I parked at the Beaver Brook Trailhead just after passing Lost River on RT-112. I was becoming a peakbagger around that time and Moosilauke was on the list. Scott Morton would join me for the hike, the map showed close contour lines, it would be steep. This was to be Scott's first mountain hike, I remembered mine about 12 years prior on Mt Monroe.
I had visited Dave Metsky's excellent website page on Moosilauke before leaving and decided on the steeper Beaver Brook as a challenge.
It was a beautiful day with bright blue skies, fairly cold. The trail started off pretty easy but soon got steep. We could hear some cascades off in the distance. As I remember it got very steep near there. I saw some pinnings from what must've been ladders in places. I used these several times as hand-holds.
The accompany noise and company of the cascade was nice, with the wind blowing it sometimes took the mist and that's probably why the rocks were wet in places. Scott and I worked our way upwards, slowly and carefully.
The woods alongside the brook were tinged with fall color, clear sparkling sunshine filtered through the leaves throwing everything in a golden cast.
We reached the top of the steeper rough parts and paused to drink and eat a snack. We were quickly spotted by a couple of pairs of beady black eyes. The bold Grey Jay made his appearance, he hopped up onto a low branch and looked at us enviously. I said to Scott, "watch this." I placed a small cracker in my palm and stretched it towards the fat bird.
With a rush of wings it took off and sure enough landed right on my hand. It cocked it's head and plucked the offered cracker and flew off. Scott thought that was cool, we took turns taking pictures of the birds taking gorp from our hands.
Pretty soon we were back to walking uphill, nice easy grades then we emerged into the place where the trees shrunk away. I looked up to see the tops of the miniature forest all coated in rime ice. The ice was melting in the warm sun which sent all colors of the rainbow in different directions.
From there we started out above treeline. Yellow sedge grass was waving in the wind, the sun was directly in our faces. It wasn't a real bad climb at all to the summit. The top was mobbed with about 40 people who were from a college. So we just tagged it and headed down to some relative peace and quiet at an old foundation.
Felt good to sit in the sun and enjoy lunch, I could've easily fallen asleep. It had been a fun day. The walk down was uneventful, we were carefull over the steeper rough parts.