A Tourist Guide to New Hampshire's Eastern White Mountains

Summary show

1. Appalachian Mountains:

In Canada, stretching almost 2,000 miles from Newfoundland to Alabama, in the US, the Appalachian Mountains-or the eastern counterpart to the Rockies inside the west-shape a natural barrier between North America’s coastal simple and its interior lowlands. Subdivided into 3 northern, vital, and southern physiographic areas, they encompass numerous levels.

Consisting of metamorphic rock fashioned using catastrophic eruptions, intense warmness, and crushing stress at some point of the Precambrian Period of between 1.1 billion and 540 million years ago, the Appalachians represent some of the planet’s oldest mountain rock group. Rising throughout terrestrial crust upheavals on the quiet of the Paleozoic Era (about 250 million years in the past), they were formed when indoors crumbling of improbable proportions exerted lines on a subterranean rock, which then buckled, folded, faulted, and cracked, earlier than being counteracted by using uplifting-once in a while into parallel ridges. Secondary shaping and chiseling, by water, ice, and weather over the millennia, produced valleys and ravines, at a time whilst plants and maximum animal species had but to exist.

When the earth’s forces had subsided, that they had left the best peak, of 6,684 feet, in the latest North Carolina in the shape of Mount Mitchell.

2. White Mountains:

New Hampshire had infrequently been disregarded while it got here to elevation superlatives. Indeed, it is very own segment of the Appalachian chain, the White Mountains,

poked the sky with 48 peaks considered “four thousand footers,” numerous at the least 5,000 toes in height, and the crown of its country, 6,288-foot Mount Washington, the tallest peak in all the northeast.

Glaciation had formed deep mountain passes named “notches” through early settlers because they resembled the shapes they’d made in wood with axes. Simultaneously, as cirques had produced, the heads of include Mount Washington’s Tuckerman and Mount Adam’s King ravines.

The man had also had a hand-and on occasion an unfavorable one-within the shaping of New Hampshire’s phase of the Appalachians. Stripped of their arboreal fashion using the logging worries that had bought most of the land and then decreased it to shreds with the 1,832 place sawmills before being hauled away by railroads, they were left bare until the Weeks Act turned into signed into law and permitted the 1914 reacquisition of the unique 7,000 acres.

Subsequent purchases, coupled with logging prohibitions in particular wasteland regions, ensured the status quo of 800,000-acre White mountain rock group National Forest, which nowadays totes the slogan, “Land of many uses.”

Prominent in the nation is its Presidential Range, whose peaks, as their call implies, are named after presidents and other prominent Americans.

Its ample natural world levels from deer to moose, black bears, bobcats, grey fox, coyotes, beaver, porcupines, raccoons, and 184 species of birds, such as Peregrine falcons.

Although its protected popularity restricts its use, this problem does no longer practical to its enjoyment, whose possibilities are ample and vary in line with the season.

Abundant snowfalls re-size the panorama into pristine postcards and sports paradises all through the winter, as an instance, luring sightseers, tourists, athletes, and fans, as the mountains lend their facets and submit to world magnificence lodges that facilitate various activities, inclusive of alpine and go united states of America skiing, snowboarding, snow tubing, snowshoeing, ice skating, snowmobiling, sleigh driving, ice fishing, canine sledding, and even frozen waterfall climbing.

Ablaze with color, the location will become a by no means-ending canvas of Impressionism artwork inside the autumn, turning into a magnet for photographers, leaf peepers, and naturalists. Color peeking depends upon time, elevation, and tree kind. Red maples, for example, pinnacle at low elevations in mid-September, at the same time as beech, sugar maples, and birches attain this stage a month later under 2,000 feet. At the start of October, this height occurs earlier among 2,000 and 3,500 toes, and yellow birch, mountain maple, and mountain rock group ash glow with color intensity in mid-September between 3,500 and five 500 ft.

However, the area’s peaks reach their best heights for the duration of the summer season traveler season when its some dozen attractions provide natural surroundings, hyperlinks to its railroad past, family-oriented subject matter parks, and outside activities.

3. Orientation:

New Hampshire’s White mountain rock group, placed in the northern portion of the state, is easily reachable. Route sixteen, Interstate ninety-three, and Route three provide the north-south tour Routes 2, 302, and 112, reducing the region in an easterly-westerly course.

