Warmup #4: Phoebes Nable Mountain, Moose Mountains Reservation - 5/31/20
1,178 feet - 1.0 mi
This was the first time any of us had been to Moose Mountains reservation. I was scrolling around on Google Maps, looking for mountains nearby that might make suitable warmup hikes, and spotted it. It was less than 40 minutes away from home, had several trails over a handful of small mountains, and looked perfect. So on a Sunday morning we got up early, and headed up towards the mountain. The morning started off interesting when our GPS took us down a long private road and wanted us to drive a half mile past the end of the road into the woods. As we were turning around in the driveway of the house at the end of the road, we noticed an old woman coming down off her porch and waving to us. So I stepped out of the car and she immediately said "Looking for the trailhead? Did your GPS bring you here?" and I replied "Yes, I suppose this must happen pretty often." She told me that indeed it did, and she didn't mind if people parked there and followed a little trail into the woods that headed deeper into the reservation as long as they were respectful of the property, but that if we wanted to find the real trailhead, we shouldn't have taken a left onto their road, Mountain Road, and instead continued farther down New Portsmouth Road, and there would be a small parking area at the end of it. So I thanked her and told her that we'd head up to the official trailhead, and she suggested that we take the Phoebes Nable Trail, which would take us to the top of the mountain behind her house and provide excellent views of the pond. On our way out we took a picture of the intersection where we went awry, in case anyone reads this an wants to follow in our footsteps.
So we continued up New Portsmouth Road, which eventually turned into a narrow dirt road shortly before ending in a small parking area with room for half a dozen cars, and a kiosk containing a trail map. There were already a few cars there by the time we parked. The Phoebes Nable Trail actually started just before the parking area, so we walked back to it and began our climb.
The route we ended up taking was quite short, just to the summit and back and ended up being only about half a mile. The trails were a little overgrown but not difficult to follow and actually fairly well marked, once you knew to look about 10 feet up. I'm not sure why the blazes were placed so high, but they were easy to spot once you knew where to look.
The trail ascends pretty quickly to the summit, and so we arrived in short order. Unfortunately at the top there was a small group of people with four unleashed, poorly controlled dogs, all four of which came over and began to harass Lana. We asked the owners to leash or at least control their dogs, but the dogs were not listening and the humans insisted there were no rules requiring leashes. I told the people that I had a picture of a sign at the entrance saying something to the contrary (which you can see if you look back at the trail map picture), and offered to show it to them. This quieted them down but since they still had no control over their dogs, so we decided to just turn around. One of the dogs (fortunately realtively friendly) actually followed us several yards down the mountain. Talk about being a poor dog owner. This indcident unfortunately prevented us from getting a summit picture and just generally put a damper on the hike, but Lana was uninjured and I didn't have to fight any old people so it could have been worse. We got back to the car and headed home, the entire hike taking less than an hour.