As you know, we’ve been chasing SLA’s Squam Ranger redlining patch for a few years. We are finally getting close! 🙌🏻 But recently an independent party created a patch for hiking the Crawford Ridgepole Trail, which is a traverse of the main mountain range. Thankfully, the rules allow for section hiking the ridge, so we just had to tag the couple pieces of CRT we had left to earn the patch! Obviously we couldn’t resist that. Besides, after all we’ve done and been through in the Squams, we deserve a “bonus” patch! 😂
| (google image - patch pic to be added when I receive it) |
The CRT approach to Doublehead Mt. apparently has a reputation. The stats seemed reasonable, but research showed mentions of kind of wild scrambles, including a chimney. What’s a chimney? Well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like — a vertical rock fissure or parallel rock faces which hikers must squeeze through and up. It sounded slightly intimidating, but also hella fun.
We knew the trail starts right off steep, so we parked at the Beede Falls lot so we could get a half mile warmup walking up Sandwich Notch Road. (It also offered safer and easier parking, so that was good too.) We were definitely glad we did.
Aside from the climb being a little bit intense so early in a hike (and of course the fall leaves 🍂 covering every rock and root, so you never know how each footstep will land 😅), the trail was fairly nice overall. I could tell it’d be a river in wet seasons, but today it was 98% dry. Despite the steep sections, there were also wonderfully mild sections and varied terrain. The surrounding forest was quite beautiful, and the rock formations when we arrived at the cliff section were very cool. Obviously the colorful foliage was an attractiveness factor, but the mature, open woods were also pretty in their own right. Oh, and there was so much gorgeous, lush moss along parts of the trail. It felt very Irish sometimes.
Of course the coolest thing was climbing the chimney. It was challenging, for sure, but not too scary or excessive and annoying. (Other than our photo angles making it appear smaller than it was. 🤨) We both had so much fun and enjoyed the entire hike enough that we agreed we would happily hike this again just for fun! (Probably as a car spot for a somewhat more knee-friendly descent, and so we can hit the viewpoint on the Doublehead Trail.) Enjoying a whole trail this much is practically a rarity for us in the Squams. LOL
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| so annoyed the chimney looks so much smaller in pics than it was in real life! wtf?! lol |
Another rarity is us finishing a patch on an “epic” hike. All too often we end up with our final hike being on something relatively unexciting. We’ve been trying to plan better and save an extra pretty or interesting trail for our patch finish hikes, but sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. Not that it matters, as we still get the patch. And any hike is still time in nature. But it’s always nice to have a special finish. Or at least an enjoyable one. This certainly counted as both.
Check out my reel + more pics on Instagram/FB! https://www.instagram.com/reel/De2dO72yrBb/
That is likely it for us in the Squams for 2026 (unless stars align for us to tag one or two more condition-dependent trails.) We fully intend to finish the Squam Ranger patch in 2027. For now, we are happy to have completed the new CRT Traverse patch this year.
Info on the CRT patch in the files section on the Squam Range Hikers facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1030166062974983/
This and other patches on my blog page: https://dragonflyhikes.blogspot.com/p/patches.html
10/21/26 CRT to Doublehead Mt, 5.02 mi, 1627 ft
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