Another cold day in this "old fashioned New England winter." Despite the low single number temperature and morning wind, I was going to give Mt. Pierce a go. But when I pulled in to the Crawford Path parking lot I saw six microspikers heading in, with not a snowshoe in sight. I've climbed Pierce often enough that I didn't need to slog up three miles of rototilled trail! So I drove back to the Beaver Brook Ski Trails for a slide bushwhack in the Gale River valley, one of my favorite winter playgrounds. I had stopped there on the way to Crawford Notch and noted several vehicles and fresh snowshoe tracks. After 0.7 mile on Beaver Loop X-C Ski Trail and 0.35 mile on snowmobile-groomed Gale River Loop Road, I arrived at the trailhead for Gale River Trail.
The trail had an excellent packed powder snowshoe track, thanks to peakbaggers Joanna, Ilse and James, who were headed to Galehead and the Twins.
After a long, gentle stretch through hardwood forest, the trail briefly comes beside the North Branch of the Gale River.
An inviting softwood corridor.
One of my favorite sections of the mile-long relocation made by the WMNF in 2011.
Garfield Stream, frozen and buried where the trail crosses it.
On the far side of the crossing I headed off-trail into the woods, following Garfield Stream up to the base of the slide on Flat Top Mountain. The deep, soft snow looked daunting as I left the packed track.
I knew this would be a slow-moving workout in the 20-24 inches of unconsolidated snow with no base.
Coming down from an upslope bypass of some rough ledges.
With each successive snowfall the bushwhack trail-breaking gets more difficult.
In places I could follow the corridor of the original Gale River Trail, which once led up this valley to the Garfield Ridge Trail in the deep col east of Mt. Garfield. This was part of the first trail route to Mt. Garfield, cut for the AMC by Franklin Clark in 1897. The section in the Garfield Stream valley was abandoned by the WMNF in the late 1950s. Most of this route has been reclaimed by the forest.
Hobblebush traps lurking ahead.
Looking back.
A peek up at the wild SE-facing cliffs of Flat Top Mountain (3,248 ft.), a northeastern spur of Mt. Garfield.
It took more than an hour for this old guy to break trail 0.35 mile to the huge snowy granite slab along Garfield Stream at the base of the Flat Top slide. Perhaps the first to visit this spot were Benjamin J. MacDonald and local guide Allen Thompson, who ascended the valley of Garfield Stream (then called Deep Hole Brook) in 1880 as part of a multi-day exploration of the Mt. Garfield area. "For at least one hundred and fifty feet the water flows swiftly over an immense granite floor nearly fifty feet wide, rivalling, if not surpassing, the far famed cascades in the Franconia Flume," wrote MacDonald in one of his series of hike descriptions entitled "Echo Explorations" in The White Mountain Echo, a leading tourism newspaper published in Bethlehem, NH.
At the lower end of this slab is a multi-tiered cascade that MacDonald and Thompson named "Eaton Falls," in honor of a local farmer they had visited with on the way to their exploratory trek.
A beautiful wintry scene here.
Out here in the open, the snow was deep. This is the point where, during Hurricane
Carol in 1954, the three-pronged Flat Top slide came crashing down to Garfield Stream
and made a 90-degree left turn into its bed.
Only the central section of the middle prong of the slide, and one small patch on the northern prong, remain open today. To access the largest open area, I headed up into prickly conifers on the slope between the middle and northern prongs.
Thickets of small snow-laden spruces made for a slow ascent, with constant branch-banging to minimize the number of cold showers of powdery snow.
Farther up, the woods were more open, but the climbing was steep.
I arrived at the open slide section - in summer a spine and gully formation of gravel and loose rock - at mid-afternoon, looking across to a spur of Garfield Ridge. Mindful of the morning's "moderate" avalanche forecast for the east side of Mt. Washington, I used lower angle slopes to get out to the middle of the slide.
First look across the valley to the Twins.
Out on the spine, I could look up to the frosted cliffs of Flat Top Mountain.
A snow-crusted white pine at the edge of the slide.
An advantage of my late morning start was that the day's wind-driven clouds had finally melted off the Twins, revealing them in their full winter glory.
South Twin and part of its prominent SW ridge.
The massive bulk of North Twin.
Looking back at part of the steep descent from the slide.
Late afternoon on the big ledge slab along Garfield Stream.
Dusk drawing on in the hardwoods along Gale River Trail. For the last mile I was aided by both headlamp and the light of a half moon high overhead. The temperature was a balmy 3 degrees when I got back to my car.
