Hiking North Moat Mountain with Good Friends

It feels like I'm always playing catch-up on this blog... I guess that's what happens when you are doing stuff...

In the beginning of December, there was still no snow in New Hampshire so I convinced my friends to go on a hike. I figured out what hike I wanted to do and studied the maps to know how I wanted to do the hike... but in typical Jenny fashion, left the maps at home... Not home as rental place in North Conway where we would be starting the hike, but home as in Rollinsford, 2 hours away from North Conway... Thankfully, my friend, Anna, the muse for this blog, knows us well enough and brought a map with her!

Here is the map from the day...

Notice that little blip pointed out with the purple arrow... 

Here is the blown up section of that little blip... 

Yes, that was about 4 tenths of a mile but during that 4 tenths we got to witness this! 

But besides walking off the trail and going in a circle for a bit, it was a really fun hike. It was a 10 mile hike that took us 7 hours. It was cold enough out that there was ice on the trail in the higher elevations so it wasn't a really boring hike at all. The views on the way up and way down were really pretty too. Here are pictures from the rest of the hike:

The boys being gentleman and helping Molly and Anna cross Diana's baths

Anna's pure concentration as she walks across a tree over Diana's baths... 

And Nate barely awake as he stands on a tree... 

Using a compass and a map and Nate's silly faces and we still got lost... :) 

Scout doing what Scout does... Scouting out the land... 

On the way up, looking back at North Conway and Cranmore

In our fancy camera, we have a magic filter called soft focus. I thought this part of the trail looked like a fairy tale with the moss and the ice... So I used the soft focus filter and I tried to make it look more fairly tale-ish. 

Climbing above the clouds. One of my favorite parts of hiking in not so awesome weather

Happy campers hiking! 

Buddies on the summit!!! 

Heading down still above the clouds

Once we started heading down, all of us were pretty much ready to be done. It was so nice to see Diana's baths again. 

Thank you Anna, Mark and Molly for going on an adventure with Nate and me. I hope that we didn't scar you again!

I'm not setting a goal of elevation gain this year because last year was such a bust and I think I burned Nater Potater out a bit. I will keep track of our elevation gain though. We did 2,879ft on this trip. It was December so it gets counted! :)