Hike New England: Trail Report: Cannon Mountain & Northeast Cannonball

As usual I am extremely late with this blog post. I've been really lazy about writing it up and now I have two I need to write. Not that it matters, I don't think anyone really reads this blog anyway.

On November 12, 2012... Kellie, Tony, Tom and myself decided to hike up Cannon Mountain 4,100' along with Northeast Cannonball 3,769'. Being a month ago I forget the exact weather details, but it was on the cooler side, clear skies and windy. There was more ice and snow on the trail that we had anticipated, we did this without micro-spikes but in the end I think we all wish we had them. Especially Kellie as she twisted her ankle at the summit.

We started hiking up Lonesome Lake Trail around 9:13am.

Lonesome Lake Trail Head Sign

After about 15 minutes we hit the Hi-Cannon Trail sign, but we decided to go checkout Lonesome Lake and the AMC Lonesome Lake Hut.

Trail Signs

Shinny Rock covered in ice. Kellie and I visited

this rock on Mount Haystack when we hiked the Lafayette loop

Starting to get slippery

After about 50 minutes of hiking we made it to Lonesome Lake 2,760'. At this point we took a few pictures and decided to skip visiting the hut as the hut sits on the other side of the lake. We weren't sure how long the rest of the hike would take us so we decided to visit the hut on the way down if we had time. We didn't. I'll visit it next summer.

Lonesome Lake 2,760'

AMC Lonesome Lake Hut

There are a lot of reasons I like hiking, one is to get away from work, people, and to just be outdoors. But to show you how small the world is, while we were taking pictures at the lake, we heard someone walk up behind us, Tom engages in conversation as I was taking pictures and I hear them both talking about our place of employment. I turn around and there is Kris from my department! We had no idea that each other hiked. And it was quite funny to run into someone from work.

Kris from MTL/MIT

After a short 10 minute stop at the lake we continued on up Lonesome Lake Trail to the Kinsman Ridge Trail.

The higher we got the more snow we ran into

Top of Cannon Mountain our destination

Once we reached the Kinsman Ridge Trail, we took a left to bag Northeast Cannonball. Kellie decided to stay back, at this point she was not enjoying herself at all. The snow and ice was worse than we had predicted and she was wearing some kind of trail sneaker, I'm not even sure what they are called, but with no boots she was having a rough time. I also forgot to take a summit picture, not that there was a view, but it would have been nice to have a picture of the three of us at the top. Oh well. Here is a picture of us descending NE Cannonball.

Descending NE Cannonball

We met back up with Kellie and continued our journey along the Kinsman Ridge Trail to the summit on Cannon Mountain. The snow and ice seemed to get worse but I think this was mainly because the trail really started to get steep as we were going up Cannon.