A few weeks ago we went on a hike that loops around to the peaks of Mt Welch and Mt Dickey. We lucked into the perfect day for this hike -- a morning where it hadn't rained, and wasn't too sunny. Normally neither of those things would be very important on a hike in the White Mountains -- you're almost always in deep forest, where the sun and rain are diluted by all the trees above you. But this hike (which was about a 5-mile loop) spent a good 3 miles out on open ledge.
In the woods near the trailhead, we spotted these nifty Monotropa uniflora. (Normally I am not a latin-binomial kind of person, but the common names for this plant are "indian pipes" and "ghost plant", and those are both kind of lame.) And the entire ledge was full of these tiny blueberry plants growing in every crack. Zillions of them! On the south-facing ledges, we picked a handful of blueberries each without even stepping off the trail. On the north-slopes, the plants are a few weeks behind and are probably ripe right about now. It was pretty awesome to have some fresh wild blueberries with our lunch on the trail.
It was pretty, but more than a little hairy (literally! hairy algae!) in spots. The ledge is criscrossed with tiny streams (taking water from... where exactly? The sheer cliffs above?), and wet granite is slimy and slippery! Fortunately most of the streams are narrow, so you just have to hop carefully across them. At the very top there's a spot where you have to actually climb through a cave (at the top of a mountain!) to get through to the next piece of the trail.
All in all, a great hike, although I gather from the 80-car parking lot (complete with bathrooms and everything) at the trailhead that this is a pretty busy route on the weekends.
