Tripyramid South Slides: 3/18/20

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The wide Livermore Trail is a good one for social distancing. These two gents did a loop over the Tripyramids via the South and North Slides.

White Cascade was flowing on Slide Brook.

Signs of spring.

A favorite trail.

There was still a partial snow bridge on Avalanche Brook, but not for long.

A place of solace in uncertain times.

A parade of frozen postholes all the way to the South Slide.

The rock-solid snowpack, with an inch or two of new snow on top, made it possible to bypass much of the postholing.

Open sun-drenched hardwoods beckoned for off-trail bypasses.

Majestic yellow birches.

Lunch seat.

Nice woods on the final approach to the South Slide.

Grouse tracks.

A short bushwhack brought me to the gullied runout of the third South Slide, a relatively short one that fell during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.

Looking up the third South Slide.

New wet snow atop crust made for good snowshoe grip.

Heading up.

Sandwich Dome comes into view.

Steep and bright.

I found a dry sitting rock at the edge of the slide and spent an hour lounging in the sun.

The double summit of Sandwich Dome.

A spectacular end-of-winter day.

I pushed across through scrub to an open patch from the 1869 South Slide.

Mt. Tecumseh, with Mt. Moosilauke in the distance.

Making tracks across this slide patch.

Nice vista of Sandwich Dome and the Lost Pass area.

Zoom on Lost Pass, with Mt. Israel beyond the gap.

I continued across to the main part of the 1869 South Slide, which the Mt. Tripyramid Trail follows.

Snowshoe tracks in corn snow.

Western views.

Vermont's Killington Peak could be seen on the horizon over Dickey Mountain.

Looking up.

On the way down, I enjoyed nearly a mile of off-trail snowshoeing through open hardwoods.

A nice ending to a winter in which I enjoyed views from 15 different slides in the southern Whites: 5 on Tripyramid, 4 on Osceola, 3 on Passaconaway, 2 on Scar Ridge and 1 on West Sleeper.