On a beautiful summer day my son-in-law, Vivaldo, and I hiked Mount Cardigan in Canaan, NH. I had climbed it numerous times before, the last time almost 15 years ago. I had forgotten what a beautiful mountain it is.
We had planned to climb Kearsarge but my daughter felt a bit ill and wanted to wait a day before that hike. So Vivaldo and I headed out not knowing where we might go. Why not Cardigan? Sure.
We stopped at Grafton Pond to hike into a quiet spot away from the dam. Then we navigated through a large farmers market in the center of Canaan. Up the road and … no places to park—the lot was full. We had arrived late in the morning on a beautiful weekend day. I managed to squeeze into a small ditch just far enough to the side so that others could pass and off we went.
I remembered that the trails to the right off the main one made a nice loop compared with heading straight up and down. We took the first one, the longest, the South Ridge trail. That was a great decision. Not only did we hike through some interesting forests and ledges, we first saw the summit when we were about three-quarters of a mile away. And we saw very few other people on “our” trail until we merged with another side trail.
To the left is a photo as we started to emerge onto the large expanse of exposed rock that is the summit of Cardigan. On the right is a photo of Vivaldo taken 5 minutes later.
A few minutes after I took the above photo, I made a 9-shot panoramic image (below left) of the summit, then used my lens at its longest to magnify summit. We started to see why there were so many cars in the lot. 
A short while later we found a cairn that collected dirt around itself and then sprouted a small ring of vegetation. An amazing feat for a pile of rocks.
Along the trail we reached a large pile of rocks that formed a memorial to Steward Goss.
From this spot I shot a panoramic image of the memorial and the summit in the distance. If you click the image below you will be taken to a larger version that you can magnify and explore in detail. That page also has several large panoramas from the summit.
We continued on to the summit easily scaling the bare sloping ledges on the way.
The above image is a 10-shot panorama from the summit. Click the image and you will get to a version you can examine in detail. You can see the line of cairns leading down, the Green Mountains of Vermont to the left of the tower and the Whites of NH to the right. The click will also get you to a huge 360 degree pan too long and narrow to include in this blog. It is composed of 58 individual images. Here are a few more images from the summit.
