Kath
New member
Today's forecast called for a cloudy day with mild temps and little to no wind. Since Old Lurp and I were already in the area visiting his folks, we decided to take this last Sunday in winter to hike up Mt. Blue in Weld, Maine. Mt. Blue, at 3187 ft. is #49 on the Fifty Finest Peaks list. We both figured it would be a relatively short, moderate workout for us today. However, the access road to the trail-head was not drivable. The walk in to the trail-head was 2.5 miles on a nice wide road with minor ups and downs that was easily bare-booted on hard packed snow, due to heavy snowmobile use. (We encountered 4 or 5 of 'em during the course of the day) Then from the Mt. Blue Trail-head, it is 1.6 miles to the summit. There were plenty of tracks from snowshoe hare and fox. We spotted a hare crossing the trail, but he did not stick around long enough to pose for a picture, darn it! We found it odd that we did not see a single blaze or trail marking of any kind throughout the entire hike. The trail was easy to follow for the first mile or so. We followed the track that had been made by a very daring snowmobiler. Some spots were pretty steep, and we could not imagine how in the heck he made it as far as he did on his machine. About a half a mile from the summit, we could see where he finally gave up. This was a good time to put the snow shoes on. About 2 inches of powder on top of crust, with occasional breaking through to mushy stuff made travelling fairly easy. The going got MUCH tougher after another quarter of a mile. A couple of places were so steep that scrambling up on all fours was necessary. The trail became difficult to follow at times. Here, the temps dipped below freezing and the trees were all encased in a coating of ice. It looked like clusters of "ice carrots" hanging from the branches at about head-level. And as we pushed through them, it was as if winter's icy fingers were trying to grab hold of us. I would have liked to have spent more time at the summit, but the sky to the north looked mighty threatening and it was starting to spit snow. On a clearer day, the views would be magnificent, I'm told. I intend to find this out at a later date. We were lucky enough to get occasional glimpses of the surrounding mountains of western Maine through the gray clouds. We may have gotten short-changed in views today, but we got more than our fair share of the beautiful serenity that the woods in winter offers. (not to mention the bonus extra portion of exercise that the 5 mile road walk handed us!) A nice way to bid farewell to winter. I have (hopefully) uploaded a few photos. This is my first time attaching any pix, so I'm not quite sure if it will work. 
Happy spring hiking to all,
Kath
Happy spring hiking to all,
Kath
