Over Cardigan and Through the Woods

September 25-27, 2016

By Emma H.

Yellow Group D2 B3

       AMC Cardigan Lodge is located in the northeast part of New Hampshire in Grafton County. Within Grafton County, it is located in the Southern part and is specifically located in the town of Alexandria and Orange. East to southeast of the lodge is Lake Winnipesaukee, the biggest lake in New Hampshire. Surrounding towns include Bristol to the east as well as Grafton to the southwest and Groton to the north/northwest. Newfound Lake, which is in Bristol, is also located to the east of the lodge. It is about an hour's drive from where I live, which is Hopkinton. Adjacent from the the lodge is the Mount Cardigan State Forest. If you go about about 2,000 feet higher in elevation, you will find the summit of Mount Cardigan, which has a difference of about 0.4 degrees of latitude and 10.5 degrees of longitude from the AMC Cardigan Lodge. The address of the lodge is at 774 Shem Valley Rd. Though all this information may be helpful, it is only relative, hence it being called "relative location." Absolute location gives the latitude and longitude of a specific location down to the second. The latitude of the AMC Lodge is 43 degrees 36 minutes 58.5 seconds north and the longitude is 071 degrees 52 minutes 40.5 seconds west. The elevation is 1,391 feet. Surely now, you must have a good picture of the location of the AMC Cardigan Lodge with the relative and absolute location of it, and you won't be asking where it is any longer.

Place of Cardigan

Definitions-

Physical: Not having to do with people

Cultural: Anything having to do with people

Physical

       Cardigan is a very unique place, both physically and culturally. Knowing that Cardigan is a location based in nature, it has some incredible physical features. For one, spruce trees are widely spread in large groups, both at the summit and the base of Mount Cardigan and the AMC Lodge. The summit of Mount Cardigan itself is a bare rock summit. It almost looks like one gigantic rock rising from the Earth with sheer determination. In between cracks of rock, spiky spruce trees poke there heads out of the parched dirt. A small alpine bog resides on the top of the summit in a small valley. In the distance, you can see Newfound Lake, quaint like the mountain. On the way up the mountain, you can find many beautifully colored mountain maple trees as well as beech trees, with their leaves still a rich green. The trail gets steeper and is marked with scattered rocks, most of them of notable size. If you take the yellow trail to the top, you may even find a large rock, separated in two by glacial erratics. The Alexandria Ski Trail which I traveled down the mountain is thick with ferns.

       The Firescrew Mountain summit is much like Cardigan, with the exception that is a few hundred feet lower in elevation. The trail to the top also takes more turns, decreasing the steep increase of elevation. Fortunately though, hiking these two mountains is not the only thing to do at Cardigan. Taking a hike to Welton Falls is also a wonderful thing to do. The trail is very narrow and does not increase in elevation much from the AMC Lodge itself, though there are a few dips in the trail. The trail is lush, with plenty of places to play hide and seek. As you get closer to your destination, you will see pine needles litter the ground. Once you are really close, you can smell the mist in the air and you will hear the slight roar of the water cascading down to the pool below. Before the waterfall, the water that goes down it is supplied by a deep blue pool. The pool in which the water lands is wide, and as you move to the left, it gets deeper and deeper where the waterfall falls, probably deepen by the intense pressure of the falling water itself. On almost all the trails, the rivers are dried out this time of year, but you still may find some fungi and edible plants scattered around.

       The nature trail has an array of campsites as well as what I would call "natural playgrounds," with things like fallen trees looking like balance beams over a dry brook. The nature of Cardigan is astounding, including chickadee calls and various types of squirrels. These physical features are what makes Cardigan so unique.

Cultural

       Not only is Cardigan special and different from anywhere else in the sense of physical features, it is also special in cultural feature ways. The trails covered in pine needles and roots sticking up from the ground is a cultural feature, for it has to do with people in that people created the trails. On the way up the multiple trails we hiked, stone walls stood plentiful amidst the trees and bushes. On the hike to Welton Falls (not cultural), an old cellar hole from the 1800's is apparent, several feet below the trail itself. There almost see to be stairs leading down into it, as there was most likely a house it was attached to. When you finally got to Welton Falls, you may have been timid around the edge of the trail that plunged 10's of feet down. Luckily, when you got to the sight overlooking the fall's, there was an old metal fence. Though in rough shape, with it's rusting posts and sagging chains, it still did it's job. At Cardigan, there were also campsites. These could be found on the Nature Trail hike as well as the Welton Falls hike, and there were several of them. They consisted of man-made benches from wood as well as stone-lined firepits. The Crew Bridge is also a cool sight, with a physical dry stream trickling beneath it. At the summit of Cardigan you can find a large fire tower. Because of it's size, you can see it clearly from the summit of Firescrew. When the second session went, which I was not a part of, they claimed to have seen a helicopter land near the summit of Cardigan. Around the fire tower is rock, which is not cultural, but the writing in it is. It is an example of human-environment interaction, one of the 5 Themes of Geography. Nestled between the granite writing is a US geodetic marker. Also, depending on the trail you traveled down from Cardigan Mountain, you may have seen a fire warden as well, specifically on the Alexandria Ski Trail. As you can see, there are many amazing cultural features located at Cardigan Mountain, as well as the AMC Lodge itself.

       Though there is a third paragraph, do not be mistaken. Place is described by cultural and physical features. Sometimes, certain things found at Cardigan cannot be placed into either of the categories. This is the soul reason I have written this paragraph. One of the things that could not be sorted into either category was the many apple trees found there. Though apple trees themselves are physical, they would not fit under that category because it was people who planted the trees. Another example was the pond located right next to the Lodge. Though the pond itself was physical, it was a man-made pond. From these examples you can see that though a lot of things fit into one of the place description categories, some do not, and for good reasons as well. Hopefully, you are now able to see how special Cardigan is, for both physically and culturally, it is different.

We were at Cardigan Mountain for three days: Sunday September 25, Monday September 26, and Tuesday September 27.

Postcard Image by E.H. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.