Owl's Head: Unfairly Infamous

Of all the 48 4000-footers in the White Mountains, Owl's Head is the most unfairly judged.  When you tell people you are going to hike it, the most common reaction is "ugh, why are you hiking that?"  It gets some bad press for being one of the smallest 4000-footers, having no view at the summit, and for being a 20-mile round-trip hike.  But overall, I'd say this was one of the most surprisingly good hikes I've done so far.  Sure it's 20 miles, but 18 of those are completely flat - to the point where we actually ran parts of it.  And the intensely steep climb at the end of the flat is really fun scrambling with decent views of the Franconia Ridge.  Also, there are some fun river crossings to help cool you down.  DOUBLE ALSO: there are frogs and toads all over the place, just like the Pemi Loop.  Overall, I'm rating this one a 1 on the hiking binary scale, which I've just invented, just now:
0 - would not hike again
1 - would hike again

But enough about ones and zeros.  Our big driver for hiking Owl's Head was that after backpacking the Pemi Loop last weekend, where we saw Owl's Head mountain from EVERY SUMMIT (almost), we decided to "thread the needle."  So Sarah, Sterling and I drove up to the Tufts Loj the night before for a Sunday morning hike.  Along the way, we saw an epic double rainbow.

Double rainbow, but not quite all the way across the sky!  WHAT DOES IT MEAN?!

Ok, the second rainbow is pretty faded on the left, but still!  IT COUNTS.
Then hanging out at the Loj with some growlers before bed.  AND THEN waking up early to start the hike at 6 o'clock in the A.M.  Three hours and a few river crossings later, and we were at the base of the Owl's Head trail, which is the short, unmaintained trail up to the summit.  It's conceivable to lose your way, but the trail was fairly easy to follow.  Part of it is an exposed rock-slide, which is fairly scrambly and awesome.

"We came from that way"

Getting scrambly...

After that, it was just a little walk to the view-less summit.  Eh, I can do with that since we had some pretty good views on the rock-slide.  But the summit didn't have a sign (apparently it gets stolen every once in a while, oh well).
The hike back was flat and just as fast as getting to the Owl's Head trail, with frogs, toads, and a shitload of butterflies all over the place.

What are all these butterflies doing here?  You guys are crazy.

So we finished the 20-mile hike in just under 8 hours.  Not a bad hike at all.