60 people went to New Hampshire on the MITOC fall circus. I arrived late, having just sung in the MIT Concert Choir's accidentally creative rendition of some awful music by Copland (whom I normally like, but not this!). When I arrived, I found that the easiest hike was to be a 9-mile deal with 2400 feet of vertical. There was no room on the climbing trip. Robin somehow convinced me to lead a hike of my own, with all of 3 other people. Sure, it was shorter, but we did have to drive an hour to get there.

For some reason, the scanner here seems incapable of capturing the colours of trees. My apologies. Look at Anne's pictures, and rest assured that the views I got on my hike were yet more beautiful! So there.

Here we all are on the way up Cannon Mountain (yes, the one with the Old Man). The path was quite muddy, but here we'd just arrived at a ridge, and this rock was quite appealing for a short break.
On the way down, there was a fabulous view of, well, trees. There's a little AMC cabin by the lake that looks more like a resort hotel if you ask me (we'd hiked up past this lake). We sat and watched traffic form spontaneous waves (where the cars slow down from 65 to 0, sit there for a few seconds, and then go on, for no other reason than that the car ahead of them did the same thing a moment ago). Most entertaining. Then about 8 hikers from Québec came along and wanted to invade our rock and smoke, so we moved on.
Anne decided to go climbing with her spiffy digital camera. Here's a view from the top of one of the more climbable-with-expensive-electronics parts of the cliff. It's no accident that there's a little dark area along the left for your icons :)
The long journey home. Would you feel comfortable knowing that the fool belaying you wasn't even watching? Note especially the poor soul who got trapped under a rock, upper left.