We turned up here, and started to follow a pretty discernable path. Soon the path steepened, turned to loose scree, and we began to emerge onto the old slide. There was so much water in the ground that many sections of this steep scree had water burbling through it, making things a little trickier. We soon emerged into open sections of the slide, where one needs to scramble up good rock with good holds, winding back and forth to find the most appropriate ascent route. I'd call it mild class 3.
Although we now had good sight-lines, we could only see terrain below 3500 feet. The cloud deck obscured anything higher, which was too bad, since from this vantage point we could have had views of Franconia ridge. Perhaps the cloud deck would rise up and/or break up by the time we came back down...
We continued up the steep slide. At times, the slide narrowed and wound through a bit of brush, and then opened out again. Finally, a steep scree-ish finger of it headed up into the woods and petered out. Fortunately, a very well-defined and cleared-out herd path took over. It continued up, steeply at first and then gradually lessening, until it arrived at the crest of Owls Head's summit ridge.
The herd path follows along the broad forested ridge until it reaches a small cleared out area under the trees. Apparently, this used to be what people thought was the highpoint (there's even the remnants of a blue disc on a tree). The true summit, however, has recently been discovered to be 0.2 miles further north, and so we had a little further yet to go. We followed a fainter but still reasonably-well defined path north, pushing through wet foliage, until finally we arrived at a moderate cairn of rocks and a long, thin 'owls head' sign on a nearby tree trunk. It was just before 11am, and we'd managed to make it here from the trailhead in about 4 and a half hours. Pretty decent, all things considered.
Although it was not raining, it was breezy, cool and damp on the summit. We therefore didn't stay long, other than to snap some photos and have a snack, before heading back down. As we did, the weather started to lift a little, and by the time we got to the top of the slide, we'd seen our shadows a couple of times.
Unfortunately, although the cloud deck had lifted a bit and some blue sky had appeared, the heights of Franconia Ridge still had thick clouds clinging to it. It looked like we wouldn't be getting any uniquely-angled views of it today. We waited a few minutes to see if it would break, but to no avail. Down we went (steeply, too - care is required when descending the slide).
