Deer Mountain Berlin, NH -23-2014

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WeRmudfun

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Location
Southern NH
Oops the date was 7-23-2014. :eek:
This hike brought us to Deer Mountain in Berlin, NH #71 on the NH Fire Tower List of the 93 towers that are standing, once stood or were proposed.
We parked at the Berlin Fish Hatchery off York Pond Road and headed out on the Mill Brook Trail. We were not on it long before we decided to start the bushwhack. We headed up through open woods and it was a steady up. The trail went from open and steep, to a rocky steep climb over moss covered boulders. There was really only one section we hit like that and it was not much fun.
The forest grew in a bit as we hit 0.9 miles from the summit, but was still easy to navigate through. We found what we believed to be the original Deer Mountain Trail and it was a welcome relief to hike on, though it was short lived. The first artifacts we found was a wire just below the summit. The summit itself was wide open but covered with bushes, ferns and raspberry's vines that made my wife wish she wore pants. It's much easier to follow a herd path than to create your own. As we worked our way across the summit towards the shed, we started to see all the fire tower remains camouflaged amongst the landscape. There was the shed, a crooked outhouse, footings from the tower, platform for the stairs, and various parts of wooden fire tower laying about.
We walked around exploring everything until the bugs just became to relentless. So we dawned our bug nets and headed back down. We did run into the Deer Mountain Trail shortly after leaving the summit it ran down to the spot where we had lost the trail, it was easier to see going down. It got to a point where we headed down old logging roads which were easier but taking us further away from the car, so we once again bushwhacked our way back to our start point.
We did post a video of the day for anyone interested in seeing the hike...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNaPFFCL-QU
 
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