Cabot (1/23/21)

For this hike, I was supposed to hike with my friend Sylvia and a friend of hers. However, the weather reports were showing extremely cold conditions for this day. Mountain Forecast had wind chills of -20 to -30 degrees at the summit. Sylvia wisely decided that discretion is the better part of valor and backed out.

I considered backing out as well, but I had hiked Cabot before, and one thing I knew about Cabot is that it's in tree cover for the entire hike. That means no views, but it also means no wind. I figured that if the trees were blocking the wind, then they would also block the wind chill, and I would only have to deal with the temperatures. The temperatures were cold, in the single digits, but that's well within expectations for a winter hike.

Cabot is the northernmost 4000 footer in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It's an uninteresting mountain with the lack of views, but I had to finish it if I wanted to finish my list of winter 4000 footers. I had an interesting history with the mountain, having failed to hike it successfully on my birthday in March 2018, and then successfully hiking it later that year with my friend Steve. As an aside, I haven't gotten to hike with Steve in more than a year thanks to conflicting schedules and then COVID, so I will be really excited when I get to hike with him again. He may well be my favorite hiking partner (no offense intended to anyone else I have hiked with).

Because Cabot is so far north, the drive is a long one, and I got there at about 9 AM. The parking lot for the trailhead I wanted was full, so I parked in another trailhead lot a short distance down the road. It had been snowing during the drive in and the roads were a little slippery, so I was glad to make it to the trailhead incident free. As is my tradition, I sat in my car and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then strapped on my boots and gaiters before stepping out into the cold. In case you're wondering, gaiters are a wrap that goes around your lower leg to prevent the snow from getting into your boots - a must for winter hiking.

I started out on the York Pond Trail, but after a quick 0.2 miles I turned off onto the Bunnell Notch Trail. The trail was basically a tube that had been carved out by snowshoes over the prior week.

Bunnell Notch Trail had some annoying ups and downs, and a bunch of small hops over streams, but overall it wasn't too difficult. The stream hops worried me not because I was afraid of getting carried away or anything like that (they were just tiny drainages with maybe an inch or two of water in them), but because I knew that if my spikes got wet, they would start balling. If you're playing basketball, balling is a good thing, but if you're hiking, it's not so good. It's what happens when the snow starts collecting on your spikes and basically forms a big snowball on the bottom of your boot. As you might imagine, that makes it fairly difficult to walk. It happened to me when I misjudged a water crossing back when I was hiking Owl's Head, so I have been more careful about it since then.

I hiked on Bunnell Notch Trail for almost three miles, making pretty good time. I log my hikes with an app called Guthook, and so I was checking it every once in a while to monitor my progress. I learned early on in my winter hiking career that it's important to keep your phone in a pocket where it will be near skin so as to keep it warm. If you put it in a backpack or something like that, it will freeze and be useless. Thus, I always keep my phone in the cargo pocket on my hiking pants.

The Bunnell Notch Trail intersected with the Kilkenny Ridge Trail, and this is where the hike got more difficult. As an aside, I wonder why it is called the Kilkenny Ridge Trail? I associate the name Kilkenny with Ireland much more than New Hampshire.

The Kilkenny Ridge Trail dropped for a distance, which was definitely bad. You never want to hike down while you're climbing a mountain, because that means that on the way back you're going to have to hike back up that when you would rather be descending. Once it finished dropping, it started climbing with a vengeance. I met three other groups of people who were descending, and they all reported that there was no wind at the summit, so that was nice. As for me, I just kept pushing upwards. I kept thinking that I had to get to the Cabot Cabin soon, and I knew the cabin was where the hard climbing ended. Unfortunately, the cabin was elusive.

I checked Guthook, and it told me I was 0.6 miles from the cabin. At my normal hiking pace, I figured I could make it there in 18 minutes. It actually ended up taking me more than half an hour, which I think shows just how difficult the terrain was in that section.

When I did make it to the cabin, I just soldiered on past it towards the summit. I figured that I could hit the cabin on the way back down. When I arrived at the summit, I met another hiker there. He was standing next to a sign that I thought was the summit marker, but he told me that the actual summit was next to a tree fifty feet off trail. Wanting to make sure I covered all my bases, I duly hiked up to the true summit and took my summit selfie there, following in the tracks he had already made. Apparently the other three groups had all missed the summit, not that it really makes a difference.

Greetings from Santa Hawk!

I proceeded back down to the cabin, and when I walked in I ran into the same hiker I had seen at the summit. We got to talking, and he told me that he was seven peaks away from finishing his grid. The grid is when a hiker hikes every four thousand foot mountain in New Hampshire in every month of the year, for a total of 576 peaks. Yeah, even I'm not that crazy. Nonetheless, I have mad respect for any hiker that manages to accomplish that. In fact, back in March, just before the pandemic started, I met a hiker who was about to become the first hiker over 80 years old to finish the grid. Pretty amazing.

The view from a clearing near the cabin.

I had a couple of snacks at the cabin. I had some cheese, which I thought was appropriate on a mountain named Cabot. I also ate a Clif Bar, though it was mostly frozen, and I was afraid that if I didn't eat it carefully I would end up requiring dental work. In retrospect, I should have brought a York Peppermint Patty to honor an inside joke with Sylvia, but too late now. The cabin is in pretty bad shape, but thankfully they had a lot of building supplies stored there that they apparently plan to use to restore it soon.

The gridder started out hiking before me, but I was descending the mountain at an extremely rapid pace, and I pretty quickly passed him. I ran into two other groups still coming up the mountain, but for the most part there weren't many others on trail. I think some of that had to do with the weather warnings and some of it had to do with the fact that nobody really likes Cabot.

I made great time on the hike. According to Guthook, I hiked 9.8 miles in 4 hours and 13 minutes for an average speed of 2.3 mph overall. Even better, I discovered that the remote started on my car could cover the distance between the two parking lots, so when I got back to my car it had been running for a few minutes and starting to warm up!

Thankfully, the roads had been sanded while I was hiking, so the drive out was a lot easier than the drive in had been. Thanks for reading, and always remember that you can't take flight until you spread your wings!