Last Sunday Sabine and I loaded our dogs up and drove out to Miller State Park for a hike up and over Pack Monadnock and North Pack Monadnock mountains and back, along the Wapack Trail. After a good breakfast and coffee at J Beaner's in Nashua, we headed west on Rt 101 to the park, which is accessible right off of 101, about 40 min west of Nashua, half-way between Nashua and Keene.

After unloading and getting everything ready to go we hit the trail. The previous couple days had been quite warm, so a lot of the snow we had received recently was melting away, and this proved to be one of our biggest challenges for the day. After completing the first mile or so of the trail, which involves a lot of somewhat steep scrambling, we then were faced with quite a bit of icy trail. Seems the runoff goes straight down the trail in a lot of sections, and when the temps fell back below freezing the night before everything froze. It was like mild ice climbing in some parts!

We made it up to the top of Pack Monadnock a couple miles in and took our first break. There's a radio tower and a parking lot (for a road that's closed in the winter) at the top and the view was great:

View from Pack Monadnock

We continued-on down the north face of Pack Monadnock, with the goal of going through the valley between the two hills and then on up to the peak of North Pack Monadnock and our turnaround point, however we quickly found out that between the fact that the north side was much colder and icier and we were, well, going down, the going was very, very slow and nerve-wracking. Between the slow pace and the diminishing daylight, we decided we better turn around, so we did. On the way back up to Pack Monadnock we decided to take a coffee and biscotti break (life is rough) at Joanne Bass Bross overlook, which was really beautiful.