Crawford Notch State Park, New Hampshire

June 9, 2024

Since we were only hopping over the White Mountains to the other side of the range, we didn't have a long way to go on this sunny travel day. We made stops for groceries, lunch and a dump station (at a fairly sketchy private campground), and we arrived at Crawford Notch State Park in the early afternoon.

Entering Crawford Notch State Park

A welcoming committee of mosquitos greeted us upon arrival, but it was nothing that a little bug spray couldn't handle. We have yet to see the swarms of mosquitos legendary to the upper Midwest, and we're hoping to keep it that way!

The campground was small and rustic, but overall quite pleasant, and our campsite was spacious and pretty easy to get into. We ended up getting plenty of solar to get by, despite some rainy weather later in the week.

For such a rustic campground, there was a really nice new bath house--with laundry, too

We didn't have a lick of cell service at this campground, so we checked the weekly weather forecast prior to arrival. Wednesday and Thursday looked to have some sun with good chances of thunderstorms mixed in, and Friday-Sunday looked cool and rainy. We don't normally do activities on travel days (besides drive), but this day we figured we should try to fit in some attraction while the weather was pleasant.

We drove a little way to a short trail adjacent to the Wiley House Historic Site where there was supposed to be a scenic mountain pond. Seemed like an easy diversion that shouldn't be too taxing. Upon arrival, we thought it odd that the large parking lot was completely empty--until we actually looked around.

Won't be getting that pretty "mountain reflected in a pond" shot today

Julie did manage to find something to take a picture of though!

Across the street from the empty pond was the Willey House Historic Site. The house was long gone, but there was a small interpretive exhibit that we wandered through. The site marked the location of the house where the Willey family lived in the early 1800s. The family (father, mother, five kids, and 2 hired hands) had left their house in the middle of the night during a horrible storm where the nearby Saco River had risen 20 feet in one day. It is thought that they were attempting to climb the mountain to get to higher ground when a landslide tragically buried them all. In a sad twist of fate, the house came through the landslide completely unscathed due to a large rock outcropping uphill from their house that had diverted the landslide away. The house was later converted into a 50-bed lodge and somewhat macabre tourist attraction until it burned down in 1898.

Our hike having been a bust, we instead decided to check out the river just off our campground. We immediately encountered ample evidence of a significant recent flood event. (We later learned that there had been a major storm in December of 2023. That explains the empty pond as well.)

Rick has the GPS, and immediately set about finding a way across the river . . .

Rick had to climb a big debris pile to get through to a crossing upstream. Julie stayed on the other side of the river where there weren't huge debris piles.

Dark clouds were beginning to roll in

Before Rick pole-vaulted across the river, Julie got in position to photograph the possible fail

The jump large step was a success!

Julie admired all the different kinds of granite boulders strewn about

Despite the ambiguous weather information we got from our satellite GPS device the next morning (100% chance of rain or thunderstorms some time in the day and maybe sun and maybe clouds), we decided to do the 2.8 mile round trip hike to Arethusa Falls.

You will notice the map does not match our plans . . . That first peak at 1.2 miles is the falls . . .

The trail was a lot of uphill with lots of rocks and roots

Our first detour was a walk along Bemis Brook

It was interesting how the brook bed was a giant tilted slab of granite

Next stop--Bemis Falls

From there, the trail turned steep on its way to rejoin the main trail

At last we arrived at Arethusa Falls

The original plan had been to go back the way we came. In the direction of down. That's the way most people do it. But we paused at a split in the trail while Rick consulted the GPS. How about taking the Frankenstein Cliff trail back that's double the miles but looks like it would have some scenic overlooks? We sat there for a moment considering this. Julie would have liked to have consulted the radar, as the sun was no longer to be found. But, alas, no cell service. At this point Rick said, "Every trail should be a loop." And Julie agreed. We were going to make the trail a loop.

The trail started by climbing up. And just when we turned a bend, the trail went more steeply up. This continued for some time until we heard our first rolling thunder. Well, we were too invested to turn back, so we continued onward. More up.

Finally, things leveled out and we looked forward to some views. We got excited when there was a slab of granite that looked like it could open into a clearing, but no dice.

Maybe there had been a view here before the trees grew to obscure it?

Further down the trail--not really a view here either

We were starting to doubt whether any views would be forthcoming, but then we walked through a burn-scarred area and got to see some mountains through the burned trees.

And then, a little bit farther...

This looks promising!

Now that's finally a VIEW!

We would have liked to have stayed in this spot for a while, enjoying the surroundings and taking a rest, but it had started to sprinkle and we could still hear the occasional thunder (and see rain in the distance). We didn't want to be caught in a thunderstorm on a mountain top. So, we headed down the long. steep. trail.

We came to a steep rocky wash that would have been a pretty treacherous waterfall crossing if there had been more water flowing. Fortunately for us, it was just merely wet with a trickle of water, and we made it across without dying.

