Socializing Time

June 9th, 2013
Beaver Brook tr

Todays hike up mt Moosilauke had one goal, to meet some of the people from facebook hiking forums. We talk on facebook pretty often about our hiking plans but many of us didnt really know each other. Today, we were hoping to change it.

We started around 9 o'clock. There was 7 of us: me, Allison, John, Erick, Dan and Bill and Kimball. Most of us haven't seen each other before so it was pretty exciting to be finally able to put face next to the name. We all were sicked to do the hike together and couldn't wait to get to the summit to meet the rest of the people coming from different directions.

Even though we came to socialize, we started at a pretty fast pace and it turned out everybody could keep up pretty easily.                            

Slowly, we got to know each other and shared a lot of stories from our previous hikes and other interesting facts from our  lifes.

 It could not have been nicer out. The sun was shining and temperatures were slowly getting higher and higher. And the scenery......ahh....hard to describe. It was absolutely beautiful.

For most of the hike the trail follows Beaver brook with tons of cascades and little waterfalls. It starts out steep pretty quickly, but that couldn't  slow us down.

Most of the trail was covered with rocks and boulders and 90% of it was wet from yesterdays rain. We had to be very careful and watch our steps because one wrong move could have send you down the brook and believe me it would not have been pretty experience.

We took one long break at the Beaver Brook shelter to kill some time, we expected everybody to get to the summit near 1 o'clock. It was slowly getting chiller and i actually had to put additional layer on. We decided that on our way up we were going to look for a little herd oath on the right going to nearby mt Blue, unofficial 4k peak. I tried to find that peak one time before when i was hiking with my dogs but with not much luck. This time we didnt have much trouble locating it at all. The path was very visible and easy to follow. It was amazing scenery, ground covered by thick layer of moss, a lot of  deformed trees and ferns everywhere.
The peak was marked by the canister hanging on one of the trees, inside which we found little notebook and couple of pencils.

Each of us wrote their names carefully on the paper and we took our first group photo. I was very excited about that, i think more than hiking the Moose again!! I loved the fact that everybody wanted to find the summit and that we all could enjoy something new together.
From then on we met several people going down. It started to become colder and the sky was covered by layers of clouds. A moment before we hit the Benton trail intersection we met one of the hikers that we were suppose to see up top. She and her friend decided to head back down because of cold up top. They said that some of the people went back down already and that most of them were on the summit at least around an hour waiting for us. That was not good news!! If we knew we would not have taken all the extra time to do other things! We thought we had a lot of time and didnt wanna get to the summit too early.
From then on we wanted just to get up top to see if there was anybody left waiting.

When we got to the beginning part of the broad summit there was no views, clouds were all over and the wind was fierce. I went fast ahead and after couple of minutes i could see shapes of people. Thankfully there were many on top still waiting for us. Everybody got an invite hug from Mike and started to introduce to the rest of the group. It was really cold, i put all my layers on and was very thankful that i had my gloves with me.

We spent some time at the summit but not  nearly as much as everybody was hoping for. Weather was not cooperating and there was no point on staying any longer in the strong wind. There were still no views so i was a little disappointed. We snapped couple of pictures and said our goodbyes.
Right before we hit the treeline, clouds moved a little and we were able to catch some of the panoramic views.

Half way down the skies cleared and we were able enjoy the rest of the hike back down. A lot of rocks were driy now so it was a little easier to walk down. I was worried about that on a way up but i was relieved to see the path much dryer than in the morning.

Our way down went very quick and in no time we were hitting the parking lot.

To our surprise, Kimball offered us some of his beer which he stored in his cooler. It was very refreshing to have, after the hike.
We stayed for a while at the parking lot before heading home.
It was great hike with great new friends. We all hoped to hike together more in the near future.