New Hampshire trip last weekend was amazing as expected. But one wonderful unexpected thing we did was to climb to the top of Mt. Monadnock in less than 4.5 hours. Details as follow (this is as detail as it gets, as I can't write at length even if there are many things left unsaid) :When we decided about the fall trip, initially it was only 3 of us, an old friend from my undergrad who eventually became my ex-classmate at Rutgers and his-now-ex-labmate and my department friend and me. But somehow crowd gathered at the last moment and it was 9 of us who left jersey at 4am on a chilly Saturday morning. By the time we reached to the small town of Jaffery, at the base of Mt. Monadnock, we had spent a good length of time looking for food, to get some energy before we start hiking. Finally, we ended up at a small authentic Italian eatery where luckily, we got to eat awesome pasta and other stuff which is exactly what hikers are supposed to eat in order to get supply of carbs which can last throughout the day. In all this business, we started the actual hiking pretty late at 12:30 pm at starting elevation of 951 ft. We had given a daylight time of around 6 hours and we selected the longest trail which would take 6 hours back and forth on an average. First hour was spent in looking around at absolutely beautiful autumn colors NH is so famous for. This is what we were walking through:
Heavenly :)
After walking through the pristine beauty for a while, the rocky road started. It was quite steep at times, so we didn't really take many pics there. After around 2.5 hours and many rocks later we reached the bare rocky top of the mountain and the entire view in front of our eyes was spectacular. (More photos from the top coming up soon)...We loitered around on the top for sometime, very reluctant to go back to the less-then-prettier everyday life. Coming down didn't take too long and by 1am Sunday morning we were back to NJ.Picture courtesy: Abhineet Sawa, a brilliant photographer we were lucky to have with us.
