Mighty Mt Cube

Dwight Peck's personal website

Mighty Mt Cube

Bugs and mud in New Hampshire, USA

Marlowe's wedding picnic now a matter of history, we're celebrating the Fourth of July (USA national day) with a hike up Mt Cube near Orfordville, New Hampshire.

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

Having finally found the trailhead in the nearly trackless forest, we've been slogging up for over an hour in beastly, insect-ridden heat and vast sinks of mud and foetid water. Like so many New England mountain hikes, only the granite summit of Mt Cube peeks out of the nasty trees, and we're glad finally to be there. The breeze helps to keep the bugs off.

We're coming up to the "South Summit" of Mt Cube, having left from some little country road and bug-swarmed mud-hole at about 340m (1130 ft).

Ooops.

The last stretch of the path follows along a gently rising rocky ridge.

Everything is going to level out pretty soon.

Finally rid of the pestilential bugs

Hills of New Hampshire and/or Vermont in the distance (depending upon which way we're facing now), some ways south of the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Presidential Range.

Here's the summit. The famous Appalachian Trail (Maine-to-Georgia) runs over this little mountain. 2909 feet is about 887m (coincidentally, that's the altitude where the treeline BEGINS above the fields in my village in Switzerland).