Wildcat and Carter Dome

December 31, 2016

Andy, Emily, and I drove to Pinkham Notch for a 07:30 start on a cool morning. We started at the Nineteen Mile Brook trailhead with a plan to do a loop over Carter Dome, and maybe a side trip or two to some other peaks. We started in snowshoes and hiked up the smoothly packed trail, making fairly good time to the first junction. Shortly after this, Andy pulled a muscle in his leg and began hobbling. After some stretching and a bit of vitamin I, he declared it to be good to go so we continued, albeit a little bit slower. At the col we took our first real break and decided to climb Wildcat. The snow here was very deep and wind drifted. Unfortunately some fools had attempted to go this route without snowshoes and the trail was a mess of full body sized post holes. Fortunately the conditions foiled the fools in short order, and conditions substantially improved. Even more fortunately, one person had climbed and decended the peak earlier and broken it out somewhat and actually was properly equiped with snowshoes. It was still tough going as we smoothed the path over with the dense snow with the consistency of styrofoam. I took the lead here as was in better condition than the others and did quite a lot of the work stomping out a smooth descent path. Finally at about 11:30 we topped out and searched around for a bit to determine the true summit in this treed in peak. Fortunately there was a fantastic lookout ledge on the top of the cliff which looked straight down to Carter Notch Hut. We had another break here and then made the descent. This went very quickly as now the trail was nice and smooth and well broken. We met a couple more groups coming up, so now the trail should be in really good shape. Next up was Carter Dome. As we walked over to the start of the climb, we encountered a very beautiful alpine lake, which would have made a fantastic skating rink had we remembered to bring our backcountry skating gear. The first half of the climb up Carter was incredibly steep. I did fine in my technical snowshoes, but Andy and Emily had to switch to crampons, even though it was not icy, just packed snow. I charged ahead and was stuck waiting for quite a while when they were changing footwear. I met a fellow here and we had a friendly chat. We were to meet him again later in the day. Just as I was getting too cold to stay any longer and planned to descend to find the others, they apeared. I quickly continued on upwards to warm up. Not much further up, the trail became more moderate and the others had to stop to switch back to their snowshoes as they were postholing pretty severly. Suddenly the temperature began to drop and our nice bluebird day became cloudy. Snow started falling and the wind started blowing, as we layered up before climbing the final bit to the summit. Here we met the fellow I had chatted with before, who introduced himself as Dan. He was celebrating his second round of the NH-48 on the summit of Carter Dome. We sat down for a break here with him and exchanged some friendly talk and photography services. As we turned to leave, we invited Dan to join us if he wanted company for the descent. He was ameniable, so we continued onn as a group of 4 and stuck together for the rest of the day. The descent was quite nice. A gradual slope pretty much consistent in lovely, well broken out powder snow made travel quick. Andy broke out the crazy carpet and sledded a good portion of the trail, while the rest of us snowshoe skied downwards. One final break at the junction with the Nineteen Mile Brook tail, and then we hurried down the last stretch trying to beat the darkness. We arrived back in the parking lot after 9.5 hours on the trail, said goodbye to our new friend Dan, and then drove back to Conway for New Year celebrations.

Nice bridge... this must not be the Pemi wilderness.

Emily is in a good mood.

A mountain rabit leaves its tracks in the snow.

Summit of Wildcat. Blinky the monkey celebrates with us even though he did not help much in the trail breaking.

Carter Lake. Wish we had brought some skates.

Part way up Carter Dome, looking back at Wildcat and down at Carter Notch Hut.

Winter wonderland up higher on Carter Dome.

Summit of Carter Dome.

Bit of an accident with the crazy carpet.

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