Mount Monadnock

great hike and great views. Although the summit is like an ant hill with too many people. It is best to go on a week day in the fall.

I love this little mountain; hiked here annually with my family. Relatively easy ascent if you’re in decent shape. Easily manageable in an afternoon, have seen plenty of little kids do it. (So no excuses, fattie.) Great views at the top! Avoid July 4 weekend if you can, because of the crowds.

Mount Monadnock, or Grand Monadnock, is a 3,165 foot (965 m) peak in southwestern New Hampshire that has drawn attention for years by its relative isolation from other mountains.

Monadnock was the site, in the 19th century, of a toll carriage road, still visible, and of a resort hotel. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were among those who climbed and wrote about it then. In the same period, uncontrollable fires (some supposedly set to drive wolves out of thickets to be shot: the last wolf killed in the state of New Hampshire was in 1887) destroyed crucial vegetation, permitting severe erosion and creating a tree-line that still persists, though the mountain is too low to have a naturally bare summit.

Today Monadnock is criss-crossed by well-maintained hiking trails (some requiring hiker-level scrambling), and an estimated 125,000 people a year climb it to the top.

Monadnock has long been described as the second-most-climbed mountain in the world (after Mt. Fuji in Japan). Since 1990, it has been suggested that so many of Fuji’s climbers have shifted to newly available public transportation for that ascent, that Monadnock’s annual total of foot traffic now exceeds Fuji’s.