Cardigan: Our Home Away From Home

September 28-30 2016

Green Group D1B4

By Sara L.

AMC Cardigan Lodge By: Sara L

The moment you arrive at the AMC Cardigan Lodge you feel like it is your home away from home! The Cardigan Lodge is located at the end of a long dirt road and it faces the Cardigan Mountain. To the left of the lodge is a pond and a hiking trail. The lodge is white and has a small dirt parking lot adjacent to the pond. We stayed at the lodge for three days and hiked the surrounding trails. The absolute location of the lodge is North 43 degrees 38 minutes and 58.5 seconds, West 71 degrees 52 minutes and 41.9 seconds. It was 1398 feet in altitude. I did a sketch of the Lodge on Day 1.

Place Paragraphs

Physical:

At the top of both Cardigan and Firescrew there are bare rock summits because not a lot can grow up there. Only a few of the hardy trees can survive in this weather stricken area, Fir trees and Spruce trees. These trees have branches on only one side of them because of the weather. Welton Falls is a beautiful waterfall located near the lodge the has huge glacial erratics following the whole trail. There is a long river that the trail follows where you do not even need a bridge to cross because there are so many large boulders. We found that there was a lot of mica in the rocks near the river. At the top of Firescrew there are multiple alpine bogs. They create runoff because of gravity and that makes gushing streams and ponds. There are some man made streams so that the runoff does not come onto the trail but the streams have eroded into deeper paths that you have to have bridges to cross. Near the lodge is a pond that is filled with the runoff from all the water on top of the mountain. Another physical thing about the Cardigan Region are the lush plants. The Indian cucumber is a widely found edible plant that grows little white cucumber roots. Another widely found species of plant are ferns and hobblebush, due to the shading treetops overhead.

Cultural:

At the AMC Lodge we played lots of outdoor games and ate a lot of great food. They had a concept called ORT which helps to prevent wasting food by weighing it. In the backyard of the lodge is a man made fire pit. On the trails AMC trail maintainers marked yellow blazes on trees to lead the way so that you do not get lost. When we were on the top of firescrew there were multiple cairns leading the way because the blazes that were on the trees in the lower part of the mountain could blow away with the tree or get washed off. On top of Mount Cardigan are a lot of carved signatures, some dating back to 1812! From the top of Cardigan and/or Firescrew you can see electricity generating windmills. You can also see the AMC Lodge. At the top of cardigan there is a lookout tower and geodetic markers. On the side of Cardigan opposite Firescrew of is the old Fire lookouts house, a brown log cabin in a thicket of Spruce and Hemlock. On the trail to Welton Falls is an abandoned house with only the stone remains of a cellar standing. There are some man made ditches surrounding the trails so that the water does not stream down the path. At Welton Falls there is a fence so that you do not fall off the towering cliffs. Since there are a lot of rivers there need to be bridges to cross. Sometimes bridges have been provided but other times a tree has been cut down or fallen down to cross on.

We were at Cardigan for three days from the 28th to the 30th. On Wednesday we arrived and got settled on Thursday we went on the big hike and on Friday we went to Welton Falls.

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Cardigan Trip by Sara L. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.