On a glorious spring day with warm temperatures and 100% sunshine, I returned to one of my favorite bushwhacking haunts: the glacial valley known as The Bowl, enclosed by Mount Whiteface, Mount Passaconaway and the Wonalancet Range. I was seeking three things in particular - big trees, trout lilies, and a striking view of Passaconaway from a slide on the SE side of Whiteface. I was fortunate to succeed on all three counts, though the third involved some difficulty.
I set off mid/late morning from the Ferncroft trailhead, home base for the Wonalancet Out Door Club (WODC), which does an admirable job maintaining most of the trails in this area on the south side of the Sandwich Range. Visit them at wodc.org.
Ferncroft is a strong contender for most scenic trailhead in the Whites. Mount Whiteface on the left, Mount Wonalancet on the right.
Thanks to the property owners who allow hikers access through their properties.
Whiteface is a burly peak.
No better place to spend a sunny day.
Climbing through the "S-curve" on the Dicey's Mill Trail.
Excellent rock work is seen on many WODC trails. Over the last couple of decades the club has made major investments in the heavily used Dicey's Mill and Blueberry Ledge Trails.
Yellow violets were blooming along the edge of the trail.
Dicey's Mill is among the most pleasant trails leading to a 4000-ft. peak.
After passing the junction with Tom Wiggin Trail, Dicey's Mill Trail enters the 1500-acre Bowl Research Natural Area, which is a spacious glacial cirque drained by two branches of the Wonalancet River. Research indicates that the larger western valley, which is The Bowl proper, has never been logged. Note that camping and fires are not allowed in The Bowl RNA.
To access the western valley, The Bowl, I left the trail and donned my Crocs to cross the eastern branch of the Wonalancet River, aka Passaconaway Brook. The Dicey's Mill Trail crosses this brook a little farther upstream.
This rising slope serves as the gateway to The Bowl.
The ridgecrest of Mount Whiteface towers to the northwest.
Not far into the valley I started encountering big trees, this one a soaring yellow birch. One of the outstanding features of The Bowl is the extensive stand of
old-growth hardwood on its broad floor, a rarity in the White Mountains.
(Most of the old-growth spruce and fir on the walls of the cirque were
destroyed by hurricanes and other natural catastrophes.) The vegetation
and ecology of the valley have been intensively studied over the years,
and serve as a valuable reference to compare with the primarily
second-growth forests of the region.
One of a number of wonderfully gnarled old sugar maples.
Reaching for the sky.
In one glade there was an explosion of trout lily leaves, thousands upon thousands of them. And there was a fair number of early blooms. Yay!
The ring around this massive maple trunk will soon be awash in yellow.
It's believed that some of these maples are up to 250 years old. The Bowl was saved from lumbering about 1915 through the efforts of Katherine
Sleeper and other members of the Wonalancet Out Door Club. The land was
then added to the White Mountain National Forest, and in 1931 much of
the western valley was designated as a 510-acre Natural Area. In the
2006 Forest Plan, what is now called The Bowl Research Natural Area was
expanded to over 1500 acres.
There are some neat boulders scattered around the floor of the valley.
Ephemeral beauty.
Peering up to the south peak of Whiteface.
Old growth artistry.
A colony of trout lilies was blooming in a sandy area at the edge of the Wonalancet River.
A typical scene along this picturesque stream.
View from my lunch seat, a rock on the west bank.
From here I started working my way up to the remaining open area on the Whiteface slide, about 800 feet in elevation above. This appeared to be a lower runout of the slide, parallel to the tributary brook that runs down from it.
The base of a giant yellow birch.
Heading up past some boulders as the slope steepens.
The climb became relentlessly steep (after an easy start, the climb gained 700 ft. of elevation in 0.4 mile), but the woods were open until I was fairly high up the slope.
First patches of snow around 2500 ft.
Into the conifers, and harder going, which I knew was coming.
A peek up at the north ridge of Whiteface.
To get from here to the slide I had to make a steep and gnarly traverse up and across the slope, with patches of mushy spring snow adding to the fun.
I descended a short way through this patch since going ahead or up was worse.
It probably took longer to do the last 0.1 mile than the previous 0.3 mile.
When I finally reached the lower part of the remaining open section of the slide, at 2800 ft., the joke was on me - it was covered in mushy spring snow! I should have known, as it faces NE, but I figured out in the open it would be bare. Darn!
Going straight up seemed pretty sketchy, and would lead to steep wet ledges. Instead, I kicked steps/postholes across the slide, sinking thigh-deep in one spot, then climbed carefully up a strip of soft gravel to a safe stance.
From here I had a decent view of Mount Passaconaway, but from a previous (snowless) visit in 2013 I knew the view was much better from the upper open part of the slide. I took a break to weigh options, thinking it might be too tricky to climb to the upper section. I will admit that I was a bit frazzled after the struggle to get here, only to encounter the obstructing snow. Might be time to bail and head back down.
Definitely not going across or up that way.
I decided to cross the rest of the slide's snowfield, and perhaps seek a way to get across the steep brook flowing down along the edge, and then head down through the woods on the other side. Maybe there would be better going on that side.
Before heading down, I at least wanted to climb high enough to see the single white pine that was growing on the slide back in 2013. I thought this was important as a couple of the many botanical studies done in the Bowl Research Natural Area make no mention of white pine being present. The slide is a unique disturbed area on the wall of The Bowl. So I climbed along the edge, postholing with one boot and placing the other in the bordering scrub.
There's the pine above, illuminated by the sun! (Zoomed photo)
The drifts were too deep to continue up that way, probably three to four feet of snow next to that blowdown.
I ducked into the scrub between the slide and the brook, and was pleasantly surprised. It was relatively open and mostly snow-free! Lady Luck had delivered me a route to the top of the slide.
I climbed that slope, then edged across back to the slide, passing right though the branches of my target pine.
Out onto bare ledge and gravel - yay! This slide is prominent as a long, narrow strip in a 1956 aerial photo, suggesting the possibility that it was initially triggered by a fairly recent storm such as Hurricane Carol in 1954 or the September 1938 hurricane. In a 1981 aerial it appears to be mostly revegetated, but in a 1986 aerial it looks freshly fallen, with a runout track winding down to the floor of the valley; thus it may have been “refreshed” in the early/mid 1980s. It is now revegetated again below this open area, at 2,800- 2,900 ft., which is quite steep with a slope of 37 degrees.
The upper slide provides a great view of Passaconaway rising above the headwall of The Bowl.
I worked my way up through these ledge shelves to a comfortable seat and settled in for a while.
Passaconaway, looking mighty.
Zoomed. The ledge slab on the headwall may be a
remnant of another old slide. The dark crease in the woods below the
slab is a narrow slide of wet ledge.
Moving over to the west edge of the slide expanded the view to include Nanamocomuck Peak and Wonalancet Hedgehog.
Looking across to my perch.
A (wet) boot shot.
My pine, glowing in the sun.
This is how the pine looked in 2013, seen from the side. In twelve years it's grown quite a bit in this tough environment.
After a forty-five minute sojourn, I decided to head down through the woods on the same side I came up, but using a somewhat different route in hopes of better going. The entry into the tangled forest was not inviting.
The going was pretty grim for a while...
...but improved in small increments.
Getting better.
Looking good - steep but comfortably open.
Back down in the hardwoods, late sun on the headwall.
Looking back up the brook that drains from the slide.
Back through the big trees.
Then an easy cruise out on Dicey's Mill Trail.
Dusk at Ferncroft, wrapping up a satisfying adventure in The Bowl.
