Mt. Mary, Middle Pilot and Hutchins

Hiked Mt. Mary, Middle Pilot and Hutchins on 12/4/2016. Bill Cronin joined me on this adventure. We also went over Northwest Pilot but it doesn’t seem to be on any list. Temperature was 25 when we started and was 17 on the summits and was 22 when we got back to the car. There is a trail that starts on private land which the landowner allows hikers to use but no hunting is allowed and no carrying of a gun on his property. The trail goes up 3.4 miles to a cabin which was built by carrying all the materials up the trail. It must have been an awful lot of work and taken a long time.

View from the cabin (it was cloudy)

Cabin near Mt. Mary

After reaching the cabin we did the short hike up to Mt. Mary. There was a pretty well defined path so you couldn’t call it a bushwhack.

Summit of Mt. Mary

We returned to the cabin and then backtracked along the trail to its highpoint and then bushwhacked up to the summit of Middle Pilot.

Middle Pilot

We signed the register and ate our PBJs and then headed off to Northwest Pilot. Not sure how we manged to go in a circle but we were soon back on Middle Pilot. We then started out again this time in the right direction and were soon on the summit of Northwest Pilot where there was a glass bottle which we couldn’t get open.

Northwest Pilot bottle

We then headed off to Hutchins which should have been pretty straight forward but because of a few navigational errors took longer than we thought it would. We got there and signed in and then headed back on the same track, following our footprints in the snow.

Hutchins canister

We got to the low point between Hutchins and Northwest Pilot and decided to take a shortcut back to our original trail up Mt. Mary. This turned out to be a bad decision as our route was blocked by cliffs and large blowdowns. We eventually worked our way around all the things in our way but we ended up bushwhacking by headlamp for about 2 hours, not a lot of fun. We got out much later than anticipated. It helped that we had a little bit of moonlight to help us. Only 3 peaks left to finish the New Hampshire 100 Highest.