![]() I could see no swamp, but heard the roaring sound of what had to be Styles Brook, the short but beautiful stream that has the swamp for its source. On the other side the ground fell off precipitously. Fortunately this hunter was real and solid, the non-see-through variety, and for that I was grateful.Īfter fighting on for another half hour, two small knobs came into view, and if the map was to be believed, Merriam Swamp was just beyond through this wet and tangled portal. ![]() I don’t know what either of us was expecting to see at that particular moment, but another human being wasn’t it. I was a little more than halfway there by my reckoning when in some thickly vegetated wetlands I pushed aside a clump of hobblebush to see, about 10 yards away, a man silently looking in my direction. Jay Mountain towers 1,000 feet above the swamp. It provided plenty of time to contemplate life’s great questions, such as which is nastier, spruce, hobblebush or beech whips? At this dismal point I could at least appreciate why the Merriam Swamp apparition had been cussing and swearing. The forest was nice and open for about five seconds until blowdown, woodland marshes, random small cliffs and spruce began to add interest to the hike and slowed progress to a sometimes literal crawl. From here it would just be a simple matter of hugging the contour for a mile and change until the sizable natural feature would hopefully be pretty obvious. From the trailhead on Jay Mountain Road, I followed the path for a mile and a half up the mountain until I was just shy of the 2,700-foot elevation of the swamp. The Jay Mountain Wilderness is known for having its share of borderline-impenetrable wildlands, so it seemed prudent to take advantage of the Jay Mountain Trail as much as possible. All told, it would be a six-mile adventure with 1,600 feet in elevation gain. The timing of a visit seemed apt, since it’s been raining a ton lately, and I figured MS would be chock full of swampy goodness and at peak spookiness. The Hurricane Wilderness seen from a clutch of red pines in the Jay Range. ![]() The guy started at the name and then said, “you’re a braver man than me” before recounting how he’d been hunting there when he heard a loud crash, and the sound of a man cussing and swearing and thrashing through the woods, again without leaving a trace. The story was left there, and little if any thought was given to it over the decades until one day my friend mentioned to someone in Keene that he was thinking about hunting up at Merriam Swamp. His dad had admittedly been asleep, so it could have been a dream, or, possibly, someone else could have been sharing the remote wilderness location at the same time, although that seemed unlikely. He was awakened suddenly by a loud snap and the sound of an angry man talking loudly as he crashed through the thick underbrush. His dad had been hunting there all day, and after having no luck he sat down in the late afternoon, leaning up against a tree for a little snooze. I also agree that Halloween is a great holiday, and her letter reminded me of a bushwhack I’d been meaning to take.Ī deer-hunting friend a couple months back related a story his dad had told him about Merriam Swamp high up in the Jay Range. I put some thought into this, and concluded she was right. ![]()
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