Sunapee Mountain and the Andrew Brook Trail

This is my last outdoor column for the Laconia Daily Sun. Nancy and I, along with my aging hiking companion Reuben, will be moving to Newport, Vermont to live closer to my daughter Meghan, her husband Rob and our two grandchildren, Maggie and Gabe. It is a bitter-sweet move, pulling stakes from our tent after living in the Lakes Region for 42 years. After five years of writing over 190 articles for the Outdoor Section of the Laconia Daily Sun it is with great regret that I leave my post as a contributing columnist. I want to thank the staff at the Sun, especially Roger Carroll and Adam Drapcho for their support and encouragement over these past five years. I will miss writing my weekly column, but perhaps opportunities exist elsewhere. As Chris McCandless wrote, “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

When my children were first learning to ski we would drive to the Mount Sunapee Ski Area. At that time it was operated by the State of New Hampshire. Lift tickets were reasonably priced and almost all of the terrain was manageable for beginning skiers. There were no luxury condos, high priced food bars or long lift lines. It was one of the first ski areas to provide adaptive skiing for people with disabilities. My children and their friends would refer to Sunapee as the “Magic Mountain”, because they became magically blissful and carefree, flying down the mountain. I returned to Mount Sunapee last week, obviously not to ski, but to climb to the summit, this time by “shoe leather express”, not by chair lift.

Mount Sunapee is a five mile long mountain ridge. Besides Mount Sunapee the ridge encompasses three other peaks: White’s Ledges (2,716 ft.), North Peak (2,280 ft.) and South Peak (2,608 ft.). The entire mountain ridge is traversed by the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway Trail, a fifty mile hiking trail that terminates on Mount Monodnock in Jaffery, NH. The seventy mile Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Trail links the three mountains together. Both trails meet at the Pond of Solitude on the south side of Mount Sunapee and use the same trail to the summit.

Prior to 1850 the mountain, as well as the town of Sunapee, were known by other names. Some maps still refer to the area as Wendall, named for one of the early Masonian Proprietors. In 1850 the name was later changed to Sunapee, an Algonquin Indian word: “suna” meaning goose and “apee” meaning lake. If you have an imaginative mind, you will see that the lake is shaped like a goose. It’s interesting to note that so many names of New Hampshire mountains and lakes have their origin in the Algonquin language. Was this done out of respect for the native people who lived here long before Europeans arrived in the Seventeenth Century?

Dave, Susan, Dick and I met at the trailhead of the Andrew Brook Trail on very warm, sunny day. The trailhead is located on Mountain Road, which junctions with Route 103 a few miles south of the southern end of Lake Sunapee in Newbury. The Andrew Brook Trail is one of several other trails that lead to the summit, but according to Dick this is the most picturesque.

We began our journey tramping through a maple grove filled with sap lines. The trail was wide and smooth, following a woods road that obviously is used to collect sap during sugaring season. Within a mile we began climbing the southern ridge of the mountain. The climb was gradual as we sauntered along, stopping often to admire the beauty of the forest and inspect several interesting features, like mushrooms and various wildflowers.

The trail then climbed gradually until it leveled off as we approached the Pond of Solitude. A family was having a picnic beside the pond, children were ducking in and out of the water, while an older gentlemen was fly fishing. We sat for some time reflecting on past hiking experiences, recalling many humorous moments during the many years we have hiked together. The Pond of Solitude is a final destination for many people. It is worth the two mile hike just to spend a quiet moment along the shores of this mountain pond, take a swim or to try your hand a catching fish.

After our extended respite and many laughs at my foolish exploits over the years, we resumed our hike, climbing steeply to the ledges above the Pond of Solitude. The views from the ledges were spectacular and we again lingered to admire the cloud formations, billowing over the mountains to the south, Monadnock, Crotched Mountain and Pack Monadnock.

Upon leaving the cliff edge we immediately began the climb to Sunapee’s summit where meadows of colorful wildflowers were waiting for us. They quietly nodded their heads in the breeze as strode by. The wide ski trails provided awesome views of Lake Sunapee, Kearsarge and Ragged mountains. A soft, cooling wind blew across the wide expanse where several ski trails adjoin. At the upper lift station we took our lunch, reminisced about our many hikes together and shared stories of humorous moments we had together hiking the mountain trails of New Hampshire and the Adirondacks Mountains of New York. This was most likely our last hike together, and we treasured these lasting moments.

We left the mountaintop and began our descent, knowing that this was our last hoorah. But our hike back to the trailhead had a few surprises. I told Dick that my GPS earmarks geocaches. He then enticed us to begin trying to locate two geocaches not far off the trail. Having never hunted for a geocache, I was curious to see what we could find. The first effort was a bust. We searched the forest floor near the ledges for some time before we gave up. The second effort was a success. We found the cache near the Pond of Solitude, hidden behind a boulder about 50 years off the trail. Dick enthusiastically opened the ammunition box and found interesting items and signed his name in the register. The geocache was placed there over 20 years ago and is still waiting for others to discover it.

When we returned to the parking lot we celebrated our last hike together with a few beers and seltzer water. At times things seem to come full circle. I had hiked to the summit of a mountain I hadn’t been on in over thirty years, skiing with my children and their friends. Today I returned with my own friends to mark my departure from the area and to celebrate our long relationship of hiking in our beloved mountains of New Hampshire, not in whooshing downhill on skis, but by trekking to a beautiful mountaintop.