Roadtrip to nowhere - Brookline NH

As Bruce M put it: "We drove to New Hampshire, parked, got out of the car and took a couple of pictures of rock piles, then drove home". A couple of rock piles is about all we got for the day.

We set out optimistically assuming the topo map was showing us good territory to explore just south of Badger Hill in Brookline NH (as discussed earlier [Click here]). But it is foolish to think you can predict local conditions on the ground by looking at the topo map. In the case of the place we selected for today, it turned out to be the right topography but the wrong geology - where we went was all one large glacial outwash area - with only sand and gravel but no rocks bigger than a fist. It is ironic that we parked next to the only rock piles we saw there. This was at the entrance to a sand and gravel operation off North Mason Rd in Brookline NH.

This pile has two scooped out hollows.
The right hand scoop had a single piece of quartz in the center in back:
[It is a small lighter rock just above the middle of the photo.] Nearby, or perhaps part of the same structure of cobbles, was one more scooped out hollow which also had a piece of quartz in the center of the back wall:Downhill a few yards below these piles was what looked like a single ground pile at the edge of a faint gully:Although we walked around for a while we could not get across the impenetrable wetland and mountain laurel to get over onto the Badger Hill which looked so inviting on the map. So it was what is probably a typical problem: too much sandy geology and impenetrable mountain laurel.