trip...Well, actually, there are a lot of things that I have been excited about.  But I have been really been looking forward to doing some smaller trips to various parts of New England. Where we stay in New Hampshire (basically the center of the state) we are only about an hour and a half/ two hours away from Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and even, Canada.  Back home I had read a book which talked about hiking Blueberry Mountain, Maine, where the hike is mild and the top and side of the mountain are full of blueberry bushes.  My youngest son, Rhys, loves fruit.  I mean LOVES fruit.  I have memories of him as a toddler eating an entire pint of them in one sitting!  So, I made a note of Blueberry Mountain thinking Rhys would really enjoy plucking fresh ones off of the bushes, and we could see a little bit of Maine.  Yesterday we had hiked East Osceola , and it was also supposed to ...

Not the summit, but still a spectacular view! In somewhat typical fashion for our family (beginning our time in New Hampshire with a bang (read: high mileage)), this trip started out with us attempting back to back 4,000 footers.  Why?  I'm not totally sure.  Perhaps we were feeling energetic having recently arrived, or more likely, the questionable weather forecast forced us to tackle some of our biggest hikes right away, before the impending rain.  Now, I know what you are thinking.  Yes, some hikes are completely doable in rain.  Soft trail, even trails that have tree roots are manageable, but steep and rocky terrain becomes dangerous in wet weather.  As do trails that feature cliffs or are otherwise described as "ledge-y."  I'd imagine that is what actually motivated us to check another of the 48 4,000 footers off of our list so soon: to take the weather out of the equation.   We settled on the East Peak of Mt. Osceola....

The vista from Snows Mountain This fall our trip to the White Mountains started off with some extreme mileage, a twelve mile hike (which is at least extreme to our kids), followed by two 4,000 footers.  Some times it is easy for me to get wrapped up in the "big" things like: how long is the hike, is it a famous/popular hike, is it a 4,000 footer, etc.?  But I've found that the  problem with that sort of focus is that you can potentially exhaust yourself physically and mentally (and your children!), and you tend to overlook some pretty amazing sights.  For instance, the day we drove to New Hampshire we arrived at about 4 p.m.  That is not enough time to do anything "substantial" but we walked from our house down to the river and followed the Mad River Trail for about a mile or 2.  It was gorgeous and the boys absolutely loved being along the water, the crossings, and all the rocks.  We probably would have never considered the hike otherwise.  Anoth...