On Saturday, we woke up to another 4 inches of fresh powder.  Before heading out for the day, Andrew had to snowblow the driveway and Lindsay had some house chores to cross off the list.  We wanted to get out on our skiis, so we decided to head up to Milan Hill State Park  (check out the pics on the website!) where the Nansen Ski Club grooms several miles of trails.

Milan Hill State Park off NH Rte 110B

Nansen Ski Trails

The snow has been pretty thin up here so far this winter, so the Club has only groomed the trails a couple of times.  Even now there isn’t enough snow to set tracks, but that’s fine with us, since we don’t normally ski in the set tracks.  Several places on the trails were very thin and grasses and shrubs stuck up through the snow.

The Nansen Ski Club does a good job grooming the trails.

There was only one other car in the lot when we arrived, but we never ran into the person.  We did our usual loop, hitting almost all the extra loops, including a loop at the summit.  We started on the Core Loop, took the 1st Extension,  back onto the Core Loop, to the 2nd Extension and the last half of the 3rd Extension.

Nansen Ski Trail Map

The trails are nicely signed by the Nansen Ski Club.

The temperature was around 10 F but we stayed warm in our Ibex soft shell jackets that Andrew won’t stop raving about.  He even wrote a glowing review on the Ibex website and won the “review of the month”!  He was rewarded with a gift certificate to buy more Ibex stuff!

Yes, that says 10 degrees F!

Milan Hill State Park is a camping park in the spring, summer, and fall.  They have yurts and tenting platforms and a short walk brings you to the summit where there is a fire tower to take in the view.  We’ve never camped here, mostly because we only live 30 min away, but the yurts are popular and fill up quickly on the weekends.  In the winter, the Nansen Ski Club, the oldest ski club in America, takes over and grooms the roadways for a fun ski touring center.  The Club takes donations and you can buy annual memberships at several local stores in the area, since the Park is not manned in the winter.  They also hold a ski race/winter carnival at the end of January.

Lindsay skiing in front of a yurt at Milan Hill State Park.

Nice view! Next to the picnic table is another yurt. This would be a lovely view to wake up to in the morning.

The woods in this park were logged several years ago and like every recently cut over area, it didn’t look “pretty” for the first few years, but the woods are starting to fill back in thick with hemlock and fir.  The snowshoe hare are abundant in the park.  Last year we also found evidence of moose bedding down near one the yurts.

A big snowshoe hare lives around here. He was heading for cover into some thick hemlock trees.

The Milan Hill fire tower. You can climb to the top for a 360 degree view.

An open-air shelter at the summit provides a good place to stop for a snack or some hot cocoa.

On the way out we ran into a friend getting ready to hit the trails who told us of the Camel’s Hump Challenge, but we’ll probably pass on that race.  Sounds pretty neat, albeit the long and arduous trek around the summit.  We headed home, glad we got to stretch our legs on such a cold day.  We had bigger plans for tomorrow: Willoughby State Forest over in VT (read about it now).