The
trip back downwas pretty much uneventful. We barely even paused for a rest. When we returned
to 13 Falls, the afternoon was waning. A group of teens was playing in the cascades, and the caretaker was resting on the brook bank, still tired
from her recent illness. She said that the teen group had recently arrived and
had already set up camp. I was a bit concerned that they might be noisy, but their
leaders seemed to do a good job explaining how to behave in the wilderness around other people. Unlike at most roadside campgrounds, I never heard a sound
from them once it got dark.
Instead
of going back to the tent right away, I sat in the sun by the brook, lying quietly on a smooth flat rock by
the water. The scene was certainly a world apart from the previous day when we
were waterlogged and tired, and not particularly appreciative of waterfalls and
cascades. The brook is fairly wide at this point, with many islands of rock ledge
between numerous channels of water. Blackflies buzzed lazily around but didn’t
seem to bite.
Most
of the cascades were narrow rivulets tumbling gently into shallow
pools and eddies, lending themselves to the sort of waterplay the teens were engaged
in. As I mentioned earlier, there were two brooks that joined a hundred yards
or so downstream from where we were sitting. The other brook, the main branch
of Franconia Brook, which was just beyond a narrow peninsula where the Lincoln
Brook Trail crosses over to the tentsite, is narrower and swifter, and has several
small falls and cascades. Muffin and I wandered over to a spot near one of these
falls, relaxing on the rocks in this slightly more secluded and quieter location
for a few minutes.
Around
5 o'clock, which was a guess since my watch was still waterlogged, we headed up
to the dining tarp to make supper, hoping to finish eating before the teens took over the space. I made a dehydrated vegetarian chili, again
by simply adding boiling water to the foil packet. But this was a much better
meal than the previous night’s limp, peppery enchilada dinner, and I quickly ate
all of it, except for a few large spoonfuls that I put in Muffin’s dish. Just
as we were putting away our food and re-hanging the bear bag, the teen group and
their leaders, about a dozen in all, arrived. Good timing, I thought.
We
walked to our tent and climbed in to read and relax. But after a few pages,
I got tired, putting down my book to just lay there,
resting and thinking about the day. I knew that day camp was now over, and hoped that Toi and Holly were home safely and not too lonely with Muffin
and me still gone. Before it got completely dark, we took a short walk down to
the brook to refill our water bottles, pumping
the handle on the filter for what was probably the last time on the trip. |
Muffin
in front of the cairn on top of Galehead Mountain. There are almost no views from
the rounded, wooded summit of this peak. The inset at the upper left shows the
summit sign, which is on a tree just outside the clearing. |
|
