Saturday June 15, 19.2mi/30.9km

Pinkham Notch/Hwy 16 (1872.6) to Rattle River Shelter (1891.8) (NH)

We started the day with a big breakfast, and Bill and Jill had made homemade bread too. They even had a huge (3kg) peanut butter jar… Ruben would be jealous. 🙂They dropped us off at the Pinkham Notch visitors center, and we started hiking at 9am. The trail went by Lost pond, then started the steep climb up to Wildcat mountain.Steep rocks!An hour later, we had covered the 2 mi/3km to the top. There is a ski lift here for Wildcat resort.And the views back to the Presidentials and Mt Washington were pretty spectacular too.After an hour of ridge walking, we started the steep descent into Carter Notch. You can see down to the hut, and across to our next mountain, Carter Dome.After 1000ft/300m of descent, we were at Carter Lakes and then stopped at the hut for lunch.I had one of the best trail lunches ever… a huge sandwich on homemade bread with tons of veggies.I was pretty full, so the next climb went very slowly. The top of Carter Dome was nice, with a cairn to mark the otherwise unremarkable summit.As we were descending the north face of the mountain, snow patches started appearing. It was quite surprising to see so much snow in mid June.The next summit was Mt Hight, and it felt more summit-y, with views and a prominent rock to mark the top. And Bob!Going downhill…Between the summits it is often wet and boggy. The section between Mt Haight and Mt Moriah was no exception.On the way up the climb to Moriah, I took a break at a junction to a campsite with a hilarious name. Imp!The climb up Mt Moriah was really fun, withlots of smooth slabby rock, so I could just walk right up like a ramp. It would be terrifying when wet though.Good views from the top!I had tried to hike this section back in 2015, with PCT friend Cheshire Cat. We ran out of daylight in that attempt, so it was nice to finally tag Mt. Moriah.The “descent” down from Moriah to the shelter was slow and steep, I would call it “controlled falling”. I arrived to the shelter quite late at 7pm.

There was a large group there, they were AMC youth program instructors doing a group training trip. I actually knew a couple of them! Small world. I’m looking forward to my super-nero tomorrow… only 2 miles to town!