Mount Isolation. Now there’s a mountain that lives up to its name. The easiest route to the summit clocks in at around 14 miles, which is a hike, indeed. Given that the terrain is largely flat, it’s an entirely feasible trip to accomplish in one day, but only if said day starts near the trailhead. And since Columbus Day weekend is prime foliage time, even the shack motels in the White Mountains are booked solid with leaf peepers from around the world. $125 to sleep in a smelly room that hasn’t been updated since the 1980s? Why do that, when sleeping in the woods is free?
Thus, we decided to break up the hike to Mount Isolation by backpacking and spending Saturday night in the woods. We left for New Hampshire before noon on Saturday, underestimating the impact that the leaf peepers would have on the traffic, both on the highway and on the local roads in the White Mountains. The full extent of leaf mania was made clear to us when we rounded a curve on I-93 and there were scores of people milling around the side of the highway and traversing the two lanes in order to take some pictures of peak foliage. Crazed leaf peepers, risking their lives on an interstate highway to snap low-quality digital pictures of some red and yellow leafs!
I don’t understand leaf peepers: Why would you want to drive around looking at leafs, when you can take a walk in the woods? You can gaze at a canopy of leafs above your head as they wink in the wind, tread upon a soft bed of freshly-fallen leafs, and even use them as toilet paper.
Walking in the Leafs
So although we didn’t start hiking until 3:30pm, it was okay because we only had to hike 3.7 miles to Rocky Branch Shelter #2, where we’d spend the night. I was nervous that the shelter would be full and we’d have to find a campsite for our tent, but it turned out we were the only people crazy enough to want to spend the night in 30-degree temperatures. We pitched the tent on the shelter platform, reasoning that the tent might retain some of our body warmth.
Rocky Branch Shelter #2
By 6:30pm, we were already pretty cold, so we decided to eat dinner. Dehydrated backpacker food: Mr. P had a hearty concoction called Chili Mac, while I had dehydrated eggs with a chopped-up avocado. By the time we finished dinner, cleaned up our stuff, and hung our packs on a tree branch, I was more than ready to abscond to the relative warmth of my sleeping bag.
I don’t know what time I woke up, but it was the dead of night. It seems that the dehydrated eggs had turned my normally-iron stomach into jello. Not to be too graphic, but my body wanted to expel the eggs by any means necessary. Up or down, either route would do. Yet the eggs did not move, they stayed lodged in my digestive track, causing hours of turmoil as I lay in my sleeping bag, sleepless and uncomfortable, with ice cold feet and clammy hands. Mr. P dozed beside me, his bear-like snores both a comfort and a taunt.
In the morning, when I “woke up” (a term used loosely, as it implies substantive sleep), it was snowing. Not hard, but resolutely and with patches of stickiness on the rocks and logs. We decided AGAINST our planned breakfast of dehydrated eggs, and opted instead for salami. Then, we consolidated most of our stuff into Mr. P’s pack, which we hung back in the tree so we could summit Mt. Isolation unencumbered.
Hanging the pack
Nice hike to Mt. Isolation. It took less than 4 hours from and back to the shelter, an easy trail but with quite a bit of water and mud on parts of the trail. And about a half-dozen river crossings, ugh. Oh, how I loath skipping across a raging brook on wet, uneven stones with mud-caked boots and a sleep-deprived sense of balance. But we made it to the summit without a dunking. We were alone of the summit of Mount Isolation, which felt appropriate, and quite cold.
Summit of Mount Isolation
View from Mount Isolation
Mount Isolation Summit Cairn
And now… leaf porn for any peepers out there!
