Tripyramid South Slides: 5/6/22

 

On one of a series of fine (and bug-free) spring days, I paid a repeat visit to a favorite haunt, the sunny South Slides of Mt. Tripyramid. I'd been halfway up the slides three weeks earlier, but didn't have time to go to the top. Got an earlier start today, and figured that the ice reported in the closed-in sections of the slide might now be melted. As it turned out, the hike was 99.5% free of snow and ice. It's one of the few trails - maybe the only trail -  right now where you can get up to almost 4000 ft. with great views and have such minimal dealing with snow and ice.

The moss was glowing alongside Slide Brook at White Cascade.

Several times - today included - I've searched in vain for the site of the original Avalanche Camp, which was occupied by Parker-Young Company in the 1920s. The only evidence I've ever found is this piping between Avalanche Brook and Livermore Trail.

This way for the South Slides.

 

 

The crossing of Avalanche Brook was easy enough using slightly underwater stones.

Entering the sanctuary.

A peaceful feeling as you enter the woods on these western slopes of Tripyramid.

I was hoping for some bounteous wildflower viewing, but it was a few days too early, still. There were many Red Trilliums almost ready to pop.

More signs of spring.

Slide Brook.

 

A mile up the trail I went northward on a bushwhack diversion through the open hardwoods, and looped back to the trail  3/4 mile farther up.

Scattered blackened stumps are evidence that these slopes were partly logged back in the 1920s to 1950s.

A lovely maple glade at 2700 ft. There were thousand of trout lilies leaves in here, but no flowers yet, not even buds.  Probably not until mid-May.

Trace of a tote road from the old logging days.

Back to the Mount Tripyramid Trail at 2900 ft.

The only patch of snow encountered on the hike, on a flat spot at the base of the slide.

 

Heading up the treed-in lower track of the 1869 slide, the slide that the trail ascends. This slide fell during an October 1869 rainstorm and was for some years known as the "Great Slide." Contemporary accounts tell of a swath of destruction carrying two miles down the brook that is now known, naturally, as Slide Brook. In his classic 1876 guidebook, The White Mountains: A Handbook for Travelers, Moses Sweetser noted that the Great Slide was "considered by many visitors the most remarkable object among the curiosities of Waterville."

In August 1885 a second South Slide fell alongside the first, a bit farther to the east; this same storm also unleashed the impressive North Slide - making the sequel better than the original. AMC member Alford A. Butler visited the 1885 slides soon after they fell and wrote a fascinating account in the March 1886 issue of Appalachia. (You can find it on Google Books.) Butler wrote that the two slides together on the South Peak "have made the fair mountainside a desert of rock." This slide is now mostly revegetated except for a large open patch at the top, which is crossed by the Kate Sleeper Trail.

 

The first views are found along a large, open, gravelly swath at ~3200 ft.

Higher up, big boulders dot the slide.

 

View from the top of the lower open section, at ~3400 ft.

A rocky mountain way, ascending between the lower and upper open sections.

In here there was one rather nasty ice flow, but there were enough exposed rocks to get around it.

Emerging on the upper open section of the slide, you peer up at layers of broken rock.

Looking down from near the top of the slide.

The South Slide views are a unique combination of intimate looks at the wild Sandwich Mountain/Lost Pass region and horizon-stretching vistas to distant peaks in Vermont's Green Mountains and southern New Hampshire. The most distant visible summits are Dorset Peak and Stratton Mountain in southern Vermont and Mt. Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire. I sat on a convenient rock and took in these views for a long time.

Lake Winnipesaukee shimmers in the distance to the left of Sandwich Mountain.

Zoom on Mt. Israel through Lost Pass, with the southern tip of Flat Mountain Pond seen below.

Three-way arrow at the junction of Mount Tripyramid Trail and Kate Sleeper Trail, near the top of the 1869 South Slide.

The sign for Kate Sleeper Trail is set back in a few yards.

 

At the junction, a view of Mts. Tecumseh and Moosilauke.

 

It's only 60 yards along the Kate Sleeper Trail to the open patch at the top of the 1885 slide.

 

This spot offers the best view of the Lost Pass area. This is a large trailless enclave - more than 6,500 acres in the heart of the Sandwich Range Wilderness.

Back at the 1869 slide, a side view.

The South Slide ascent and descent is very steep and rough - 850 ft. in ~0.4 mile - but still easier than the North Slide (for which descent is strongly discouraged). There are a few tricky spots, especially this one at 3500 ft.

The 1869 slide is lined almost exclusively by red spruce with some balsam fir, but there is an occasional stunted white pine. Wonder where they came from, as this is well above their normal elevation level.

 

This aspen illustrates the struggle for survival in this barren, almost desert-like habitat.

 

In 2007, in a cooperative project involving the U.S. Forest Service, the Waterville Valley Athletic & Improvement Association and the Rey Center, a trail crew installed rock steps/soil retainers and scree walls on eroding sections of the South Slide. Due to the loose gravelly nature of the slide, it's a tough location to stabilize.

Leaving the Wilderness, with only an easy hour's walk back to the trailhead. After the first quarter-mile on Livermore Trail in the morning, I saw no one on this 10-mile hike.