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Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Whiteface & Piper Mountain

The weather called for a gorgeous day, so Vanessa, Henry and I set out for some more redlining/peakbagging in the Belknaps. This will be "home" for a while. We have patches to earn, the trails are in fantastic shape.. and most importantly, it is a place we can hike several miles with fantastic views in between school hours! This time we took 2 cars and spotted 1 at the bottom of the Carriage Road in Gilford. We then drove over to the trailhead of Whiteface Mountain and geared up to start. I hadn't been up Whiteface in 2 years. Once you find the trailhead (it is between 2 houses, so can be a bit tricky to find).. it is a moderate climb up, but once you reach the summit you are rewarded with some pretty views over the lake and back to Piper Mountain. It's a wide open summit (a snowmobile/ATV trail is actually the latter half of the hiking trail so it is a fairly well used area in all seasons). On our way we had passed the trailhead for Mt Major and there were a lot of cars and several school buses already there.. we passed no one and had the summit to ourselves. I love that. After a quick break, we headed back down to the junction with the Piper-Whiteface Link Trail, which I needed for redlining and started up towards Piper. This was a bit steeper. I love Piper Mountain as the summit area is huge, so should it get crowded (which it wasn't, we had it to ourselves) there are plenty of areas to tuck away and enjoy the views in peace. We had lunch and enjoyed the warmth of the sun for a while before heading back down Old Piper Trail to the White Trail and down the Carriage Road back to the car. 2 more peaks for Vanessa and Henry and 2 more trail completions for me.

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