Black Mountain

Benton, New Hampshire

Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic we have been forced like many other hikers to get creative about where and how we choose our next adventures. On Friday, April 24 the White Mountain National Forest announced trail head closures to every trail head they maintain.

We believe that this decision was poorly made. It takes a bunch of hikers (who have no intentions of stopping) and crowds them onto fewer trails which do remain open. Prior to this hike we haven’t hiked in the White Mountains for a month. We decided to go back because it is crushing our over all physical, mental, and emotional health to not have the mountains in our lives.

We wanted to preface this post by saying, we hike safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. We go straight to the trailhead and back without making any unnecessary stops. We never use any public bathrooms (ewww…) and we are always prepared to make a rational decision. If the parking lot is crowded, we don’t hike.

We arrived around 10am to start our 3.8 mile out and back hike on Black Mountain and only a couple other vehicles were located at the Chippewa trail head. It was a perfect 60 degree April day, the birds were singing and butterflies all around. Getting outdoors, even just a little bit is a must on a day like this one. At the beginning of the trail we crossed a swampy stream area. We looked into some of the deeper pools with child-like fascination to see if we could spot a fish swimming around. As we continued we came out on a logging road, followed that for a short time, and soon we started ascending the stair-stepper 1,000 of western NH.

I thought Monadnock was steep, and it is, but not like this. This trail was steep almost the entire way up and the elevation gain was truly insane. As a result of being surrounded the entire time by rare stands of pitch pine we often lost the trail. The first time we lost the trail we ended up finding a scenic overlook and boulder caves! From there we quickly realized that we weren’t in the correct spot and backtracked a little. The summit the views opened up more and more. Don’t be fooled by this trail. We counted four false summits. Very few people were seen the whole day making our social distancing successful.

Watch our adventure below and subscribe to our blog and YouTube channel for regular adventures!