This is not Cardigan

Original plan was to check out Cardigan this weekend but we found out last second (thanks to a friendly poster at timefortuckerman) that the NH chapter of AMC was having their winter weekend there this weekend and there was going to be LOTS of people on trail skinning, snowshoeing, etc.

So luckily we were able to avoid the traffic jam and we had been thinking about a trip in roughly the same area anyway so we did some last minute research and put it together.

Again I had high hopes based on my research that we were gonna find some really good stuff and also based on some inklings of things we could see when we spotted my car. But yet again navigation is much harder once you are actually up in the woods and you can miss lines by 3 feet and never know its there. But this trip def went much better than last time around and I think there is much more potential for this area and now that we know right where certain things are we will be much more efficient.

you know its gonna be good when you are gearing up at a playground

We hit trail around 10am and the skin up was nice and gradual. Weather was absolutely perfect for hiking, sunny and mid 20's. We made quick work of the skin up with only a few tricky spots around and over drainage streams.


On the way up we noticed all kinds of gladed lines that looked very doable that were completely untouched. I will def be back exploring more in the future. We eventually hit the ridge line and topped out for a bit of lunch in the sun.


There was a fairly steep headwall just off the front of this face that could very well have nice stuff in the trees but it was just a bit too steep for us to take a peek without fully committing and our plans were slightly different for this day so we decided to continue on but again something I will need to check out in the future.

We skinned a little bit further to check out the first descent we were thinking about. It looked pretty good, decent snow but the bottom half of the run was much more flat than we had anticipated and the run out looked pretty boring so we decided on checking out the other line on the itinerary.

We were fairly sure based on sat images where we needed to head into the woods to attempt to find it so we fanned out a bit and started bushwhacking. Things looked promising at first but things never completely thinned back out to where we needed them to really link turns nicely. You could definitely tell that there was at one time something where we were but it had grown back in with enough little sapplings that you couldn't go more than 10ft or so without getting whipped in the face or catching a tip.

So after our first run of extremely tight glade skiing we re-skinned and headed back up the other side trying to find something a bit nicer. The second skin up was a bit more aggressive but nice because we topped back out in under 30 mins. On the way up we spotted a nice little line through the trees that hadnt been touched and we were fairly sure we could find it from where we were at the top so we gave it a go...and finally some success!

the goods

Nothing overly amazing, but pretty deep. It served up some fun bouncy powder turns and actually dumped us right down at the car we spotted, perfect!

So again I wouldn't call our expedition 'epic' by any means but another good recon mission and learning experience. I now feel way more coordinated when it comes to de-skinning and re-skinning on trail. I've got the routine down to under 5 mins now. Unfortunately this might be it for skiing for a bit with lots of rain on the forecast for tonight and tomorrow...next report might be from the ice bike.