I was curious to see what the lingonberry plants looked like up on Franconia ridge. To this end, I took a high speed nature walk up the falling waters trail to middle haystack, over to Lafayette, and then back down to the parking lot.

This trail is an interesting slice of biomes in the notch, and it is (rightfully) one of the most popular trails, coming in at about 8+ miles and around 4k of gain, with good parking, it’s also very accessible.

The falling water trail zig zags up to middle haystack, crossing a stream/waterfall several times. This area is always wet, and due to the recent high rainfall, some of the crossings were a little harder to navigate.

Once gaining the ridge proper, the forest drops away and you are in the alpine of the northeast! The soil is sparse and rocky, well drained and likely acidic. This supports two plants that I am interested in: Lingonberries and Blueberries.

Nature Notes from the ridge

In contrast to the alpine garden trail/general mount Washington environ, the lingonberries/blueberries here seem to be a lot smaller. I suspect that is because there is a lot less soil due to the ridge being pretty exposed to the elements. Most lingonberry bushes were much smaller, with the plants being more individual instead of large mats. The blueberry bushes were low to the ground, but still large. Both the lingonberry and blueberry bushes are just starting to flower, although there were a few unripe adventitious blueberries hiding in the brush.

Interestingly, the blueberries seem to dominate here. The bushes are large and healthy looking, and there seem to be many more blueberries than lingonberries. I wonder why that is. I stayed on the trail since its a high traffic area- maybe blueberries have some advantage in taking over disturbed territory? who knows.

Nature Notes from the Bridle Path

Due to the absolutely torrential rainfall that the northeast has been experiencing, the forest is DAMP!

That means there are a ton of mushrooms fruiting. I don’t really know anything about these, but it was interesting to see. Some of these are from a small forest down the road from the ridge.

Trail/Nutrition Notes:

This hike took about 2 packets of gu and 2 packs of gummies, and just under 3L of water. It was hot hot hot! Falling water trail is fairly steep and rocky/slippery, but once on the ridge its smooth sailing to lafayette. There is a steep/wet/rocky section on the way down from greenleaf hut, but once that is passed it is easy to jog back to the car.