New England offers wonderful daily treats of change.  The seasons change from Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter and each provide the most wonderful scents, visions, sounds and of course feelings.  Now that we are officially in the summer season I wanted to talk about summer in Northern New England.  

Living in northern New England, I am surrounded by the mountains and deeply wooded areas scarcely populated by people.  One of my favorite actives besides knitting is just getting out and going for a walk.  Walking is so important to me as I have a commute that is slightly under an hour and a day job that confines me to my office for 90% of my day.  I am privileged to have a commute that takes me through Pinkham Notch going my Mount Washington twice a day.  

On days off, my husband and I love to just explore new trails, or just do one of the tried and true trails if we are short on time.  This past Saturday was one of those short on time days.  Late in the afternoon we decided to hike Mt. Jasper in Berlin.  This is a very short hike only taking about 20 minutes however its very strenuous and nearly straight up to the top.  We haven't done this trail in about two years and immediately noticed it had changed.  We kept going however.  Approximately 45 minutes in we obviously knew we had taken a wrong turn.  We first ended up at the back of the cemetery on Cates Hill in Berlin--opposite of where we were headed.  To our delight, we didn't know there was a trail there.

So turning around we thought we would trail again and this time turn left at the fork in the trail.  We soon discovered we were off trail again as the windmills in Berlin were now visible and we had passed them.  The beautiful thing of us being off trail is were found new places we had not yet seen.  We also came across a deer!  

 So approximately an hour and a half now on our off trail adventures we decided to turn around and come home. On our way back down the mountain we saw a spray painted rock with the direction to mount Jasper and a very clear and obvious Trail which we walked right past.    We decided to take it and what a beautiful trail it is. We we got to the top and came across a man in his late 80s walking alone with his dog. We had our dog Bella with us who normally doesn't like other dogs but she actually made friends with this little  dog as we both passed each other on the trail. He was going back down and we of course were going up. 

So even though we got off trail and our 20 minute hike took almost 3 hours we had a wonderful surprises a great adventure and a good workout!