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Published: October 28th 2007
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Obfuscator writes: Since we were perfectly legally camping, we wasted no time in leaving our legitimate site in the morning. (Onaxthiel adds: Yup. I woke him up at dawn for stand-to, so we'd be ready for the French and Indian attacks.) Our gear got stashed in its traditional place in the backseat, and we headed back toward some of the places we had been unable to take in the night before, namely the Falls of Lana and Silver Lake.
Silver Lake was only a .6 mile hike from the parking lot, so we figured, “Why not?” It turned out to be a rather pretty lake, if somewhat unimpressive. We did find a neat spillway, or something on one end of the Lake. Nearby, we saw a sign that said that the Falls of Lana were another mile. Now, our other choice to see the Falls of Lana was to go around by road, and see it from the bottom rather than from the top. This would have been a fairly long drive, and one that would have taken us out of our way, so we opted to make our hike a bit longer. Why not, right?
Well, it was
a hike well worth while. On our way to the falls we ran into some Park Service old men, who told us of a great side hike we should take on our way back up, so we made a mental note of that and moved on. The Falls of Lana are a series of falls strung out along a fast moving creek. All along the creek and falls are tall rock cliffs that we spent a LOT of time climbing on. This may not have been terrifically wise, considering how slick some of them got with all the moss. Nonetheless, we went from the very top of the falls all the way down to the bottom, which probably added another mile or so (round trip) to our hike, most of it off-road and rather steep. Still, the rapids and falls were well worth the extra time. Somewhere on our hike back up to the lake and the Park Service men's detour, it started to hit home that we had failed to pack water or food for this hike, anticipating it to be a short 1.2 mile round trip affair.
We took the detour they recommended, when we found something
approximating the right landmarks (we were coming at it from a totally off-road approach). We were really glad they told us about it, since we would have missed it otherwise. The detour took us to the top of a high ridge, with a mostly unobstructed view of the Adirondacks in the distance and Lake Dunmore nearby. Oh yeah, and a lot of Vermont in between.
By the time we got back to the car, we were both really thirsty and hungry. We descended on the auto like vultures, and staved off starvation and dehydration with our stores, before heading into Brandon for lunch. The diner we ate in was ok, but nothing to write home about. Goulash isn't normally tomato paste-based, is it? Following lunch, we began our drive toward New Hampshire. There was one stop worth mentioning, which was called Texas Falls.
Texas Falls is fairly short compared to the falls we spent all morning exploring, but it's really pretty. The water has a sort of turquoise color to it, and it's carved out big round basins after more or less every drop. I think these might be called potholes. Whatever they are, the water swirls around
in them after it drops, and it looks really neat.
In New Hampshire, we headed straight for the White Mountains National Recreation Area. The first campsite we arrived at was closed, of course. A bit more driving brought us through North Woodstock, and up to Franconia Notch State Park, which is where the New Hampshirites keep their Old Man of the Mountain contained. It's also where we were finally able to find a campground that was open, just like the one we definitely camped at in Vermont. We were even allowed to build ourselves a nice fire there, and so we enjoyed our evening there, prepared to see the sights of this Newest of Hampshires in the morning.
Onaxthiel's Lessons Learned: We got sloppy with our non-hiking and non-camping. We should have just brought the camelbacks and some granola bars or something on our hike. We pretty much always find reasons to extend our hikes and detour to something else, so why not plan for it? Instead we spent a couple hours hungry and very thirsty for no good reason. If all your firewood is wet, it will take a long time before the big logs will actually
burn, so you have to feed a lot of small and medium wood into the fire to keep it going.
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J
non-member comment
texas falls
sounds like they were pretty poorly named. Anything named after Texas ought to be at least as big as the state itself.