Nubble Peak

Nubble Peak

88th highest peak in New England
(a.k.a. “Nameless, Trail-less Peak”)
Matthew and Eric Gilbertson
April 3, 2011

Few mountain names strike as much fear into the hearts of mountaineers as “The Peak Above the Nubble.” Some brave hikers even refer to it as “Trail-less, Nameless Peak.” Browsing the New England Hundred Highest Mountains list one day Eric and I came across this foreboding mountain and decided we would see what the hype is all about. We found out that old “Nubble Peak” had a few tricks up its sleeve.

After finishing a nice little 25 mile warm-up hike + ski through Mahoosuc Notch the previous day we headed to Nubble Peak on Sunday. We arrived at Haystack Road near Twin Mountain and found it unplowed, as predicted by the little green “P” on our White Mountains Map (as opposed to a red “P”). No problem, we whipped out our XC skis and starting kicking and gliding towards the beginning of the route.

We had done our homework and printed off a route description from Views From the Top. I marked a few key locations on the GPS. We were supposed to drive (ski) for 1.8 miles, then turn right at 3 boulders, then hike (ski) for another 0.5 miles and arrive at a clearing, at which point we wound start bushwhacking up the mountain.

From our 10 miles of starlight XC-skiing on Success Pond Road in Maine the previous night we were seasoned ski veterans and covered the distance rapidly. The boulders appeared on schedule and we starting heading up the mountain. We soon came across a dude with his dog who was out for a little morning snowshoe hike. We hadn’t expected anyone else in this part of the woods. I mean trail-less Nubble Peak isn’t exactly a hiking hotspot when you’ve got the Presidentials, Franconia Ridge, and Crawford Notch nearby.

“You guys headed to Nubble Peak?” he asked.
“Yep, is this the right way?” we asked.
“Yeah, just head up through the clearing and then start bushwhacking up the ridge. I think about 40 people have already hiked it this year, there is a good trail.”
“Awesome, thanks.” Wow, we hadn’t expected the mountain to be that popular and really hadn’t expected trail.

We later found out that the dude’s comments were completely inaccurate: Only one two-person party had signed the summit register since early November. And all trails completely vanish when there’s 6 feet of snow on the ground. But we trusted his comments and kept climbing. Soon we reached the clearing and it was time to trade the skis for snowshoes. We were looking forward to some nice downhill ski action on the way down.

We followed the GPS and started climbing through the woods. The vegetation was much thinner that we had anticipated. “Wow, I wouldn’t even call this ‘bushwhacking,’” I said to Eric, “this is just called ‘walking through the trees.’”

But the mountain would not be won that easily. The higher we climbed the more the vegetation tried to hold us back. Soon we entered a dense thicket of pine trees and started thrashing through the brush. As we climbed a thousand little hands pulled and yanked on our clothes and backpacks, trying desperately to hold us back. Each time we bumped into a branch or grabbed onto a tree for support a huge clump of fresh snow would dump down on us. We all know that the worst situation is when snow falls down your back. A few times with Eric in the lead I heard a few piteous gasps and moans and knew exactly what had just happened. Eric’s head would emerge from a mini local blizzard covered in snow.

In brush that dense it’s a good idea to bring eye protection. I donned my sunglasses and cinched my hood down and was ready to battle with the bushes. To make things even harder tough, we were sinking down about a foot and a half with every step. At the MITOC office on Thursday Eric had made the fateful decision to rent out the smallest snowshoes. This would have been fine if we had weighed 100 lbs, or the snow was 6” deep, but they didn’t do a whole lot of good when out net weights were over 200 lbs and the snow was 6 feet deep.

Each step meant picking one foot up out of the little snow crater it had just created and placing it on top of the snow in front, then letting it sink back down and slide backwards about 50% of the distance it had just gained. I would say that much more of our effort went into compressing and displacing snow than in bringing our bodies up the mountain. I would take a few steps then, exhausted, switch with Eric. And so we slowly climbed.

Occasionally encountered what is referred to as a “Spruce Trap.” This phenomenon happens when it snows so much on a spruce tree that it bends over, leaving a void underneath it. Then subsequent snowfall covers up the tree and turns it into an invisible booby trap. This hike proved an excellent opportunity for us to learn first-hand the dangers and dynamics of Spruce Traps. A few times while leading I picked up my snowshoe and planted it back down on the snow in front of me, only to find that there was in fact nothing but air underneath my foot. I plunged chest-deep in to the snow and became a tangled mess of person, pack, spruce tree, snow, and snowshoes. It took a minute, a few acrobatic moves, and a little snow down the back to extricate ourselves from these tricky situations.

