The Trip So Far: The 70's and Owl's Head

Week of 5/14 - 5/20

It is the week before Pineland Farms Trail Festival and the 50 miler I am in and I wanted to really pour it on this week and see how it all plays out for the good or bad, it's still all learning experience.

The week started off really solid had a great run with CC doing the yellow and green dot on Tuesday. Then Thursday opened up the week with a 22 mile NH Mountain Adventure. Mutha captures it beautifully here. We had absolutely beautiful weather for this type of even, trails are still wet but we had a high pressure system over the area with some crystal clear skies. The agreement was that Mutha, DogMan and I would go all out to the summit of Garfield, I got there in 1:20, Mutha and DogMan arrived shortly there after. We then started East along the Garfield Ridge Trail to the Franconia Brook Trail which brought us down to 13 falls tent site and really cool crossing of Franconia Brook. We then continued West along the Lincoln Brook Trail until we got to an opening to begin the Bushwhack up to Owl's Head. We kept a due South bearing with Garfield on our backs and basically hammered through tangles of branches, trees, downed trees, mud, water and roots. We wondered around what we thought was the summit the altimeter read 4040 so we thought we might have been on the "old summit" on the Northern aspect of Owl's Head ridge. We continued to wander around and circled back on the western flank hoping to find the western slide leading up to Owl's Head which didn't happen. We ended up calling it good enough and Bushwhacked our way back to our entry point for the start of the Bushwhack. We continue back East along the Lincoln Brook Trail and had a great water crossing probably knee deep (2nd time) and then took the Twin Brook Trail to the intersection with the Frost Trail and summited Galehead. The push from the start of the Twin Brook Trail near 13 Falls Tent site was every man for himself and we went really hard. I pushed hard along the lower half and was able to run some of the flatter sections that had a plateau type feel. We all met at the Galehead Hut which was open for the season but self service only.

After we got in some calories we started the 5.6 mile ripping descent back to the trailhead. This was an everyman for himself descent as well. The trail on the top section is really steep and the footing is not that great around 2800 feet you can start to rip all the way back to the car. I went all out, had great footing and was able to clip off some really good splits, I hit the Gale River water crossing and just ran straight through it didn't not bother to rock hop any of it. Once I hit the Gale River Road I pushed hard back to the car. Data can be found here. It was a really great day to get out with DogMan and Mutha and push things. Congrats to DogMan Owl's Head off the list, 5 more to go!!!!

Here are some cool pictures from Mutha.