Hiking Trip Logs

Introduction

Soon after my family moved to Connecticut, which happened in 1963, when I was nine, we started taking camping vacations every summer in the White Mountains. We (my dad, my older brother, and I at first, and later others) would make day trips up into the mountains. I know I summited Washington, Adams, and Jefferson during those days, and I'm pretty sure I summited Monroe. I also, when I was a child, went on a number of long (but not mountainous) hikes as a boy scout.

After I grew up I would still hike occasionally, but not very often. I know I hiked in the Presidentials at least four times in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, including one disasterous hike in which I greatly overestimated my abilities while encountering sleet in August.

In October of 2001, wanting to lose weight, I decided to try to go on a hike every weekend. I hiked on several trails, but the trails of Case Mountain Park in Manchester, Conn. became my default location. At first I only hiked a mile or two, but I kept extending it until by the next spring I established a standard weekend hike, an eight mile trek through Manchester and Glastonbury, Connecticut mostly on the Shenipsit Trail. I gradually extended that to a sixteen mile hike which included parts of Hebron and Bolton. When the pandemic hit, I started hiking other local trails more, especially the Nipmuck. Now, when I'm not on the sort of hiking expeditions listed on these pages, I'm usually doing something locally in between 10 and 16 miles almost every weekend.

I now have some pictures online of my Shenipsit hikes and my Nipmuck hikes.

I did not lose weight doing all of this hiking, but I did feel more vigorous. I found that, in everyday life, I lasted longer before I started feeling fatigued. In 2003 I put myself on a diet and finally lost the weight. In 2004, in much better shape that I had been since my 20s (I was 50 years old at this point) I decided I was ready for something more ambitious. So I returned to the Whites. This became the first trip reported here. I loved it. I soon decided I wanted to do this every year, and then I decided I wanted to do it every season, and then I decided I wanted to do it every couple of months. In May 2007 I joined the online hiking group Rocks on Top (now defunct), and started taking advantage of hikes organized by them.