This was truly bushwhacking. There may have been a user trail underneath us that’s visible in the summer, but in April, the deepest-snow month of the year, most of the trails in the Whites are completely indiscernible. I tried to picture what we would look like if you could imagine removing all the snow and watching us crash through the trees 6 feet off the ground. We thrashed and crashed our way through the thick bushes on the way towards the top. I felt like a little slow-moving bulldozer, plowing my way through the branches and swimming uphill through the snow.

But pretty soon we ran out of mountain and found ourselves on the top of Nubble Peak. We had a spectacular view of the Presidentials and Mount Washington. At last the sun shone upon us in the summit clearing. We realized that in the summertime we would probably be standing amongst 6ft tall spruce trees, but in the winter we were on top of them. We basked for a few moments in the summit glory. For a few minutes we stared solemnly at Mount Washington in the distance, watching the clouds form and disappear.

We decided then that the official name for the mountain should be “Nubble Peak.” That’s what the local we had met called it, and that sounds a lot nicer than any of the other names we had heard. Nubble Peak was a feisty, challenging little mountain.

Now it was time to withdraw the potential energy we had deposited in the bank during our ascent. Time for some downhill action. Following our tracks we tore through the bushes and flew down the mountain. We calculated that we actually went four times faster downhill than uphill because: 1) we could follow our tracks and didn’t need to worry about finding the route, 2) the trail was already broken for us, and 3) it was a steep downhill so we could actually snowshoe-ski at times. What had taken us 1.5 hrs to climb took us a mere 20 minutes to descend.

Now it was time for even more elevation payback with the skis. We switched our snowshoes for our skis and pointed them downhill. I’m not a real strong skier so I crashed a few times into the bushes. But despite a few scrapes and broken branches it was still way funner and faster to go down. We blasted down the mountain and out the road and reached the car in record time. We had gone from the top of Nubble Peak all the way back down to the car in just 1hr. I think you’d have a tough time covering those 4 miles that quickly in the summer.

Time to head back to Boston. We hopped into car sweet car and grabbed a bite to eat before our 3hr journey back. It was only 4pm so I was pumped that we would make it back into town just before dark. It had been a good day. We buckled up, I put the car in reverse and started to back out of our parking space. As I glanced out the back window to look for obstacles I happened to glance at some snowshoes in the backseat.

“You got my snowshoes, right Eric?” I asked.
“Um…your snowshoes?”
“Uhh, yeah, my snowshoes.”
*Silence.*
I stopped the car.
“Let’s look through everything.”

We got out and ripped through all the gear in vain search for another pair of snowshoes. Nothing. We discovered that there was only this one pair of snowshoes within a hundred foot radius of the car.

“Hmm,” I said, “so I came down the mountain in snowshoes and then we got to the clearing. Then we put on skis. Then we came back to the car.”
“So the snowshoes have to be somewhere in between the car and the clearing,” Eric answered.
*Silence*
“&^$#*%&@,”I said, breaking the silence.

“How much are those dang snowshoes worth?” I asked.
“$200.”
“Well they probably came off in the clearing when I fell while skiing. That’s 2.5 miles away.”
“Well we better go get them,” Eric said.
“&$$#$^&%.”

The trip to Nubble Peak was getting even more epic. Nubble Peak was calling us back. I painfully put the car back into its little parking spot and put on the cold, squishy, wet ski boots. We grabbed some gear and the skis and scooted back up the mountain.

Luckily there was still plenty of daylight so the ski back to the clearing wasn’t all that painful. But soon we began asking ourselves “How can a 5 mile ski that you plan for be pleasant, while the exact same 5 mile ski that you don’t expect be sheer drudgery?”

I made it to the bottom of the last steep hill and ditched the skis. I started running up the trail. My eyes were in snowshoe identification mode. Every stick or branch or snowpile I looked at my mind wanted to turn it in to a snowshoe. At last I reached the clearing and found the two little renegade snowshoes basking serenely on the ground next to a little broken tree that I had crashed into while I was skiing. I carried them over my head triumphantly and paraded them down to Eric, who was waiting at the bottom of the hill.

“Ok, now let’s get out of here,” I said.

We were back down to the car at 6:15pm with an hour of sunlight to spare. The April daylight had been much more forgiving than January daylight would have been. We threw the gear—all of it—into the car and closed the doors. Yet another successful trip, we thought to ourselves: we had attained our objective, with no injuries and no lost gear. Nubble Peak had provided us just the challenge we were looking for.

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