| Hiking Trail Conditions Report |
 | Peaks |
Mt. Osceola, NH |
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 | Trails: |
Bushwhack, Mt. Osceola Trail, road walk |
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 | Date of Hike: |
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 |
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 | Parking/Access Road Notes: |
Adequate parking at Mt. Tecumseh lot on Tripoli Rd |
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 | Surface Conditions: |
Wet Trail, Wet/Slippery Rock, Standing/Running Water on Trail |
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 | Recommended Equipment: |
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 | Water Crossing Notes: |
All doable |
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 | Trail Maintenance Notes: |
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 | Dog-Related Notes: |
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 | Bugs: |
Issues with mosquitoes and black flies esp on the roadwalk in the afternoon |
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 | Lost and Found: |
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 | Comments: |
This was an (successful, by and large) attempt at finding and following the abandoned Breadtray trail up Osceola. You can find a description of the trail here:www.franklinsites.com/losthikingtrails/viewtrail.php?id=8. I was working from a description in the 1946 AMC Guide (thank you, Uncle Jack). Many (most) of the abandoned trails are hopeless but I thought my odds were better here because the trail followed logging roads and the phone line to the summit. Getting started on the trail was not so good. The 1946 guide said the TH was 5.8 miles up the Tripoli Rd. At 5.6 mi I was at the Tecumseh TH; not good. The guide said the trail follows a small brook for a few hundred feet to the Tripoli RR bed. I followed a fine footbed a few hundred feet along NW side of Eastman Brook to the RR bed. No road on the uphill side of the RR but because the RR bed was 2 tracks wide I figured it was a site for loading logs onto RR cars. I scrambled up the bank and found a road with a good footbed. Unfortunately this road crossed the brook in about a 1/4 mile; something the correct road was not supposed to do in over a mile. So I scrambled up the bank to the NW and found the correct road with a fine footbed. No sign of phone wires, however. This road took me to a pretty wetland up in the Breadtray basin where things went wrong again. The road (and phone wires) were supposed to slab up the South side of the Breadtray basin but the road ended on the North side of the wetland. I decided to follow a compass line due East hoping to find the road again. After ascending a somewhat steeper slope for roughly 1/8 mile I stumbled on the phone wires. It's a stretch to call the overgrown corridor the phone lines follow up the slope a road. J.E. Henry's crews would have been downright dismissive of it. And it's slow work following rusted old wires that look much like sticks sometimes on the ground sometimes up in the trees. But it's doable. The guidebook says to watch for a sign where the trail leaves the road and climbs more or less up the fall line to the ridge. When you're there, though, it's not a problem as there is just the wires, no road. Once on the ridge I followed the wires and herd path to the summit. The rest of the day was just walking. Great fun - I love it! |
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 | Name: |
Old Man and the Saw |
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 | E-Mail: |
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| Date Submitted: |
2015-06-10 |
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 | Link: |
 https://www.franklinsites.com/losthikingtrails/viewtrail.php?id=8 |
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Disclaimer: Reports are not verified - conditions may vary. Use at own risk. Always be prepared when hiking. Observe all signs. Trail conditions reports are not substitutes for weather reports or common sense. |
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