No, I am not referring to the music of Modest Mussorgsky. I'm talking about the little-known summit in southern New Brunswick near the hamlet of Wirral. Yesterday afternoon Steve and I packed up our gear and drove down Highway 101 to Wirral, where we turned off and drove down a secondary road until our GPS unit indicated that we would be best off parking and snowshoeing into the woods. Our packs must have weighed at least 40 lbs. each. We had about 3L of water, 8 cans of beer, 2 cannisters of diesel fuel for the campstove, pots and utensils, first aid kit, 2 sleeping bags and sleeping pads, a tent, a tarp and ground sheet, twine, multi-tools, hatchet and saw, binoculars, 2 sticks of cedar, matches, food, headlamps, and snowshoes. While hiking in on the snowed-in road, we noticed huge moose tracks, with each step spanning the distance of three or four of our steps. It took about 2.5 hours of snowshoeing, combined with negotiating steep icy slopes, a brook crossing, and some extreme bushwhacking, but we eventually made it to the summit of Bald Mountain at about 6:30 p.m. The view from the top was amazing: nothing but trees in all directions, far below. No car or human could be seen or heard. Campsite was at N 45°28.309’ W 066°30.488’.
We set up our camp about 20 m away from the vertical rock face on one side of the summit. Then we spent some time hacking and sawing away at the numerous dead trees on the rocky land, and within no time we had a good pile of dry wood to burn. While hiking up the mountain earlier we traversed a clear-cut, so we backtracked there with our empty packs and filled them up with dead pine boughs and birch logs. Then, back at camp, our priorities turned to making a huge bonfire and eating supper.
Supper was amazing: I finally got a chance to use my Richmoor freeze-dried food packages I bought off the Mountain Equipment Co-op website 5 or 6 years ago. For supper we had beef, peas and carrots, and hash browns, with blueberry cobbler for dessert. Then we topped it off by roasting some hot dogs. It was amazing how fast the time flew by simply sitting there throwing logs on the fire and occasionally poking at it with a stick. Before we knew it several hours had gone by and the fire was dying, the temperature was dropping, and we were tired. So we called it a night and went to bed.
The temperature during the night was about -10, so it was pretty comfortable in the down sleeping bags. There was no wind, so even in the morning I could cook breakfast (oatmeal) without freezing my hands off. We had to go on another wood scrounging mission for another small bonfire. The coolest thing about the bonfires we had was how far into the snow they sank. We initially built the fire on rocks we laid on top of the snow. By the end of last night, they had sunk to the ground, about 2 feet lower.
The hike out this morning was way easier, with less weight and the knowledge of what to expect. We will definitely be returning here sometime in the summer, maybe next time with fishing rods to catch supper in Three Bridge Brook which you have to cross to get to Bald Mountain.
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