By Marty Basch

Solitude is a lake with lily pads and dragonflies, croaks and chirps, ancient downed limbs and boulders. The lake is a gorgeous alpine jewel, with blueberry bushes not yet bearing fruit and plentiful evergreens providing shade. It is a place where a mother and ducklings can splash at one end of the lake within sight of hikers on a distant shore. Above that lake are white cliffs, blue skies, hardly a cloud and a half moon not quite asleep in the middle of a morning on a sweltering summer day.

That lake is Lake Solitude.

By Mount Sunapee

The trail register will attest to the popularity of the trek up to the glacial lake on the backside of Mount Sunapee via the Andrew Brook Trail. But when the timing is right - and it was right this day - only two other hikers were heard and only one other was seen by our party of two.

There are many ways to get to the nearly 2,600-foot high lake. The Newbury Trail is one way. So is hiking up Mount Sunapee and then connecting via the Lake Solitude Trail. From the lake, hikers can connect to a couple of long-distance networks: the nearly 50 miles of trails on the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway and the 75-mile ring of the Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Greenway.

On this day, the pathway was the Andrew Brook Trail off Mountain Road with its limited parking in Newbury at the southern end of Lake Sunapee, for about a six-mile roundtrip that went to Lake Solitude. From the lake, the Lake Solitude Trail was the link to the stunning White Ledge some 300 feet above the lake and on to the summer slopes of 2,726-foot Mount Sunapee, with its dormant chairlifts and regional vistas that include the lake that shares the same name.

Follow the trail

The Andrew Brook Trail follows an old woods road in the heart of the woods on the east side of the mountain. Rocks and roots, logs and bogs, there are plentiful crossings of the brook and its tributaries during the ascent to the pleasant shores of the lake. Signs of recent trail work are evident from a wooden bridge and steps to a winding path under the evergreens with blue ribbons wrapped around trees as a trail blazes closer to the lake.

The lake is a fine destination unto itself. No camping is allowed by its shores, but the remnants of a couple of fires and bootleg trails indicate that might not be heeded.

If one is at the lake, a hiker must continue above it, via the Lake Solitude Trail, to White Ledge. Also called White Ledges and White Cliffs, the vertigo-inducing scenic lookout is a must for a delightful bird's-eye view down to the lake and over to Mount Kearsarge.

To Sunapee

And if a hiker is at the cliffs, well, it's less than a mile to the summit of Sunapee, so off you go. The trail narrows tremendously in the woods, first down to a col, before a grand opening onto the ski slopes of Mount Sunapee. Even without snow, a steep trail is a steep trail. Hike up along the slopes, looking down upon a section of Lake Sunapee. The slopes are covered in high grass with patches of wildflowers. Cross under a dormant chairlift and head up a short way to the summit. Dreams of a mountaintop burgers, fries and cold soda were quickly dashed as the lodge was open to a couple of carpenters doing renovations to the beat of hammer and boogie box on a picnic table.

To escape the sun, shade was found behind the lodge on the rear deck with its picnic table. The summit was ours to explore, walking along the trails that are skied and snowboarded in winter. Mount Monadnock was out there, the Uncanoonuc peaks by Manchester, too. Out there among the mountains was Vermont's Mount Ascutney.

The two summit chairlifts weren't running, looking like swinging couches hanging from a string. Down the mountain, sans boards and poles, the wide, open slopes were soon left behind as we retraced the same path leading back to yet another glimpse of Lake Solitude from cliff's edge and then back down to the shoreline, this time taking a walk along the thin pathways under the hemlocks to get yet another perspective on a jewel of a lake on the backside of a ski mountain that skiers and snowboarders may never see in winter.

One Tank Away

Newbury is:

*45 miles from Manchester, N.H.

*104 miles from Newton, Mass.

*164 miles from LIttle Compton, R.I.