Grafton Loop Trail, Maine

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Our plan was to drive up to Grafton Notch and walk to Baldpate LeanTo and hang out for part of the afternoon. As we drove through Franconia Notch, the rain started. It poured until we got to Grafton Notch. It stopped raining and we waited. We finally decided to start walking and ended up doing about 4 miles of night hiking. We set up quickly when we got to the Lean To and camped away from the shelter. We met 4 Thruhikers as they were having breakfast at the Lean To. We headed out and climbed Baldpate and got wonderful views. I had always remembered this climb as being very fun. The summit is where we took our turn onto the Grafton Loop Trail. The trail was overgrown and very remote, or atleast ot felt that way. We saw 3 people total, but not until later in the day. The climbs were long and plenty. This is a fun section of remote trail. Many folks still do not really know much about it. There were lots of little swimming holes and I took advantage of one. The water was very cold but refreshing. We pushed on to Stewarts Campsite which is really just a small cleared out area with a couple of logs. There was no water at this spot so we had to camel up earlier in the afternoon when we knew we would push on.  The night was quiet and we were in bed before dark. We woke to clouds and it started raining as soon as we put our packs on. We would be going over Puzzle Mtn in some nasty weather. We got to the summit and notcied some small ice pellets. It was hard to see any blazes at the top as the trail snakes around on the top in an open rock walk. It would have been beautiful, had it not been raining. We decided to get to the road and hitch back to the car. Wak was not feeling the best due to dehydration. When we got to the lot, we could see Puzzle Mtn starting to become cloud free. We eneded up deciding to save the rest of the GLT for next spring. We have planned on hiking the final section over Sunday River, Stowe and Old Speck in 2013.