Alpine Garden

June 7, 2008

Clear at the bottom 50' visibility on top (if that). Mt. Washington--holy smoke! How can you not take great photos here? The drive up the auto road was hairy to say the least. The visibility was nearly 0' even before the fog lines start on the roadway. I was very happy to see the fog lines! Unfortunately, we couldn't see the parking lot for the Alpine Garden on the way up. We got to the top before we figured that out :-)

With the visibility so bad, we actually decided to take a nap in the car at the top waiting for the cloud cover to burn off. Wishful thinking! After an hour we (literally) felt our way to the summit building. Call me paranoid, but I actually got out the GPS and set a waypoint at the car. We literally waled twenty feet and saw nothing in any direction. Pretty scary.

After a brief stay at the top and visiting the museum we headed back down to cut our losses...but not before getting a snap of Muh:

Surprise! We could see the Alpine Garden lot on the way down and quickly turned in and headed down the trail.

Cairns leading up Nelson Crag:

Red-tipped goblet lichen:

Muh checking out the view of Wildcat and its Carter neighbors:

Diapensia aplenty:

Alpine Azalea:

Bearberry Willow:

Deer's-hair Sedge:

Lapland Rosebay:

Adams and Madison with the Auto Road in the foreground: