We partially retraced our drive from the day before, back to the incomparably spectacular Franconia Notch. With its majestic views and craggy mountainsides and attainable mountain peaks. Familiar to us as a place where over the decades we had taken our children, when we were all younger and relatively easily ascended peaks like Lafayette. Climbs we have long since abandoned as far too strenuous, but which we recall with fond memory of a time past.

We were headed for The Basins, which we visit every year. Not to climb high above and on to trails that meander and ascend into the mountains as we were once wont to do. Merely to push ourselves to a relatively minor climbing experience, following the Pemigawasset as it tumbles down the mountainside from where it begins, to swell the river of the same name, far down below.

Our perch at various selected points on the smooth, granite raceway gave us ample and fabulous views of the valley below.

It was a breathtakingly hot day, not much relief from the searing sun, but enough to give us shelter under overhanging trees. We were grateful for a wisp of a wind. The water tumbled down over the boulders strewn on the raceway, crystal-clear and cool, an ephemerally beautiful scene, we always hope to capture in our memory yet never quite can, without the aid of photographs.