The park was beautiful, but it definitely has that “extremely-crowded extremely-quickly” vibe to it.  While this weekend was still a touch chilly, we ended up running into a bunch of hikers on the trail and met another 40+ people (+ kids and dogs) milling around the watchtower at the top of the mountain.  I can only imagine how crowded it gets here in prime weather!  That’s one of the recurring themes I’ve noticed with our local NE outdoors adventures… there are just so many people everywhere!  (I guess it’s kind of like growing up with beaches on the Jersey shore — if you don’t know differently, you’d never imagine places — like SC and FL and TX — where white sandy beaches stretch lazily on for miles with few people marring the landscape…)

Anyway, here are a few photos from the top:

Tower at Top of Blue Hills

Metro Boston in the Distance

View from the Top

We drove up Saturday morning, went on a quick hike, and spent the night at a nice little B&B in North Woodstock, NH.  The B&B was virtually empty… I think this was the first weekend of the “off season”, a period of a couple months that lies between fall foliage watching and ski vacations.

Scrabble by the Fire

After a nice evening of scrabble & hot chocolate by the fire, we woke up to a clear frigid day.  Not a great day for hiking to the top of the mountains (which are actually covered in snow and ice by this time of year), but we did do a segment of the Applachain Trail.  It led to a beautiful deserted mountain lake.

Lake in NH Mountains

I’d love to go back and do some of the more hardcore mountains, but the season is pretty much over for the year.  I think it might get warm enough again in May?  June?  That’s the tragedy — you see all these beautiful mountains, but they’re off-limits most of the year.  Too cold for a pleasant experience, but tantalizingly close.  This is a strong argument for living in the Southwest.  The high altitude mountains there will still be cold in the winter, but at least they’re a bit more accessible.

An Inaccessible Mountain

Until then, in the spirit of weekends past, I thought I’d share some pictures from a couple weekends ago.  We headed out to Great Brook Farm State Park west of Boston for some biking and icecream.  It was surprisingly difficult figuring out where to go.  From a first glance, the NE seems very different than most other parts of the country… there aren’t as many state / national parks here.  I guess all the land was already owned (and occupied) before the government could acquisition it.  Anyway, Great Brook is essentially a bog:

Trail at Great Brook

A bog with nicely landscaped trails, a thousand visitors a day, and a trillion mosquitos: we biked around for about 15 minutes and dashed back to the car with red welts all over our bodies.  There’s also a functioning dairy farm within the park:

Mooooooooo...

Some good (overpriced) icecream there, but the excitement of watching cows sleep and eat made it all worth it.  We went out and sat down in the sun by the pond to enjoy the calories:

Pond at Great Brook

Nice hardcore biking trip with lots of exercise, right?  Honestly, it’s just hard to do anything in Boston.  I thought it would be easier with all the people packed in, but all it means is that it takes 2 hrs+ to get to a tiny crowded park less than 50 miles from the city.  Ok, enough complaining — it was a gorgeous weekend, and as I get ready for the retreat this afternoon, I’m sure I wish I could go back and add another 40 degrees to the thermometer.