Bushwhacking the Daltons
Dalton Mountain is located north of Littleton, NH, quite close to the New Hampshire and Vermont Border. It has two summits on the NH500 list: Dalton Mountain NE and Dalton Mountain, the main peak, about 1.2 miles to the south. My friend Ken and I bushwhacked both in about 4″ of powdery snow in an area that had been logged previously, so we were able to serendipitously follow many logging cuts through the forest, which made the hiking a little easier.
We started our hike off a gated ATV road called Rooney Road, in the hills above Dalton, NH. Never heard of Dalton? Google Maps hasn’t either, although there is a small store, a church, and a public library off Rt 135 in the town center.
Bushwhacking West Hitchcock Mountain
The Hitchcocks are a cluster of five mountains in the White Mountain National Forest just outside of Lincoln, NH. They’re all on the New Hampshire 100 highest list (and the NH500 Highest list I’m currently working on) and none of them have trails, so you have to bushwhack to the summits. A handful of people have climbed them all in one day, but that’s a tough tough hike because they’re non-trivial bushwhacks. Most people climb the peaks over multiple hikes.
This climb up West Hitchcock is the fourth peak I’ve climbed in the group. I climbed the East, South, and Central (main) peak previously, all on one hike, back in 2014. Now that I’m on an off-trail navigation jag again, I figured it’d be a good time to climb the West Peak before we got our first significant winter snowfall, so I headed out the day after Thanksgiving to climb it solo.West Hitchcock Bushwhack