Glad we didn't have to worry about falling ice today!

Looking down the "waterfall" while Rick takes his photosphere

The rest of the trail continued down, down and more down.

This just seemed appropriate for a trail called "Frankenstein"

Some large boulders along the trail

We walked under this old railroad trestle

At last, we found our way back to the truck, just as it started to rain. We're not sure we would have chosen to do the Frankenstein Cliff portion of the trail if we knew how punishing it was, but we were happy that we did it just the same.

After a night of rain, we woke to sunny skies and decided to press our luck again weather-wise with another mountain hike. Today's choice was the relatively short, 3-ish mile (out and back) hike up Mt. Willard.

Driving through Crawford Notch State Park

This trail was not quite as steep as the hike we had taken the previous day

New Hampshire sure has lots of nice waterfalls!

The long slog uphill through a rocky wash

The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel

We've arrived!

We stopped for a snack here, overlooking Crawford Notch (the U-shaped pass between mountains)

After eating a snack, we lounged on the mountain top for a while, enjoying the view and the sound of wind through the trees. After a while, a young couple passed by and thought we were "cute" and insisted on snapping some pictures of us.

Our mini photo-shoot 😉

There was a short little mountain-top trail that we took for some different vantage points.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which one of us you ask), there were no other trail options on Mt. Willard, other than the way we came up. So, no loop for us this time. We had a relatively quick and uneventful trip back down to the trailhead, and we returned to our camper in time for lunch before the rain.

Saco Lake, on the drive back

The rest of the days were a crazy jumble of rain and sun, so we did a few errands in town, and otherwise just hung out in the camper. We also took advantage of the inexpensive campground laundry (only $1 each for wash and dry) in between bouts of rain. We were mildly surprised that the washers and dryers actually more-or-less worked.

Dramatic skies!

Rick's Corner: Random musings

This was one of those locations with absolutely positively no internet. In these cases, we don't have the internet to fall back on for mindless downtime. We both have enjoyed playing "Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection" on our phones. This is a collection of 42 small one player puzzle games that works completely off line.

I like puzzle games where there is no guessing involved (puzzle can be fully solved with logic only), so my favorites (in more or less preference order) are: Unruly, Mosaic, Mines, Unequal, Slant, Map, Light Up, Rectangles, Towers, Bridges, Undead, Inertia, and Solo.

I have also been spending my "no internet" time converting old blog posts. I had copied the blogger HTML to individual text files in anticipation of this time. (Alan's magic Blogger importer will find the photos linked in the HTML in our photo collection, which is also available off-line.) The first pass at importing (fixing formatting and missing stuff) is almost complete all the way back to the beginning of 2023. Only one more year to go! Julie has yet to look at all the past posts and tidy the image sizes and do a final check and fix all the ugly that I missed 🙂.

Technical stuff

It turns out that the extra solar panels put on in Florida have been paying off. I am now a big fan of "over paneling" where you put more solar panels on than your controllers will use. As we have been in shaded sites almost all of this year so far, we almost never reach full possible ideal wattage. For example, this campsite was quite shaded, and we have had overcast weather most of the time. With our 2000 Watts of solar panels, we generally got between 100 and 200 Watts of solar during the day (from about 7am to 5pm). We averaged between 1 kWh and 2 kWh total a day which is almost enough to keep up with our daily demands. During this week, we never reached 100% full, but we did reach 99% on two of the more sunny days. Thanks to the generous amount of solar panels, we have always been able to fill up our batteries on travel days, as roads generally don't have trees over them.

This experience of getting 150 Watts of power while looking with envy at the sunny spot of ground only 15 feet away from the camper makes me fully understand why people get the 200 Watt portable solar systems that you can move around. One of those systems being moved around to follow the sun would keep up with our system! (Of course, the downside would be that I would have to actively move panels around.) I guess I should not be surprised at how much tree leaves block the sun - that is their entire purpose after all🙂.

My batteries have a Bluetooth interface where I can see the state of charge and voltages of each battery individually. I noticed that one of the batteries was doing more work than the others, and at one point the batteries had different voltages! That is not supposed to happen when they are wired in parallel. When I took a look at my battery wiring, I realized that even though all the battery posts were tight, I could rotate the lugs on a couple of the terminals😦. When I built the system, there were two terminals that had a bunch of lugs on them and the original battery bolts were not long enough, so I purchased some longer ones and used those. It turns out, the new ones are ever so slightly too long, and they bottomed out in the battery before the lugs were fully tight. I added a stainless washer I already had on hand to each of those two terminals and now the lugs can't rotate at all. Checking the batteries since then, they are tracking both percent full and voltage much more closely now. I would not have found this if the batteries didn't have the Bluetooth interface, so that is definitely on my "must have" for lithium batteries.

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