Mountain Wandering: Jobildunk Ravine: 9/22/25

I was primed for another ravine exploration on Mount Moosiluake, this time into the glacial cirque known as Jobildunk Ravine. This bowl-shaped gouge on the east side of the mountain is the handiwork of an ancient alpine glacier. Its upper reaches contain the headwaters of the Baker River. The ravine has a steep headwall that rises to 4300 ft. and a broad forested floor at the 3600-ft. level, dotted with beaver ponds and meadows. The entire valley is owned by Dartmouth College and is maintained as a semi-wilderness area. I had only been in there twice before - in 1990 and 2014 - and was overdue for a re-visit.

Jobildunk Ravine has an aura of mystery about it. The one trail that led through it - the Dartmouth Outing Club's Asquamchumauke Trail - was abandoned five decades ago. The DOC built a cabin on the ravine floor in 1931, but the area was devastated by the 1938 hurricane and the cabin fell into disuse and eventually collapsed. Tucked away between the main mass of Moosilauke and the long curving arm of the Blue Ridge, the ravine can be seen from few vantage points. The Beaver Brook Trail does provides a peek down into it.

I started my journey from Ravine Lodge Road along the mellow Asquam-Ridge Trail, which follows old logging roads up the lower part of the valley..

A lovely walk on a sunny early fall morning.

The first of two rustic bridges over the Baker River.

This weedy clearing likely marks the site of one of several logging camps along this route.

"Traps Turnpike" is the DOC's name for a relocation around an eroded section of trail.

The rocky course of the Baker River. The Abenaki name for the river is Asquamchumauke, "place of mountain water."

An artifact at the site of Camp 3, used by the Champlain Realty Co. in the 1920s and the Parker-Young Co. in the 1940s.

A water pipeline at Camp 3.

Asters.

Second bridge.

Dartmouth welcomes the public to its land - which encompasses 4500 acres on the east side of the mountain - but no camping or fires.

Some parts of the old Asquamchumauke Trail, which followed logging roads in its lower section, are easy to follow. The trail was opened in 1949 following a huge logging operation in the ravine by Parker-Young Co under the direction of Sherman Adams, salvaging spruce felled by the 1938 hurricane. The trail was abandoned around 1973.

A unique DOC trail marker.

Nice patch of goldenrod.

Farther up the valley the old route becomes more difficult to navigate through wet areas and blowdowns.

Big rocks in the Baker River.

Much of the upper floor of the ravine is a maze of wetlands and sluggish, meandering stream channels. The old trail is long gone in here.

Plenty of blowdown, too.

In this area the adjacent woods provide better terrain for travel, though they are thick in places.

I eventually made my way to an old beaver pond, now mostly a meadow, with a partial view up to the ravine headwall. The unusual pattern of the small conifer patch suggests that it is growing atop an old beaver lodge. The beavers were very active when I came through here in 1990, but now they seem to be long gone. An interesting story is told in Moosilauke! After The Ice: The Moosilaukee Reader, Volume 4, edited by Robert W. Averill and Kris Pastoriza. According to his sons, Minnesota native and Dartmouth '29 grad Dick Sanders was involved with restocking beavers in New Hampshire, where they had been extirpated by 1900. Sanders was a DOC stalwart and a noted woodsman, and is memorialized with a plaque at the summit of Moosilauke. In the late 1920s the governor of Minnesota gave Sanders two beavers to bring to the governor of New Hampshire while on his way back to college. Sanders maintained that these beavers were released in the Jobildunk Ravine area.

Looking across to Moosilauke's SE ridge. One of the mysteries of Jobildunk Ravine is how it got its name. Nomenclature authorities note that it has long been assumed to be of Abenaki origin. But local tradition maintains that three early explorers - Jim, Bill and Duncan - immodestly applied their composite name to the cirque.

Another angle on what is now a meadow and on its way to becoming forest, eventually. As I was heading back into the woods, I heard a moose bellow off to the west. I was glad I was heading to the north and east.

Yup, there is a moose in the neighborhood.

Heading through OK woods to another beaver meadow.

A channel running alongside an ancient beaver dam.

When I came here on snowshoes in 2014 with friends John "1HappyHiker" Compton and Chris Whiton, we marveled at the view of the headwall from this spot.

It's pretty good in the fall, too.

A closer look. In the summer of 1990 I bushwhacked up the headwall to the right of the large slab right of center. It was a rather desperate scramble, and when I emerged from the scrub on the old route of Beaver Brook Trail I startled two young women who probably thought I was a bear shaking the trees.

Looking across.

More moose sign in the woods.

Classic DOC humor, in the middle of nowhere.

Heading up to the headwall in hopes of finding a view. The terrain was getting steep and rough, looking like an old slide track.

This definitely looks like a slide track.

And there is the characteristic chain of boulders deposited along the edge, known as a debris flow levee.

Continuing up the track, which is revegetating higher up. This slide is prominent in a 1964 aerial photo, but except for this open strip is mostly obscured by trees in current satellite photos.

After tussling with some unyielding scrubby trees, I emerged at the base of a steep ledge swath on the headwall that might be the course of another old slide. If so, it's a very steep one!

It's steeper than it looks in the photo.

View from the bottom.

I wanted to traverse across to the next ledge swath on the headwall, which has a large open meadowy area at its base. To get there I dropped down to swing under the birches.

Golds on the side of the ridge.

Forbidding ledges on the next swath. A January, 1934 DOC report noted that “the Appalachian Mountain Club reports fine rock climbing on the precipitous Jobildunk Headwall.”