elvios lincoln
New member
Owls Head Trip 9/2/05
This was Santarpio’s 48th. He is 16 and started when 6. We brought along his 17 year old friend from the cross country team. She is 17 and this was her first hike. I told her that she was probably the first person in history who could claim that an Owl’s head death March, was their first hike.
We started on the Lincoln woods trail at 8:00 am. The forest service had posted signs at the trail head about flooding and impassable rivers. I quickly decided to do the Franconia falls bushwack, following the west side of the rivers as described in the AMC guide. I was able to follow the obscure remains of an old trail most of the way. I believe the distance covered by this was approximately 1 mile and it took 1 hr.
The second brook, coming off Franconia ridge , caused us to remove our boots and wade across, as did the Lincoln brook crossing that is 0.4mile before the Owl’s head slide.
I was surprised to find a large cairn at the base of the Owl’s head slide. It was perhaps 3 feet high. The slide rose immediately behind the cairn and the herd path was easy to follow. We saw where the Forest service has been scraping the blue blazed off the trees. There are tree scars, where the blazes were.
( Brief Editorial Tirade: These people are crazy. It makes me angry to realize that my parking pass dollars are paying for this over-zealous activity. I hope no one gets lost or injures because of the Forest Service’s irresponsible activity. I wish the Forest Service had some sense of history. This area was burned over and raped, by the 1940’s. A brief sixty years has turned it into a veritable jungle. This is not really Wilderness, no matter what any designation says. It is barely 8 miles from a busy interstate highway. No amount of trail obliteration is going to change this. Hiker injuries are the only likely result of obliterating Owl’s head human touches.)
At the traditional summit there was no sign and the large cairn was gone. I noticed that the rebuilding of a new “summit” cairn has begun at the base of the tree that used to have the sign. (By the way , the bolt holes from the old summit sign are still visable. Perhaps the Forest Service should fill the holes with wood-putty, or cut down the tree entirely.)
I had a GPS which told me that the much talked about “real summit”, was about 0.2 miles North. Unfortunately, the difficult stream crossing had eaten my schedules margin.
I wanted to get back across all of the difficult stream crossings and onto a well defined trail before I lost the light. We met a couple on the summit who had come across the Franconia brook and first Lincoln brook stream crossing. They reported that while they had to knee-deep wade, the crossing were not dangerous. They also said they had seen no evidence of trail flooding; so we stuck to the main trails on the way back. We had 4 stream crossings, where the boots had to come off. We arrived back at the car at 7:20pm, ten minutes before sunset, and 11hr and 20 minutes after we started.. A splendid time was had by all.
EL
This was Santarpio’s 48th. He is 16 and started when 6. We brought along his 17 year old friend from the cross country team. She is 17 and this was her first hike. I told her that she was probably the first person in history who could claim that an Owl’s head death March, was their first hike.
We started on the Lincoln woods trail at 8:00 am. The forest service had posted signs at the trail head about flooding and impassable rivers. I quickly decided to do the Franconia falls bushwack, following the west side of the rivers as described in the AMC guide. I was able to follow the obscure remains of an old trail most of the way. I believe the distance covered by this was approximately 1 mile and it took 1 hr.
The second brook, coming off Franconia ridge , caused us to remove our boots and wade across, as did the Lincoln brook crossing that is 0.4mile before the Owl’s head slide.
I was surprised to find a large cairn at the base of the Owl’s head slide. It was perhaps 3 feet high. The slide rose immediately behind the cairn and the herd path was easy to follow. We saw where the Forest service has been scraping the blue blazed off the trees. There are tree scars, where the blazes were.
( Brief Editorial Tirade: These people are crazy. It makes me angry to realize that my parking pass dollars are paying for this over-zealous activity. I hope no one gets lost or injures because of the Forest Service’s irresponsible activity. I wish the Forest Service had some sense of history. This area was burned over and raped, by the 1940’s. A brief sixty years has turned it into a veritable jungle. This is not really Wilderness, no matter what any designation says. It is barely 8 miles from a busy interstate highway. No amount of trail obliteration is going to change this. Hiker injuries are the only likely result of obliterating Owl’s head human touches.)
At the traditional summit there was no sign and the large cairn was gone. I noticed that the rebuilding of a new “summit” cairn has begun at the base of the tree that used to have the sign. (By the way , the bolt holes from the old summit sign are still visable. Perhaps the Forest Service should fill the holes with wood-putty, or cut down the tree entirely.)
I had a GPS which told me that the much talked about “real summit”, was about 0.2 miles North. Unfortunately, the difficult stream crossing had eaten my schedules margin.
I wanted to get back across all of the difficult stream crossings and onto a well defined trail before I lost the light. We met a couple on the summit who had come across the Franconia brook and first Lincoln brook stream crossing. They reported that while they had to knee-deep wade, the crossing were not dangerous. They also said they had seen no evidence of trail flooding; so we stuck to the main trails on the way back. We had 4 stream crossings, where the boots had to come off. We arrived back at the car at 7:20pm, ten minutes before sunset, and 11hr and 20 minutes after we started.. A splendid time was had by all.
EL
