Tower Hill-Candia, NH 01-29-15

Two miles from my home is Tower Hill Pond on the Candia-Auburn line. It’s part of the Manchester, NH watershed conservation area. There’s a 4 mile multipurpose dirt road trail around the lake and miles of other trails into the woods. In winter most of these trails are snowmobile trails and I stay off of them. However, up Tower Hill road to the third gated trail head on the left is a trail that snowmobiles are not supposed to use. I parked there and skinned the ¼ mile trail that leads to the lake. Once the lake and main trail around the lake is reached there’s a logging road that slopes uphill to the right. I continue to skin uphill along the west slope of Tower Hill breaking trail. About four years ago a selective timber harvest was completed and now the entire hillside can be skinned and skied. After about an hour of skinning private property is reached and there’s a rock where I sat and rested and had a sandwich before beginning the descent back to the trail head. Below the rock there’s a small snow field before the steeper part of the hill is reached on the way down. The hill does face the west but the trees kept the snow really nice. It was starting to set up. I hit a few rocks and other obstacles but did not do too much damage to my ski bases.

View attachment 15230I had snow shoed this hillside about five times over the years and always wanted to ski it. With nearly two feet of new snow from Tuesday’s storm I finally got the chance to ski it. I have never seen any other tracks of any kind on the entire hillside, except for animal tracks. I am claiming this hillside as my own as I am certain I am the first and only person to ever ski it. I believe it is my right to rename the hill; “mount granite” and the rock where I had lunch “mount granite lunch rocks”. It’s not the White Mountains or the Green Mountains, but it’s close to home, provides about 600 feet of vertical and the snow was deep and soft.

Wow look at all that fresh! Well done. I've eyeballed plenty of hills around here but too lazy not to drive somewhere that there's lifts.