By Marty Basch

Mount Osceola's craggy East Peak has a rough reputation and deservedly so. The mountains form a high ring wall above Waterville Valley with 4340-foot Mount Osceola collecting all the accolades for its vast summit ledges allowing for a year-round drama of colors, changes and clouds.

East Osceola, at 4156 feet, contains towering cliffs, a flattish wooded top with a welcoming coniferous canopy, and large summit cairn.

There is also about a half-mile steep rock pitch with some scrambling to do, including a section across an angled slide and a well-worn luge-like gully near the summit.

However, both slabs (there are a few steps to march after the gully) provide stellar vistas making the climb well worth the while.

Not So Bad

And truth is, hiking East Osceola, though a strenuous undertaking, wasn't as bad as my partner Jan Duprey and I thought.

Many hikers make the outing a double peak affair, but not us. The plan of attack was a half-day slog up the northeast side of the mountain, using the Greeley Ponds trailhead about nine miles east of Lincoln along the Kancamagus Highway for a 5.6 mile out-and-back adventure along the Greeley Ponds and Mount Osceola Trails.

We've come to be early morning hikers, making first steps on dirt by 7 a.m. in the coolness of a new day, generally turning into late morning ambassadors on descents by fielding questions about how far it is to the summit from ascending parties. Partly sunny skies, temperatures in the low 80s and a chance of late afternoon showers and thunderstorms were forecast for the day that began with a benign walk on the Greeley Pond Trail.

I have hiked the trail on several occasions, but oddly never without snow. I had last tread there this past March, enjoying a quiet winter day along the two ponds in Mad River Notch.

The snow covered the rock skipping crossings of the South Fork of the Hancock Branch and myriad of thin bog bridges. At nearly a mile into the initially easy undertaking, the trail turns left onto an old logging road merging with a snowless cross-country ski trail and a continued effortless ramble into Mad River Notch, a pass between Osceola and Mount Kancamagus.

End of Easy

A trail junction at 1.3 miles marked the end of easy, and the start of almost hard as the Mount Osceola Trail crossed a naked ski trail and began its moderate up and soon under the rugged cliffs spotted through the trees as a raptor screamed overhead.

The steep-half mile pitch follows an slide that crashed down the mountain in 1897. There are ample trees, roots and large rocks to use, in addition to well-trodden side paths on the more forgiving pine-needle covered ground. Frankly, I was more concerned about the trek down. You can always crawl up a mountain, but down?

The highlight of the scramble is venturing across a small section of the slide with jaw-dropping looks north and east to peaks like North Hancock and its Arrow Slide, dominant Carrigain, portions of the Presidentials, Carters and a birds-eye glance to Upper Greeley Pond. Then again, some hikers might think it a vertiginous experience.

The steep stuff stops a short distance from the summit where a side path leads to a viewpoint that is similar on one side from the ledge below, but the vistas to the other side show the triangular topped wooded peak of East Osceola, the massively jagged Osceola, Franconia Range and the Bonds. The post is a good stop for a breather before the final push up to the viewless summit. Though that really isn't the case as there's a small  vantage point just below the top by a fire ring and another along a short summit path.

Going Down?

The downward plunge wasn't as daunting as either of us imagined. Keeping a steady pace, we used as much of the side trail options as we could. Though I carried poles, it was far easier not to use them, and on the way down, we stopped yet again to admire the views from across the ledges near the top of the century-old rock slide.

Perhaps it was the cumulative experiences of navigating many precarious White Mountain slabs, ledges, rocks and roots cautiously that made challenging East Osceola a bit less fierce than imagined. Hard to say. But this I know: they're all best done one step at a time.