Mt Flume and Mt Liberty as the two southernmost 4000 footers on the southern end of Franconia Ridge. Sometimes called "Fliberty", they're frequently hiked together in a loop since they're only separated by a 1.2 mile walk along the top of the ridge. Of the two, Liberty gets the most traffic since it's on the Appalachian Trail, even though Flume is by far the more picturesque of the pair.
If you climb Flume first, the shortest route to the summit is via the Flume Slide Trail. The climb is quite gentle at the start, but then ascends quite steeply up an avalanche slide, which is usually covered with ice from late autumn to early spring. The final climb gains 1400 feet in just 0.7 miles and you have to pretty much claw your way up it.
I hiked it just a few days ago after Thanksgiving in microspikes, but wished I'd brought along an ice tool or two and a partner. "Slides", short for avalanche slides, are usually pretty strenuous to climb because they're randomly distributed blocks of rock that have slid down the mountain. Temperatures were in the high 30's and the ice was fairly soft and plastic, so my Hillsounds (microspikes) were able to get a good bite. But I still had to bushwhack around the bigger drops and ice floes and claw my way up in slippery wet snow among the trees. Once you start this climb, you're pretty much committed since there's no easy way down. My only real option when things got sketchy was to keep going.
At the top of the slide, the trail veers left (north) and side hills toward the Flume summit, coming out just 0.1 tents of a mile below it. The summit area is a narrow strip of west-facing rock above a sheer cliff. It was very windy (40 mph in the forecast), so I put on a wind shirt and gloves. The views of Liberty and the snow-covered Franconia Ridge were gorgeous. I could also see Mt Garfield at the other end of the Franconia Ridge clearly, which I'd climbed the day before.
The hike from Flume is Liberty is an easy ridge walk, protected by forest until you pop above treeline again at the Liberty summit. I started descending into the saddle between the peaks and ran into my old friend Bob Zoletti and his two daughters. Bob and I have been on many challenging winter hikes together, but I haven't seen him for a while since I was focused on redlining the past two years. I wasn't entirely surprised to see him though. The regular hiking community is pretty small and it's easy to run into old friends on the higher peaks.
Trip Reports to Nearby Destinations
I layered up again before hiking up the Liberty summit which is an open cliff, but not as steep as Flume. The wind had died down and it was downright balmy at the summit. I lingered some more and took in the view of Mt Canon on the other side of Franconia Notch and the impressive Canon Cliffs.
The hard (climbing) work done, it was literally downhill all the way. But the Liberty Springs Trail isn't a cake walk. The west sides of both Liberty and Flume are covered with boulders that have rolled downhill into the woods. Covered for miles! The trails weaves through them in its own special knee grinding way. There's also been a lot of trail work done on the Liberty Trail including the construction of stone steps to curtail trail erosion.
My knees, actually my quadriceps muscles, hate going down stone stair cases, almost as I much as I hate climbing them. There's something about the stride length required by stone stairs that doesn't agree with my legs and tires out my big muscles quickly. I prefer a real incline/decline rather than manmade one. That said, I was glad I was descending Liberty and not climbing it, which would have been infinitely worse. It's also not as interesting a trail as the Flume Slide Trail.
Despite my gripes about stairs, I was able to get off the peak pretty quickly and back down into the bottom of Franconia Notch. From there it was a short walk down the bike path that runs through the notch back to my car. It'd been a beautiful day and a rewarding hike, not exactly easy, but just right
Total Distance: 9.75 miles with 3900′ of elevation gain.
Recommended Guidebooks and Maps:
- Appalachian Mountain Club White Mountain Guide, 30th ed.
- AMC White Mountain National Forest Map Set
- White Mountains Map: New Hampshire and Maine
The post Hiking a Mt Flume and Mt Liberty Loop appeared first on Section Hikers Backpacking Blog.
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