September 25-27, 2016
by Chloe T.
Red group (D2 B4)
Mt. Cardigan has a beautiful summit. It is all rock and has a great view of the lodge and the land surrounding it. The summit's absolute location is N 43 degrees 38 minutes 59 seconds, W 71 degrees 54 minutes 51 seconds. To get into more detail about the mountain and its surroundings I will tell you about the summits relative location. First of all, the neighboring mountain, Firescrew, is Northwest of Cardigan. The AMC Lodge basically makes the third point of a triangle. It is Northeast of the summit of Cardigan and you can usually see the lodge from the summit. While both of those points are close to the Cardigan summit, Hopkinton is not. Hopkinton is Southeast of Cardigan summit and about 45 miles away. Cardigan summit is also located in the White Mountain National Forest and is part of the Appalachian Mountains.
Mt. Cardigan is a perfect example of place. It has many special and different traits both cultural and physical. To start off I am going to describe its physical traits, such as, how it is cold and has bitter wind cutting into your skin at the summit. Also, there are many big boulders and overhangs. The summit is bare rock with a couple trees on one edge. The alpine bog is also an important trait to take note of. It is a home to many animals and insect and is important to any type of wildlife. Along the mountain there were also lots of spruce trees. Also, along the trail I saw a couple burls in the trees. The trees looked like they had a huge knot in it. There were many different types of trees and we even saw a part hemlock and part maple tree! To round off the physical traits I wanted to point out that there are a couple traits that fit in both the physical and cultural traits, such as, ponds, dams, and the apple trees.
Now that you know about the physical traits of Mt. Cardigan, you should know that there are also many cultural traits on Mt. Cardigan. The trail markers are a good example, even though those are in nature, they were man made. That is the same with the Fire tower at the summit, or the food that we brought with us. Also, the AMC Lodge is an obvious one, it was built by humans so it is cultural. The solar panels, and foot bridges are also ones that might jump out. Many of the cultural traits might be next to the trail, such as the cairns or the wooden steps, and one of the most magnificent views I saw their had a metal railing to protect you and that was also another cultural trait. As you might have pieced together right now, there are many physical and cultural traits that make Mt. Cardigan special and different.
I was at Mt. Cardigan for three days. Sunday, September 25th, Monday, September 26th and Tuesday, September 27th. We went on a short hike on Sunday, on Monday we went on a long hike to two summits, and on Tuesday we went on a short hike and then had to leave.
Postcard from Cardigan by CT is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.