Hitch #5 White Mountain National Forest

For hitch 5 I went to Bunnell Notch Trail in the White Mountains National Forest. This trail leads to the summit of Mount Cabot, one of New Hampshire's 4,000 ft peaks. The hitch before us had started work on this trail and we returned to finish. Due to a large amount of rain in that part of the mountains, the trail becomes flooded for a good portion of the year. Our goal was to divert the water from the trail or raise the trail above the water. There are various ways to do this, most of them involving setting heavy rocks in the trail.

Overall in 10 days we set roughly 33 rock steps, 2 3 rock staircases, 8 rock waterbars, cleaned over 30 hand built drains, cleared 1 1/2 miles of corridor (cutting branches/vegetation to give width for the trail), and built 4 bog bridges of 20 ft each. We were very lucky to only have rain for our first day, which included our hike in, and for a couple hours 2 days after that. 

The night before our day off we hiked to a cabin near the summit of Mount Cabot and spent the night before taking our time hiking down another trail the next day. Between hiking the 1.5 miles from our campsite to the trail head multiple times, the roughly 9 miles on our time off, and the 6 miles on Mill Brook Trail to get to the site of the bog bridges, I estimate we hiked well over 30 miles.

My next hitch will be at Bear Brook, which is nice because I get to stay in my cabin and I have access to our facilities. The work will be various projects around the park, from trail work to chopping firewood for winter to clearing brush to make plowing easier. After that just 2 hitches until I'm finished here.