Whiteface and Passaconaway

September 11, 2022

I dragged along another friend to conquer 2 more peaks. Patrick lives in my town, and has always enjoyed hiking/backpacking. He hadn’t done anything major in quite awhile, so I thought it was perfect to have him come along and get back into it. I picked Whiteface and Passaconaway because they seemed moderate from what I had read and it would get 2 more checked off the list for me. It’s nice to do multiple peaks at a time and really get closer to the ultimate goal of 48. I honestly didn’t even think about distance or anything. I had read they were moderate and that people do them together all the time and that’s really all I needed to know. Let’s go get some.

I probably should have thought about the fact that 11 miles is a pretty solid hike for one day. But after doing the pemi, I figured this would be nothing. 11 miles is not nothing.

I picked Patrick up around 6, and we head up to the mountains. We got to the parking lot a little before 8. We got our stuff ready and were starting our hike by 8:15. It started off with us just walking down Ferncroft Road for a bit. This led us to Squirrel Bridge Road. We decided to go this way to do Whiteface first. We finally hit the trailehead off of Squirrel Bridge and started along Blueberry Ledge Trail. This trail started off pretty gradual, but got pretty steep as we made our way up. Blueberry Ledge takes you almost to Whiteface before it ends. From there, we hopped on Rollins Trail up to Whiteface. There were some difficult spots getting up to the summit. There was some large boulders we had to climb up, which were steep and not many places to grip or grab on to anything. We slowly made our way up through it all though, and made it to Whiteface for lunch. We probably hung out there for twenty to thirty minutes and then decided to get on our way to Passaconaway.

Rollins Trail would lead us almost all the way to the peak of Passaconaway. A lot of this trail was along a ridge, so it was relatively flat. There were some ups and downs obviously near the 2 peaks, but plenty of nice hiking in the middle section. We stayed on Rollins until we hit Dicey’s Mill Trail, which would lead us to the summit. Whiteface had some decent views in spots, but there was nothing to see at Passaconaway. There was really no reason to hang out here. Grabbed some water and hit the trails.

We took Dicey’s Mill trail back to where it intersected with Rollins, and stayed on Dicey’s Mill this time. This trail led us all the way back to Ferncroft Road. It went basically right through someone’s property, which could be awesome or aggravating for that property owner. We got back to the truck around 4, so it was about 8 hours of hiking to get that 11.3 miles in. Looking back at the decision to do these, I probably could have picked something a little shorter for Patrick’s first hike in a long time. But we crushed it together. We got it done, and I was able to cross numbers 20 and 21 off the list. Feels good to be at 21 peaks in less than a year of hiking.

It was a really nice day of hiking. It was good to be in the company of another friend. I enjoy sharing these experiences with other people and I enjoy experiencing some of them on my own. I like how I really don’t have a preference towards that. I’m open to hiking with pretty much anyone, as long as they are going to be able to physically make it. But I don’t need to hike with anyone either. It really provides me a lot of different options for conquering the remaining 27 peaks. As has been tradition, we cracked a few cold ones when we got back to the truck and then hit the road. There was some people actually bbq’ing in the parking lot as we drove out of there. I was pretty jealous of that. I’ll have to build that into a hike at some point. Have a little tailgate in the parking lot of a trailhead after doing some hiking.

I don’t know what happened, but I took very few pictures on this hike. We both really didn’t take too many. Somehow I don’t even have a picture of us both up there. I have no proof of our trip, so we’re going to have to do another sometime. The pictures I included are unfortunately all I really got. Maybe I’ll have to come back to these with someone else sometime and get better pictures.