What a difference a trail makes.

On a summer Saturday that easily saw hundreds of hikers tackling the Northeast's highest peak, the trek up the east side of Mount Washington on the underused Nelson Crag Trail was a journey in group solitude while the jaunt down through Tuckerman Ravine was a long parade marching over the Headwall.

Around 340 hikers participated Seek the Peak, a Mount Washington Observatory fund-raiser. It's disclosure time. I edit Windswept, the non-profit's quarterly magazine and I was one of those trekkers. Five of us tackled Mount Washington as a group: Observatory outreach coordinator Michelle Cruz, her fiancee EMS climbing guide Dave Lottmann, Tin Mountain Conservation Center development coordinator Susan Beane and Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory program director Don McCasland. Four of us had climbed the mountain before. Though Beane was the Rockpile rookie, all of us were Nelson Crag Trail greenhorns.

Only one of us carried a kite.

Nelson Crag

The Nelson Crag Trail is a somewhat steady moderate to steep climb to the exposed Chandler Ridge with its jumble of rocks above treeline. The pathway traverses both Nelson Crag and Ball Crag and allows incredible alpine vistas even with a foggy curtain drawn across a portion of  the mountain's stage.

The trailhead is located at about the two-mile mark on the Mount Washington Auto Road which may be why the path doesn't get that much traffic. Either hike to it from the Appalachian Mountain Club's Pinkham Notch Visitor along Old Jackson Road for some 1.7 miles or pay for passage on the Auto Road and drive to the trailhead. We started from the Auto Road, crossing wooden bog bridges, hiking under the hemlocks and along moss-covered rocks.

The trail also included scaling huge wet rocks; not my thing. Slippery when wet ledges can reduce me to a crawl. There were a couple of those en route to the summit, but also a wondrous Moses-like shift in the clouds that gave an eye-popping opening to a rippling sea of mountains.

Fly a kite

Once we left the shelter of the woods for the drama and wind of a world above treeline, McCasland unveiled his multi-colored kite and took it for the first of three Mount Washington flights, including one from the top.

"A lot of my sponsors are kite flyers and I promised I'd fly a kite from the summit," he said.

For most of the way, we had the trail to ourselves. We first saw humanity when the trail touched the Auto Road, and later by a junction with the Alpine Garden Trail. Crossing the road, and then the Cog Railway tracks meant the Sherman Adams summit building was soon, cloaked by mist.

Three-ring circus

The summit circus was bustling with all sorts of mile-high visiting acts. We waited in line for maybe five minutes or so to tag the summit before heading inside for some cookies in the Observatory. The wind was blowing at 19.8 miles per hour with a 49 degree summit temperature. The base temperature was a balmy 74 degrees and it was soon time to head down via the Tuckerman Ravine Trail. The weather's always moving on the summit, and sunshine replaced the fog. Instead of four hikers watching McCasland fly his kite near the Ravine's edge, scores of summit seekers saw the flight.

The popular Tuckerman Ravine Trail is not only an alpine expressway but also a boulevard to see how the general hiking population prepares for the undertaking.  There were plenty of shining examples of properly outfitted hikers complete with layers, guidebooks, water, food and foul weather gear. There were also incredible displays of unpreparedness with hikers in sneakers, trekkers carrying bottled water and nothing else, and several in jeans looking more  like they were walking to a rock concert instead of scaling a 6,288 foot mountain.

Snazzy scenery

But the real scenery was found in the Ravine with its towering cascades off the Headwall and dazzling vistas of the Carters and Wildcats. Steep, narrow and rocky with steps at times, there was even a large chunk of snow remaining from winter's past where many hikers stopped to photograph and touch.

One of the treats was filling water bottles with a hand-pump from a spring near the Hermit Lake Shelters (Ho-Jo's), and another was the relatively modest grade of the way down from Hermit Lake; certainly a lot easier on the knees than those wet slabs on Nelson Crag.

One Tank Away

Mount Washington is:

*170 miles from Boston

*350 miles from New York

*170 miles from Montreal