Well, I'm down to the wire for the New England Six-Pack. I had been hoping to have hiked Old Speck and Chocorua before getting to Mansfield — which would've made it my final peak — but a combination of rainy days of the weather kind and rainy days of the depression kind prevented me from getting out on the trail. So I was like, OK, I really need to get this done. Mansfield today. No excuses. Plus, plenty of trail reports online declared that Mansfield isn't that bad, especially the Sunset Ridge trail, and having hiked Katahdin last summer I'm well aware that I have New England's most challenging mountain under my belt.

So how bad could it be? Well, at first I thought it was going to be “boring” bad, considering the trail first followed a Civilian Conservation Corps road through the woods, and I was like, if I wanted to hike on a road through the woods I'd just find a random cul-de-sac of vacation homes in Stowe. Then it started getting steeper, but still wooded. A little bit more interesting, but not quite.

Then the trees got more stunted, and the trail opened up onto a broad rock face. And I realized: I have been meticulously checking mountain weather reports for rain or thunderstorms in the forecast. I had not been paying attention — at all — to wind. And it was freaking windy. A hiker couple descending joked to me that it was about to get much worse. I seriously wondered if it might be unsafe and I should turn back. Thankfully, while Sunset Ridge is an exposed and steep trail, it's also a very wide trail, leaving you very little chance of getting blown off the mountain. I was nervous when I saw the wind tossing birds around overhead and noticed the distinctive white head and tail of one of those birds. Like, shit. A bald eagle. If America's majestic, soaring national bird can't handle these winds, how am I supposed to? But at this point, I wasn't thrilled at the prospect of going back down the same steep and exposed trail (I was following a loop, per AllTrails) and I was less than a mile from the summit.

Mercifully, the last quarter mile to the summit has some minor tree cover to give you a bit of respite from the wind before you ascend into the alpine tundra for the final stretch, and oddly enough the wind at the summit itself was nowhere near as bad as it had been on the way up. But I wasn't exactly thirsting for more wind. So I took half the summit ridge along the Long Trail back before intending to turn onto the Halfway House trail and finish the loop back to the parking lot. But I wasn't super thrilled about the exposure, and a weird very steep uphill and downhill portion on the trail map. Then I saw there was a turnoff to something called the Canyon North Trail, which followed a parallel path but seemed to be further enough down the side of the mountain that it would be below the treeline and hence less windy. It even had a sign marking it when I came upon it on the Long Trail, indicating that it was a legitimate trail and not one of the many questionable routes that pepper AllTrails. That's a good sign! (Pun intended.)

Here's a potentially helpful tip: Mt. Mansfield has excellent cell reception the entire way up and down. Like, I was getting Slack alerts from my co-workers. (I had forgotten to turn those off.) But my genius brain had not thought to, you know, Google this Canyon North Trail. Because, as it turns out, it was flat in terms of elevation, but the boulder scrambling put it squarely in the “very difficult” category of trail ratings. Also, there were caves. And the trail wasn't well marked. So at one point, I found myself on top of a cave that I was supposed to squeeze through, facing down a crevasse and realizing I was going to have to jump over it. I did. I made it to the Halfway House Trail and back down a very rocky and moss-covered trek to the CCC road, and then back to my car. It was difficult to not fall asleep in my car instantly. Anyway, this hike wasn't boring.

(One PSA for hiking this one is that the Sunset Ridge trailhead parking lot has a fee. It's $4 for a solo hiker who isn't a Vermont resident, but there is a ranger staffing the campground at the trailhead and they take credit cards. I find that hiking information websites are terrible with trailhead parking fee information, so I just wanted to put it out there.)