Giant and Rocky Peak Ridge Traverse

June 5, 2010

Got up at 05:00 after a somewhat fitful sleep during a very rainy night spent in the roof of a camper van. It was still raining as I prepared my breakfast in the Keene Farm coooking shelter, but as others in the group arrived, the rain slowed, and by the time all thirteen of us were ready, it had stopped entirely. This was an ACC trip with two groups planning to traverse the Rocky Ridge in opposite directions, which allowed us to simply exchange cars rather than shuttle. I was leading the West-East route with seven people in my group. We hit the trail at Roaring Brook falls and immediately began climbing. The cloud ceiling was at about 4000 feet, so as we ascended we had a few good views even though the day was gray. The trail was very good with a dirt base which was easy on the feet. As we got higher, there were a few small scrambles over slab rocks. In relatively short order, we found ourselves on the summit of Giant Mountain, where there would have been a great lookout if we had not been completely fogged in. We had a short break and then head back down the trail and over to Rocky Peak, which did not take too long. Again we were fogged in, so we used the monster cairn at the top here as the backdrop for the summit photos. As two of the high peaks, these were fairly easily won as we had only been hiking for about four hours at this point. Since the next few kilometers were along the Rocky Ridge, we were disappointed that we would not have any views, but once we decended below the cloud cover we were rewarded the rest of the way with views off of both sides of the ridge. At Mary Louise pond, we met the other group. After a brief chat we quickly continued as the black flies around this swampy area were quite bad. The next couple of peaks along the ridge were clear so we lounged out on them as long as we could stand the black flies. The sun even started to shine and burned off some of the cloud cover. The descent was fairly easy with a good trail with one steep part that had to be down climbed. We spent more time lounging on Bald Peak (3000') and then Blueberry Cobbles (2000') as the day had turned into a nice sunny one. The last few kilometers were fairly hot and most people had run out of water. We did not bother to refill at a stream crossing however, as it was not far from the end of our nine hour day. Went back to Keene to the Tip-a-Canoe and sat on the patio for the rest of the afternoon, drinking beers to our success. Over the next hour or so, the other group arrived and we had a very tasty supper.

Wendy, always finding cute critters.