Alpine Garden Hike 6/21/08

The hike started off uneventfully with everyone present. However, we soon had a new AT hiker on the trail who didn't seem to be very happy with our presence.

The cranky hiker charged Mario which caused us to retreat further into the woods and bushwack through a swamp and eventually back onto the trail. We proceeded on along the Old Jackson Road with its fairly gentle grades but on the Nelson Crag trail it soon got to be fairly steep.

After a fairly strenuous and longish period of time (2 hours) we arrived at the 5 mile mark on the Auto Road where we had drinks and snacks and watched the road race for a while

We then hiked up to Nelson Crag and the Alpine Garden. It was a little bit cloudy and we did have one brief rain shower but had pretty good weather for most of the above tree line portion of the hike. The view wasn't of the 140 mile variety but was adequate. This view was looking to the north with the Northern Presidentials.

This is looking to the south and into Huntington Ravine.

We then hiked the length of the Alpine Garden Trail over to the Lion Head Trail. The most common flower we saw was Mountain Avens, but there were quite a few others.

From Lion Head the view down into Tuckerman's Ravine was pretty spectacular, nobody was skiing at the time but it looked doable.

Our final view was of Crystal Cascade which is very close to the beginning of the Tuckerman Ravine Trail.