Weather: A great sunny late summer day.
Trails: Wildcat Trail and 19 Mile Brook Trail. Rather than an out and back, we did a car spot at 19 Mile Brook Trail and started on the Wildcat Trail. 8.5 Miles, 3150 feet of elevation gain.
Trail Conditions: Heading up the west side there are many spots involving scrambling including one or two chimney type areas.
View: Good east side view of the Presidential Mountain Range.
Group: Mike, Brian, and Anai
This trip report is being written almost two months after the actual trip. Hiking and blogging took a backseat to other pursuits over the past couple months. This post may not be as in-depth as past posts however I do remember the trip pretty well and of course there are the photos.
We began the trip with a car spot, deciding we would rather hike out on the 19 Mile Brook Trail that do an out and back. My jeep was left at the 19 MBT and Brian drove the Subi back to the Glen Ellis Falls parking area after a short stop at the AMC’s Joe Dodge Lodge.
Upon our arrival at the parking area we got busy making friends with the local forest ranger. This forest ranger would have given Yogi a run for his money. A tourist type car had stopped in the middle of the road at the park-n-pay billboard leading to the parking area. They looked confused at how to negotiate the parking fee and the ranger was giving them some tips. Brian, having his WMNF parking pass didn’t need to stop at the park-n-pay so we proceeded around the car. He crossed the double yellow line to do so, sparking the Ire of the hairy chinned ranger. She demanded that Brian stop and proceeded to lecture him on crossing double lines. Not wanting to make matters worse, I decided not to ask how long we should have waited behind the parked car that was blocking the road when there was no traffic coming the other way. This ranger had that personality you often meet out in the woods. The type of people who think they know a bit more than everyone else and are quick to try and teach you something. I am an AMC member and recommend membership to people making use of the trails, but you find that same attitude among a lot of their volunteers and employees. They display varying degrees of self-righteousness. This ranger was nearly maxed out. We were all a little put off by her overly-authoritarian way and unpleasant demeanor, but I think we all felt better when we realized she had been relegated to parking ticket duty. I mean, to spend years going to forestry school or environmental science school and land a job with the U.S. Forest Service only to hand out parking tickets? Which one of the USFS bosses did she piss off? Or maybe the bears out in the forest complained that she was such a DB (this is a family blog) so the Forest Service figured why not give her a job where being a DB is expected. Anyhoo, I couldn’t help myself but to snap a couple photos of her writing parking tickets just to commemorate the start of our last hike for the summer of 2010. So here she is, forever memorialized on the information super trail (or at least until the cease and desist order is served) as the angry hairy chinned forest service parking ticket lady.
 |
| Identity obscured under the advice of counsel for nh4k48. |
From the parking area there is a tunnel under Route 16. After the tunnel you quickly come to the only significant water crossing on this hike.
 |
| Trailhead with the tunnel under 16 to the left. |
 |
| Anai making her way over our only significant crossing. Route 16 in the background. |
The Wildcat trail starts its ascent pretty quickly and you gain a good amount of elevation in a short time. Soon you have great views of the Presidential Mountain Range. The clouds were on and off on this day but I was able to get a few good shots.
The trail has some significantly steep areas where sure-footedness is a must. This includes a few ledges with sharp drop-offs, chimneys, and other areas requiring a bit of scrambling. Personally, I love these types of climbs. The west face of the Wildcats involved the most scrambling I’ve done in the Whites so far.
 |
| Brian comes up the chimney |
 |
| Some steps carved in the rock. |
 |
| Brian takes a rest while Anai continues to scramble up the ledge. |
Traversing the Wildcats can be a little confusing. The trail is well marked and easy to follow, but it is tough to find when you have hit a summit. We didn’t find that any of the summits were clearly marked and there are actually 4 Wildcat summits, A thru D that we were hitting in reverse order, and two of which count as 4000 footers. It gets confusing in that, you are never quite sure if you have hit a summit until you realize you have been descending for a while.
We passed the Wildcat ski-lift and hit what we believed to be the peak of Wildcat D. Here there is an observation platform and this is where we stopped for lunch. It has an excellent view out over the Presidentials.
 |
| A run down summit house with the ski lift in the background. |
 |
| New Hampshire's Highest. |
From here we continued to hop over Wildcat C and B, neither of which count as 4000 footers. I’m not sure we ever really knew when we were actually at the top of one. At some point we came upon some folks who were doing an out and back. They seemed completely wiped out and the women in the group complained loudly of wet trails on the east side. We did find these areas that were wet descents for us and did involve a little slipping but nothing too crazy or anything to get upset about.
We finally arrived at the peak of Wildcat. The summit is treed in for the most part but there is an observation area pointed east which looks out over the Carter Notch Hut far below. We had gotten a late start that morning after a long ride up Pinkham Notch, plus the car drop and the stop at the AMC center. By the time we got to the summit of Wildcat, the mountain was casting a long shadow out over the hut below. We knew we would have to hustle off the mountain and out the trail if we wanted to avoid digging out the headlamps.
 |
| From the Summit of Wildcat, Carter Notch Hut in the shadow below. |
 |
| On Wildcat with Carter Dome in the background |
The descent off of Wildcat, headed down to the 19 Mile Brook Trail is sharp and fast. We lost elevation very quickly. At some point along the way I slipped and fell onto my pole, giving it a slight bow. I later found a tree and bent it mostly back into shape. We eventually found the junction with the 19 Mile Brook Trail. If it had been any earlier in the day we may have considered a quick trip to check out the hut but we were in a hurry.
19 Mile Brook Trail starts off with a gradual descent for the first mile so but the flattens out and can be quickly traversed. It was about 3.5 miles from the trail junction to the trailhead and this distance was covered fairly quickly.
 |
| Night was falling as we arrived at the 19 MBT trailhead |
After exiting the trail and picking up Brian’s subi we decided to check out Margaritas down near the intersection of 302 and 16. It was actually excellent Mexican food and I recommend it to anyone up that way… unless I’m there as well. I don’t like crowds when I’m hungry.
