Ice Gulch

Trip Details
Date: August 9^th, 2019
Total Distance: 6.79 mi (via Garmin fenix 5X)
Total Time: 3 hours 2 min
Total Elevation: 1427 ft gained
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The pursuit of completing the Terrifying 25 continues. This time it took us to the Ice Gulch Town Forest in Randolph, NH. Within the forest is this essentially random ravine that runs east to west, which prevents it from getting great sunlight and allowing ice to remain in the crevices deep into the summer. It also creates a climate that remains wet throughout the drier months, which helps justify this trails inclusion on the list. The boulders that you have to climb over and parts of the trail where you drop into and climb out of the ravine remain quite slick and technical even on good days. You can find out more information by digging deep into the NH Division of Forests and Lands website. It is almost like this area is getting removed, though, as direct links tend to reroute back to the main page. I was still able to find the PDF by doing a search on their page. It is quite informative and provided us most of the information we used to plan this hike.

The landowners are gracious enough to let us utilize their land for the trailheads.

Starting on Randolph Hill Rd., you basically take a walk through the woods until you get to the junction where you can head directly into the ravine or make a short trip down to the Peboamauk Falls.

Tree burn...I was doing a bit of jogging and felt myself slip. So, I grabbed a tree and had such momentum that I wrapped around it and gave myself this dozy!

Peboamauk Falls

This picture is garbage and does not do it justice. The trail climbs up along the side of the falls. Basically straight up.

From the top of the falls there are two viewpoints to look down into the falls. This is one of them.

This is the other.

The trail then continues along the brook until it merges back up with the main trail. At this point I really thought the forest felt like a rain forest, but shortly thereafter the humidity broke and we were in the ravine. It truly had a micro climate. It is quite the site to see this large boulder field and no mountain in the vicinity for all these boulders to have originated from.

Our first view of the ravine. 

It did not take long to spot find ice in one of the deep crevices between the boulders.

We were wondering if we would find a cave, and we did! You can totally bypass this, but we took the chance to climb through it. The flash on the camera lit up what was otherwise pitch black. 

I had no idea what I was going to see when I took this picture...

The cave exit.

This was one of the larger spots of ice we found and the camera actually picked up the steam coming off of it.

There is a steep muddy climb out of the ravine and then you are back on to a dirt path for the couple of mile hike out of the woods. We ended up taking a branch trail to cut off a little bit of the road walking distance back to our cars.

This picture is at the Boothman Spring. It is horribly framed and I apologize for that. The spring is in the bottom left. I guess I was trying to capture the campsite that is setup on the flat area on top of the spring.

Mt. Madison and Mt. Adams looking picturesque from the starting trailhead.

Overall this was a fun hike, that was actually challenging. The boulders inside the gulch are not the easiest to traverse (due to placement and footing) and if they are wet the difficulty increases exponentially. Finding ice into August in some of these areas that still received some amount of sun was just crazy. This one definitely earned its inclusion on to the Terrifying 25 list.

The mileage is off by probably less than a mile due drift.