The Trailrider
THE TRAILRIDER
BOB HICKS
IT WAS A really hot day when we drove to Warren to meet Kimball and his friend for our planned ride to the top of 4800-ft. Mt. Moosilaukee. When the ride had first been suggested to me, I demurred because those New Hampshire mountains are really awful riding-steep, boulder strewn, rooty and rocky. They’re just no fun to ride. But Dave went on to elaborate that we were going to go up Moosilaukee on the remains of the old carriage road.
A number of New Hampshire mountains with panoramic views had been the sites of mountaintop hotels a century ago. The guests were taken to the top in stages drawn by large teams of horses. Carriage roads were built up these peaks, and business during the summer months was brisk. Gradually these places fell victim to winter storms and vandalism, and fire eventually claimed most of the buildings. Today the only remaining mountaintop hotel of any significance in New Hampshire rests atop New England’s highest peak, 6300-ft. Mt. Washington. The old stage road is now an auto road.
Not so at Moosilaukee. No maintenance has been done on the 3.5-mile stage road for decades, it’s been 50 years since a stage last climbed to that open alpine summit. The old road is now a part of the trail network covering this part of New Hampshire, a hiking trail network.
We met in Warren and unloaded the bikes for our trip. It was only about 9 a.m., and with just a short ride to the top, we figured to be up and back by early afternoon. Such was our optimism.
Access to the old road was not marked, you had to know the right logging road to reach the old way. Kimball knew it, he’d made this trip several times already. His Sherpa T sported a rather large 60-tooth rear sprocket, a fact which gave me some cause for trepidation with my Triumph 500 sporting gearing only one tooth down from street gearing on the countershaft. Howie had a 360 Yamaha stock, and Dave’s buddy had an old Matador with another great big rear chain wheel.
The climb was up fairly easy woods road for nearly a mile. It took only a few minutes to reach that turning where ahead lay the first steep gradient. Since horses had pulled stages up this old way, I hadn’t felt we’d see anything too steep to handle, but the horses hadn’t contended with what now lay before us. The stretch ahead was perhaps 100 yards, steep, and just a gully full of boulders. The old gravel roadbed had long ago disappeared downhill. What remained was the ultimate in erosion and boulders too big to wash away. And, this gully lined on both edges by the encroaching forest, a tightly underbrushed impassable thicket.
Gradients or rocks: Either are no big deal here in New England, but together on this mountain they combined to thwart forward progress. For the next hour and a half we toiled upward, 100 yards at a time, then rest and go back to help one who was hung on a boulder. The two Buis had the best of it, except that they frequently threw chains as the rocks caught those huge rear sprockets. My Triumph had no chain trouble, but the clutch and engine took a beating straining upward, easing over each boulder, through each narrow trench.
At each turn in the trail we’d look ahead eagerly for some sign of respite, an easing of the grade, or slackening of the gully. No such luck. It was going to be over two miles of this sort of thing. If we were just hiking we’d be making faster progress. At least the two trialstype bikes were having their troubles, too. I’d have felt badly if the whole show was held up for me.
At last we reached that bend we’d been looking for. Ahead the trail eased up, the gully tapered up into a path, and we had reached the high ground just below the tree line. To our left the south peak of Moosilaukee rose, but our way lay straight ahead, slabbing across the side of this peak toward the ridge top that led to the main peak now only a mile away, and only a few hundred feet higher. We came out of the woods into the open area above tree line, and there across the intervening stony “alpine garden” was the scar of the old stage road, looking as though it were some ancient Roman way leading through the ruins of a city. The piles of boulders were everywhere, and the desolation was at once a bit depressing and yet inspiring. Behind us now were the struggles, we thought, and the swarming midges that had made each stop a torment of buzzing crawling, swatting.
To Conquer Is To Be Conquered
In a few moments we traversed this old road to the main summit, and parked there by the sign explaining the nearby rockpile as actually the ruins of the old summit house. We ate a light lunch from stuff we’d brought along, and briefly visited the nearby spring to quench our thirst and refill a canteen. We still had not met any hikers on this well-used section of trail, no sign at all that anyone else was in the mountains.
The breeze blowing across the summit kept the insects away, and it was with some reluctance that we departed down the Benton Trail. This was to take us north and west back to the valley, and there join the Tunnel Brook Trail which followed that brook some 8 miles back to Warren. The whole loop ride was to be only 15 miles.
You would have thought that going down would be easier, and perhaps it might have been if we’d only had to contend with the very bumpy, twisty hiking trail. The roots and slippery pine needle coverings and the rocks made the downward way something akin to riding down mossy, old, broken-down stairs. It was the two or three big blowdowns that really caused the grief. They were enormous trees, two feet or more through the trunk, and right down close to the ground. Too high to go over, with their big limbs, too low to easily get under, and located on the trail where one side went up steeply, the other down, all that impenetrable thicket of regrowth timber and understory.
We ended up digging a bit under the trunks, and bodily dragging the bikes through. It was hot, sticky work, and the midges and gnats were at us again. But at last we cleared the last of the big obstacles, the trail opened out to woods road, and we forded Tunnel Brook to join the old woods road on the far side that formed the Tunnel Brook Trail. Our struggles were over, we thought, just 8 miles down the valley now. It was mid-afternoon and we’d done maybe 8 miles.
The old road was good riding until we got to the beaver ponds. Three of them. Beavers are obnoxious, no matter what connotations of constructiveness the phrase, “busy as a beaver” may carry. Once they’ve eaten all the bark from all the trees they cut in their first pond, they move downstream and build another. Now we were looking at three in succession. The original old trail route was under several feet of water. Hikers had bypassed the ponds alongside, but hikers easily climb over the jumble of boulders, blowdowns and brush. Our way was a jumble, a desolation worked by nature’s friendly beavers.
It was here that the Buis had their real troubles. Those big sprockets were constantly catching on the rocks. I barged ahead in something of an impatient mood, tired of all this tight struggling, and banged and bounced the Triumph over the rocks, over the smaller deadfalls, around the bigger ones, and through the edges of the ponds, until I gained the old roadbed on the far side. It was to be nearly an hour, though, before the others made it. One of the Buis had thrown its chain so many times that the chain was twisted. Even pushing alongside to help it did not prevent frequent throwoffs. The rocks were big enough that pushing alone would not work. We needed that engine pulling on that wheel.
The gnats had a feast. If we had thought it bad in the morning, it was a horror show now. Despite the heat, we kept our helmets on, and put on the sweatshirts we’d used up top, with the front pulled up over our faces. Still it was blink the bugs out of our eyes, spit them out of our mouths, and blow them out of our noses. They gathered along the hairline to feast, and several days after my head was sort of a pebble grain of bug bites.
At last we got the bikes past the tangle of the final beaver dam, and wasted no time getting moving. From here it was an easy ride along pleasant going out to Glencliff, and thence down the road to Warren. Soon we sat on the bench in front of the roadside store drinking cold soda, and feeling so good to be away from those Godawful bugs.
Looking back at Moosilaukee, aloof and blue in the gathering dusk, I realized that the mountain today had been telling us something. Ever since that ride, when people talk to me about the challenge of conquering the mountains by trail bike, I laugh. It’s the mountain that does the conquering, friends. |§]
