17 Mar 2021 North and South Kinsmen day hike

Bits

• Pho­tos: Photo gal­lery
• Trail: Mt Kins­man Trail, Ap­palachi­an Trail (out and back)
• Trail­head: Mt Kins­man Trail­head, Rt 116, NH
• Mileage: 9.9 miles
• Hik­ing time: 4.5 hours hik­ing, 6 hours on trail
• Weath­er: 20 de­grees to 50 de­grees, clear, sunny, calm
• Con­di­tions: Packed snow on the way up, need­ing only mi­cros­pikes. A little muddy at the end on the way down.

Journal

Bri­an, who had been watch­ing the weath­er, some­how talked me in­to go­ing on a mid-week day hike up in NH. In ret­ro­spect, I prob­ably wasn’t that dif­fi­cult to con­vince.

The idea was to go up and vis­it the North and South Kins­man peaks, since we’d had to skip them on our last at­tempt back in Novem­ber due to dan­ger­ous con­di­tions. I plot­ted a route up from the west side of the ridge this time so that we could see en­tirely dif­fer­ent ter­rain.

In our usu­al pan­dem­ic hik­ing mode, we drove up sep­ar­ately early in the morn­ing, meet­ing at the trail­head at about 8:20. I was a little late since I’d de­toured via the Moon Diner in Lin­coln…. couldn’t res­ist pick­ing up some treats for our lunch on the sum­mit.

(Sigh. Yeah. We have a “usu­al pan­dem­ic hik­ing mode”, and don’t even have to talk about it at this point. For the re­cord: the US just hit the year-long mark, and we’re not out of the woods yet.)

We headed up around 8:30, pack­ing snow­shoes just in case we ran in­to sur­prise snow con­di­tions. Or in case we went off-trail again.

I really en­joyed the hike up, even though it was the usu­al tough New Eng­land straight-up-the-fall-line slog. The snow was easy to hike on with mi­cros­pikes, the air was crisp and clear. We stopped a few times to shed lay­ers as we gen­er­ated heat. About 2 hours in­to the climb, we cres­ted the Kins­man ridge onto the AT, with an amaz­ing view out over the Whites to the east.

We stopped for a few pho­tos, then headed south briefly for our first sum­mit on North Kins­man. From there it was an­oth­er 30 minute down and back up through a saddle to the South peak. We looked around for a while, soak­ing it all in, then had lunch on the rocks at the top. Bri­an brought hot chocol­ate, cof­fee, and va­cu­um-packed hot wa­ter, so we cel­eb­rated our two more 4000er sum­mits with mochas.

After a bit of hanging out, oth­ers showed up… prob­ably eight people and a few dogs. It was fine, they were friendly, but it wasn’t quiet and solitude either. We headed out to clear out the space.

There was no ra­tion­al way to make a loop out of this trip, even by cut­ting through the woods (too steep), so we took the same trail back. We moved quickly, oc­ca­sion­ally stop­ping to knock sticky warm­ing snow off our mi­cros­pikes. Mine came off a few times (bad fit on my boots) so I just took them off. We flew down the moun­tain, mak­ing crazy good time be­cause the snow-covered ter­rain was softer than the usu­al roots and rocks.

We de­toured a bit on the way down to Bald Peak, which gave us a fant­ast­ic view of the west­ern scenery and a nice rock to sit on for a bit.

From there, it was a fast down hill through the melt­ing snow, re­main­ing ice and ap­pear­ing mud. It was 50 de­grees by the time we were back to the park­ing lot, which was crazy. We had enough time to change in­to t-shirts and to make it back in­to Lin­coln for smooth­ies.

Spec­tac­u­lar day.