Yesterday, I opted to mix it up and take Monday off to go climbing. With the dry weather we’ve been having, it’s looking like fall foliage is going to be a little dull this year, and I wanted to see if I could sneak a peek at the best of what’s left.
Using the 52 With a View list as my guide, I chose Mount Tremont, near Crawford Notch. Passing the AMC Highland Center on Route 302, you keep heading south for about eleven miles until you see a little dirt parking area on the left. The trailhead is across the street to the right. I missed it at first, but after spotting someone heading out from the parking lot, I realized I needed to turn back.
Starting out on the Mount Tremont Trail
A Quiet Fall Journey
It was a very quiet day on the trail. I only met three hikers, and not until I reached the summit. On the way up, there was very little to be heard outside the waters flowing down Stony Brook and the chipmunks darting in and out of the leaves. I saw a toad about two miles up the trail and several gray jays darting around the treetops near the top. Unlike the gray jays around Mount Avalon though, I was not descended upon.
The Mount Tremont Trail is fairly soft underfoot and was quite beautiful with the fall colors. It’s a funny mountain, though, because it’s one of the larger ones on the 52 With a View list, and yet at its summit is a very tiny outlook to enjoy the view. When I met three other men at the top, the four of us took up most of the space as we sat down for a snack and a chat.
Stony Brook
A Familiar World from Another Angle
Like all of the 52 With a View mountains, Mount Tremont is lovely. Its summit vista presents Sawyer Pond in the middle of the frame, and looking at it, I reflected on how Mount Tremont had been on my mind ever since I stayed overnight at Sawyer Pond this summer. I wanted to climb it then, but doing so from Sawyer required some next-level bushwhacking I wasn’t prepared for, or a hike-around that would take fourteen miles, we surmised. Too much to take on after a long hike to the pond.
But I’ve become a lover of the singular mission anyway. Of being present in one area, or tackling one mountain at a time. To really get to know a place, rather than quickly conquering it and moving on to the next one, never really knowing any of them at all. And ironically, one of the things that helps me with that is technology. A friend recently turned me on to an app called PeakVisor, which triangulates your position and shows you the topography of the mountains you’re looking at. So now, when I’m at a summit and I’m wondering what I’m looking at, I don’t have to guess. I pull out the app for a few seconds, line the topography up with the image in front of me, and voilà! I know what I’m looking at.
There weren’t too many red spots like this left. Winter is coming!
Making the World a Little Smaller
What I like about this is that it helps me better understand the area I’ve hiked so much in. When I’m standing on top of Tremont looking out at places like Sawyer Pond, Mount Osceola, and North Tripyramid, and knowing that’s what they definitively are, I feel more connected to the region. The entirety of it makes more sense. It makes the world a little smaller, helping me see where I began and where this neck of the woods ends.
Sightings of East Sleeper, North Tripyramid, Greens Cliff, Mount Osceola, and Sawyere Pond from Mount Tremont
Ascent Details — Mount Tremont
- Trail: Mount Tremont Trail
- Trailhead Location: Along Route 302, about 5 miles west of Bartlett, NH
- Round-Trip Distance: 5.6 miles
- Elevation Gain: ~2,200 feet
- Summit Elevation: 3,384 feet
- Difficulty: Moderate to strenuous at times. It has a rather steep section just before finishing mile one but runs at a more gradual grade for the next mile after that, keeping it from being too strenuous for a larger NH mountain. With about a half mile left to go, the trail does get steeper again, and you ascend a number of switchbacks—not something you run into often in New Hampshire—before making it to the top.
- Estimated Time: Probably on average 3.5–5 hours round trip. I started at 10:40AM and was down at 1:40PM, but I ran most of the way down. Normally you can’t do that on most of the bigger mountains in the Whites, but the trail was pretty soft in a lot of places. I usually pace around 2 miles per hour when I’m hiking, and it took me about one hour and forty-five minutes to ascend. After twenty minutes or so at the summit, I headed down. If I continued hiking at my normal pace, I think it would have been a 4-hour journey, factoring in the summit sit.
Autumn’s leaves on Stony Brook
New Hampshire’s 52 With a View
If you’re looking to climb something in New Hampshire, I can’t recommend the 52 With a View enough. And if you’re looking for more stories about mountains in the New England region, you can find more here.