Black Mountain Ledge

When I saw the photo posted on his flickr page by the esteemed bushwhacker known as timbercamp, I said to Carol, "I have to go there!" It was the best photo I've ever seen of the parallel Northwest Slides on Scar Ridge. It was taken from an obscure ledge on the eastern flank of 2937-ft. Black Mountain, the prominent northern spur of the Loon Mountain-Scar Ridge range. With a little Google Earth manipulation I was able to figure out the location of the ledge, and when I looked through photos of Black Mountain  I had taken from the Scar Ridge slides, there it was, located on a mini-shoulder directly under the summit of Mt. Liberty.

I approached the bushwhack along the Loon X-C ski/mountain bike trail known, appropriately, as Black Mountain Road. 

 

As I knew from several trips into the Scar Ridge slides, the woods on the lower eastern slopes of Black Mountain are generally pretty open.

I thought these might be timbercamp's refrozen boot prints from a week earlier.

Coming around the corner into the drainage on the NE slope of Black Mountain.

A very steep pitch serves as the portal into the broad upper part of the drainage.

As I had seen of Google Earth, a wide swath of hardwoods extends far up into this drainage.

The climbing was rather tedious, punching through several inches of crusty snow.

I gained 600 feet of elevation through this vast hardwood glade.

Heading into the final steep approach through spruces. 

An awkward sidehill traverse.

Then directly up.

Rugged terrain up here.

Skirting around more ledges.

Arriving at the little shoulder that holds the ledge.

 

There's the ledge. No safe open perch here - this will be a standing view only. Darn! Snow squalls have moved in, obscuring the view. I'll have to wait it out.

A ghostly outline of Scar Ridge appears.

Getting better.

Patience paid off!

This is the view I came for! 

These slides are apparently at least a century and a half old, as they appeared in an Appalachia piece by geologist Warren Upham in February 1878. Upham noted the fine view of the Osceola-Scar Ridge-Black Mountain range from an open area near the mouth of the Hancock Branch. Of Scar Ridge, he wrote: “Scarred on the south side by a landslide of a few years ago, it is not less conspicuously marked on the north side by precipitous ledges that occur near the head of a deep ravine. Perhaps these are the marks of great slides that occurred centuries ago.” Upham also recalled that in 1871, while obtaining a rock specimen from the top of one of the slides (in so doing making the first recorded ascent of Scar Ridge), his hammer flew off its handle and “went off, bounding merrily down, tick, knock, whack, clink, to the bottom, hundreds of feet below. It was not searched for, but a liberal reward will be cheerfully paid to the finder.” In their Appalachia account of their 1877 ascent of Scar Ridge via its then-prominent southern slide, F.W. Clarke and Gaetano Lanza noted, “As seen from Lafayette it appears as a ridge deeply scarred.”

These slides are occasionally ascended in summer by peakbagging bushwhackers. This requires a bushwhack approach of nearly 2 miles; on the slide itself one must negotiate many wet, dangerously slippery ledges and small cascades. From their upper reaches there are wide views north to the Pemigewasset Wilderness and surrounding peaks. In winter adventurous ice climbers have been known to snowshoe in to climb the upper ice flows on the slides. The area is known as “Wilderness Woods,” with the route up the western slide called “Long Way Home,” first climbed by Brad White and Doug C. Burnell in 1978. In good snow years, both slides have been skied by backcountry adventurers.

At its upper end the western slide forks into three distinct heads; the highest is the easternmost, which tops out at 3,390 ft. Overall, the western slide is 2,500 ft. long with an average slope of 28 degrees. The upper wide, ledgy section is very steep with a slope of 38 degrees, and sports large ice flows in winter.

The eastern slide has one larger fork and one smaller branch at its head, with its apex at 3,360 ft. It is 2,300 ft. long with an average slope of 29 degrees. Its upper wide, ledgy section is also very steep with a slope of 38 degrees and ice flows in winter.

In August 1959, Walter C. Merrill, a founding member of the AMC Four Thousand Footer Club, and his wife, Marjorie, climbed Scar Ridge via the eastern of the Northwest Slides. As recounted by Walter in Appalachia (December 1959), they started their ascent of this “solitary and neglected mountain” from the Kancamagus Highway. They crossed the Hancock Branch on an old bridge and picked up an old logging road along the west side of the brook that drains the valley between Scar Ridge and Black Mountain, following it for a mile. They then climbed the slope to the left (east), and followed another woods road across a ridge, where “slides and steep cliffs were much in evidence.” The route “ended abruptly at the slide toward which we had been climbing for the past one and one-half hours; the upper part of this slide can be seen clearly from the road.” They emerged about a quarter of the way up the eastern Northwest Slide. “Above us, the main track of the rock slide seemed to start at the very peak of the mountain,” wrote Walter. “I should judge it to be fully as long as the Y-slide on Mt. Hancock, and certainly steeper and narrower.” He noted that this slide was more difficult to ascend than the Hancock (Arrow) slide. The wetness of the bedrock “necessitated a side-of-the-slide scramble,” resorting at times to detours in the woods. Continuing a “slow, laborious pace,” they came to a three-way fork and chose the right-hand (western) branch of the slide as the quickest route to the summit. Eventually they pushed for a quarter-mile through dense spruce and blowdown to the flat, wooded summit, where there was no view. “In contrast,” wrote Walter, “the view from the top of the slide extended from Moosilauke across the Franconias to Mt. Bond, with an excellent side-view profile of our old friend West Bond.” For the return trip they made a “gingerly descent” along the eastern branch of the slide to the floor of the ravine. ”We felt most satisfied with our day,” he concluded, “entertaining at the time and in retrospect a most healthy respect for this peak on Scar Ridge.”

Once out of the prickly conifers, the descent was easier than the ascent in the crusty snow. I made it out just before dark.