The day started off quite dreary with pouring rain on the South Shore that transitioned into a light drizzle near Boston. I was hoping that the rain would taper off as my friend, Maggie, and I headed north into Franconia Notch State Park. At 6:30 am we departed from the Boston Area and got to the Cannon Mountain Ski Area parking lot by 8:30 am.
The trail was fairly good despite it raining most of the day prior to our hike. On the Kinsman Ridge trail, there was a lot of loose dirt and exposed granite slabs which made traversing the early portion of the trail difficult. During the first third of the trail, the trail resembled a channel with a trench in the middle. The loose dirt made the accent slow and the decent awkward as one would have to almost waddle on either side of the small middle trench for traction. On a few occasions, I had to bushwhack around pools of mud and sheer granite slabs. In dry conditions, traversing the exposed rock probably would have been easy, but I would not recommend trying to climb the rocks while wet. I took along my friend, Maggie, on this hiking trip and that was certainly interesting.
We got to the summit by 10:30 am and we were greeted with blue sky and the sun. When the clouds shifted with the wind, we got small holes in the clouds to see the surrounding mountains. The observation tower made it so that when the clouds thinned, we could see pretty far around Cannon mountain.
Overall I would say that Cannon Mountain is an easy first 4000 footer and that the Kinsman Ridge trail when dry would be fairly easy to traverse. I look forward to hiking the Franconia Ridge trail in the near future to see Mt. Lafayette and Mt. Lincoln.
Grace's Adventures 