Hiking The New Hampshire Triple Crown
New Hampshire is a great place to hike with thousands of miles of hiking trails and large tracts of wilderness to explore. While a lot of hikers flock to the White Mountain National Forest to climb the 48 four thousand footers and hike the elaborate White Mountain Trail system, there are many more trails and mountains across the state to slake your thirst for new trails and vistas.
But the three hardest lists and the ones that subsume most other lists are:
The Grid
The New Hampshire 500 Highest
The Grid involves hiking all 48 of the White Mountain 4000 footers in every month of the year, for a total of 576 peaks. You don’t have to hike them all in one year and you can climb multiple peaks in a day. This the most popular of these three lists and so far 105 people have finished it, some multiple times. On average, it takes about 3300 miles of hiking with 1,000,000 feet of elevation gain to complete. Click for “Rules of the Game.”
Bushwhacking Eagle Cliff and Downing Mountain
Eagle Cliff and Downing Mountain are two New Hampshire 500 Highest peaks located near Stinson Lake outside of Rumney, NH. They’re in a section of the White Mountain National Forest that doesn’t have many maintained trails, so they’re seldom visited. Snowmobiling is popular in this area, however, and there is a well developed and maintained trail network that hikers and mountain bikers can access if they wish to explore the area. Since these two peaks are largely within the National Forest, there aren’t any public access issues, provided you respect the homeowners and property owners abutting the area.Eagle Cliff and Downing Mountain
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