On an early fall day,  I needed to refresh myself with some time in the White Mountains. To help decide where to go I perused the list of 4,000 footers and my eye lit on Mount Pierce. Why not? Pierce is the only president born in New Hampshire and I’d never visited that summit. I owed it to him. Before I left I read a quick summary of his presidency and decided to go anyway.

Geographically, Mount Pierce stands between Mount Jackson and Mount Eisenhower. (Politically…not really.) The trail from Crawford Notch up to Mount Pierce is the Crawford Path, the oldest continually used hiking trail in the United States and it’s a delight. Passing through beautiful forests, never too steep, it brings you to a junction with the Appalachian trail. A short stretch along the trail southbound leads to a gigantic cairn at 4,310 feet: the Mount Pierce summit.

I traced my steps back north to the junction and, maybe, because Eisenhower is the first president I remember as a child, decided to continue north along the ridge to his summit. It was along this dramatic ridge walk that I experienced two disturbing events. For some time, as I walked, I was picking up bits of a one-sided conversation that seemed to be about incisions and eggs and tubes and sutures. Hmmm. Appearing around a bend was a tall man wearing roman-style sandals with straps woven up his calves. He held his cell phone aside long enough to tell me he was discussing yesterday’s surgical procedure with a colleague. Really? Here? Not long after that I began picking up music that sounded like Green Day. It was, and it was coming —loudly — out of speakers mounted on the backpack of the first hiker in a group of four. Really? Here? I have no idea if this level of electronic connection and noise is rampant in the White Mountains, but it was a discouraging discovery for me.

I had come to the Whites for peace and quiet and views and a chance to mull over worries about our planet. Drought in California, drought in Brazil. Seeing only one monarch butterfly this summer. Glacier National Park melting away. Yet another loon dead due to lead tackle. Plus, I was reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert. In this fascinating mix of scientific reporting and personal stories, Kolbert provides a history of the five past mass extinctions and the evidence that we are in the midst of one of our own making. “Right now,” she writes, “we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.” Next on my list to read is Naomi Klein’s, This Changes Everything, which examines the thesis that our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.”

Except for the two noisy and annoying anomalies, my time on the mountains provided the refreshment I craved. I always come back from time in the woods feeling better. And there is some encouraging news. Although the migratory monarch population in the northeast is weak overall their situation is improving, especially in the mid west. One measure of the monarch population is by the number of hectares of butterflies overwintering in Mexico. According to Monarch Watch, two winters ago was the lowest recorded size at .67 hectares but last winter it was up to about 1.13. Harry Vogel, executive director of the Loon Preservation Committee, reports that the annual count of loons on New Hampshire lakes, taken by 622 volunteers during a one-hour period on July 19, was up from 520 adults in 2014 to 549 this year. Chris Martin, Senior Biologist at New Hampshire Audubon, writes that “our state’s peregrine population — once classified as federally endangered — has been slowly rebounding. In 2015, we have confirmation of 20 occupied territories in New Hampshire, a thriving regional population of both rural and urban-nesting pairs.” Chris also reports a record-high total of 45 territorial pairs of bald eagles in 2015, up from 41 pairs in 2014. He estimates there were 250 to 275 bald eagles present in the Granite state at the close of summer 2015.

Chris Martin will be giving a free talk “Golden Eagles Visiting New Hampshire” on November 5 from 7 to 8:30 PM at the McLane Center in Concord. You can learn about and see some amazing images of golden and bald eagles on the Maine-New Hampshire border near the Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge, taken using a ‘camera-trapping’ technique .

New Hampshire Audubon will hold its second annual auction: “Bid for the Birds” on Saturday, November 14 to support the conservation and environmental educational work of the organization. The event will be at Gunstock Mountain Resort in Gilford and features one of New England’s most beloved storytellers, Willem Lange. Willem will speak about his adventures filming the Saving Songbirds series for New Hampshire Public TV.

Please share your comments and questions at AndoverNaturally@nullgmail.com.