Mount Tecumseh (almost...)

Date: August 1, 2009
Trails: Mount Tecumseh trail

For a weekend at the beginning of August, we planned a trip to Waterville Valley, for two purposes - to go kayaking, and to try and bag another 4000 footer. Waterville Valley lies between three 4000's - Mount Tecumseh, Mount Osceola, and East Osceola. Osceola and East Osceola are typically done together, and since we had other things planned for the weekend, we decided to go with the shorter hike of Tecumseh so that we'd have time to do all that we wanted on the weekend.

There are two routes to get up to the summit of Tecumseh - one that leaves from the Waterville Valley ski area east of the mountain, the other going from Tripoli Road north of the mountain. We had heard that the Tripoli Road trail was better, and slightly more challenging, so we decided to go with this one. The route up was very moderate the whole way, with not a whole lot to look at on the way up aside from a few nice looking streams (like the one shown in the picture above). After about two hours, we reached a clearing that looked out on the Valley, and seeing as there were no higher points to be seen, we thought we had reached the summit. We sat here and ate lunch, took some pictures, then headed down to go kayaking for the afternoon.

Turns out, we never actually made it to the summit of Tecumseh. The spot that we had stopped in was about a half mile short of the summit. When we found this out later that night, we were pretty disappointed - we had turned around not because we were tired, not because the weather was bad, but because we did not realize that where we were was not quite the mountain's summit. Unfortunately, even though we had put in all that work, we did not get to cross Tecumseh off our list.

We were so disappointed that we almost got up the next morning and tried again from the ski area - but we decided that it was not worth wasting another day, and that we would come back somewhere down the line. Despite the disappointment with the hike, we definitely had a fund weekend, and will definitely be back to try again.