Mt. Pierce (4310)

Trail: Crawford Path

Date: March 27 1999

Attending: Gabe, Simone, & John Chicoine

Miles: ???? Round trip Time: 3.75hrs up, 6.5hrs. total

AMC huts, / shelters / camping site: Mizpah

Weather: Sunny, mid 50’s at base, 40’ish on summit no wind, hot sun,

What a beautiful day! First new 4K of the new year! Started at 10:00AM at the 1’ST parking lot on Mt. Clinton Road. We took the Crawford Path to the top of Mt. Pierce, made the loop to Mizpah hut, then to the Mizpah cutoff, and back down to the Crawford Path.

The Crawford path to Pierce was a very easy path well traveled that morning with foot holes to step in. There was a section of the Crawford path that branched after the Mizpah cutoff that turned into a single footpath with a few blowdowns, but just enough to make things fun. (I’d say most people went the Mizpah hut way). The Summit of Pierce was crusted over and we had to kick our boots into the crust to make a safe footing, (here is where crampons would have made things a bit safer but snowshoes even with crampons were inappropriate.) We met a couple vacationing from Europe that had hiked from the Crawford hostile, up Crawford path, and from the Mizpah hut in street shoes and street cloths: I.E. He was in a dress leather jacket and dress shoes. She was in a parka that one would wear to the mall in winter. Mt. Washington was 5.5 miles away but the day was so clear it looked like we could reach out and open the doors on the buildings. The Crawford Path across the ridge over to Eisenhower and Monroe was snow covered and looked inviting to hike over to Mt. Washington. Later we heard that the sun and recent rains had iced Washington up so hard that you couldn’t get an Ice axe into it. The Ice was several inches thick.

It’s a good thing we brought our snowshoes. John and I used them on our way down from Mt. Pierce to the Mizpah hut. On the way we stopped at a large exposed rock outcropping to sun our selves and have lunch. The last 1/4 mile of the trail before the hut was very steep and we slid and stumbled and dragged the snowshoes under the trees, and post-holed 3 to 4 feet deep. John got cut and scratched legs because he was hiking in shorts! Gabe didn’t posthole much because he was light enough to keep from breaking through the crus, but with the hot sun in the afternoon heating the snow slope on the south-west side of MT Pierce we were postholing a lot but only on the short steep section. We pushed hard on the Mizpah cutoff path to get to Crawford path, mainly because we were unsure of the trails. All the blazes were under the snow so we couldn’t locate the trails by name. The sun sets early, and we didn’t have a lot of time to recover if we happened to be on a wrong trail. Once we got to Crawford Path it was a nice relaxing hike back to the car with 15 minutes of daylight to spare. One of these days we’ll have to do this again. We might even hike Crawford path in the summer just to see what the trail looks like.

Links to all the pierce hikes:

  1. Pierce 1 – (2014, Carrie, Winter)
  2. Pierce 2 – (2013, Ben, Winter)
  3. Pierce 3 – (2010, Tyler, Winter)
  4. Pierce 4 – (2000, Gabe, Winter)
  5. Pierce 5 – (2002, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  6. Pierce 6 – (2004, Gary, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  7. Pierce 7 – (2004, Dale, Chris, Fletcher, Gabe, Spring)
  8. Pierce 8 – (2005, Shawn, Gabe, Winter)
  9. Pierce 9 – (First summit, 1999, Winter)