Flume and Liberty August 5, 2014
Bagged 2 more peaks yesterday with Skylar, Peyton and Sky’s friend Mike. We headed out at 9 AM on 8-5-14 up Flume Slide Trail. The trail is an old logging road and climbed with easy grades for the first mile. The trail then became rocky with gravel and climbed steadily. Nearing the two mile mark we hit the Flume Slide. We heard about this section and read that this was the toughest trail in New Hampshire, the rumors were true, extremely hard. Sections of the Flume Slide are rated Class 3, requiring use of hands but not ropes. Mount Flume ranks 25th on the list of 48 NH 4000′ peaks and this particular loop is 9.9 miles.
The rock wall was at a 45% grade with not much to grab onto and not many footholds. Some of the rocks were wet and of any rocks from the lead hikers were loosened up they would come down on the heads of the hikers below. I figured out halfway up that you could skirt the trail on the left where the footing was better and there were trees to grab onto.We reached the peak of Mt. Flume at 1 PM(ish). The weather was great, great views to the west and the Pemi Wilderness to the east. From the looks of it, Mt. Liberty appeared to be very far away and there also appeared to be a great decent / ascent to the summit, that wasn’t the case. We left Mt. Flume after eating some lunch and were able to get to the summit of Mt. Liberty in less than an hour, except for Skylar who took off running and made the stretch in probably 40 minutes.
We lost sight of him and ran into some hikers taking a break who said that they saw someone sprint by them a while ago, it was Sky!!!We made it to the top of Mt. Liberty around 3 PM and relaxed for a while, took off our packs and dried off. Again, great views 360 degrees of the Lafayette Ridgeline to the north. We chatted with four other hikers who just graduated from Air Force ROTC and were hiking to Mt. Washington, or so they thought, I dont think they knew what they were doing!! We descended Mt. Liberty and took a small break at the tent platforms .3 miles below the summit. We were off the trail at the trail head parking lot by 6 PM. Great day, 9 peaks down, 39 to go…