4. White Mountain Sights:

A. On Route 2:

Santa’s Village, placed in Jefferson, New Hampshire, and open from May to December, is a Christmas-themed park and lets in children to visit the bearded guy in the crimson fit in July, feed his reindeer, and revel in 19 exclusive rides and activities, including vintage vehicles, a yule log flume, a flying sleigh, a Jingle Bells Express teach, a roller coaster, and a waterpark. Live, 3-D suggests are offered within the Polar Theater, and the Burgermeister Food Court offers an array of gadgets for lunch, such as the possibility to beautify gingerbread cookies.

Single-, -day and season pass permit the limitless use of the park’s rides, shows, and attractions.

Six-Gun City and Fort Splash are every other family-oriented theme park in Jefferson accessed through Route 2, but with a western consciousness. Open among May and September; it allows its site visitors to “ride, slide, and play all day” on sights that encompass go-carts, laser tag, water slides, bumper boats, sawmill rides, mechanical degree coaches, log boats, and a Gold Rush Runaway Train.

Kids can earn a deputy badge from the sheriff or step over to the alternative facet of the regulation and have their photos adorn wanted posters.

A transportation museum famous greater than a hundred vintage carriages and sleighs, inclusive of the oldest Concord Coach.

Children can down doubles (or soda) at the Six-Gun Saloon or have lunch at Grabby’s Grub House, and cowboy-related garments and presents can be purchased at the Trading Post and within the General Store.

The Fort Jefferson Campground, with its own swimming pool, offers a hundred websites, from camping to full hookups.

B. On Route 302:

Challenging mankind to surmount its imposing, 6,288-foot peak, and counting Darby Field because the first to have correctly carried out so whilst he had climbed to the top in 1652 with the resource of Indian guides, Mount Washington has in no way ceased to lure people to duplicate his fulfillment. However, the existing-day vacationer can do so far easier, quicker, and greater readily with the Mount Washington Cog Railway.

When Sylvester Marsh, a Compton, New Hampshire local and Chicago meat-packing businessman had followed in Field’s footsteps some two hundred years later and became entrapped on the mountain through a lifestyles-threatening snowfall, he vowed to plot a way which might do away with the ascent’s inherent risks and make it handy to all of us.

Securing a charter for a mountain-mountain climbing railroad, whose concept was, first of all, met with laughter by the New Hampshire Legislature and accompanied by way of the now-famous words that he “may as well build a railway to the moon,” he invented era that included a small, geared, beneath-locomotive cogwheel that meshed with the rungs mounted among a tiny tune and authorized the engine to drag itself up inclines as steep as 37.41-percentage.

Accomplishing its lofty intention and elevation in 1869, it’s been jogging ever because. It’s a National Historic Landmark for the sector’s 2d steepest rail device and the oldest nonetheless-running one.

Accessed by the six-mile base avenue after Fabyan’s Station from Route 302, the Mount Washington Cog Railway offers 3-hour spherical-journeys from its own Marshfield Station summit both steam and bio-diesel locomotives between May and October and one-hour halfway journeys in November and December. All trains include a pushing engine and an unmarried passenger coach.

Aside from offering a ticketing office, a self-service restaurant, Catalano’s at the Cog, and a present keep, the station itself offers a glimpse into early cog railroad generation through its Cog Museum and outdoor presentations, which encompass the first locomotive to climb the mountain rock group.

Views from the rocky, windswept moonscape summit encompass the northern Presidential Range peaks, and riders can visit the Sherman Adams Summit Building; the Mount Washington Observatory; the Tip-Top House, a National Historic Landmark; and the Summit Stage Office, in which the arena’s maximum wind pace-of 231 mph-became recorded.

A quick distance from the Mount Washington Cog Railway’s base avenue on Route 302 in Bretton Woods is any other namesaked attraction, the Mount Washington Resort.

Rising from the woodland inexperienced, and continues inside the shadow of the mountain rock group itself, this white facade, red-roofed mega-mansion, one of the vicinity’s original grand accommodations, become constructed between 1900 and 1902 through Joseph Stickney, a New Hampshire local who had amassed his wealth within the coal mining enterprise and with the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Spanish Renaissance Revival fashion.

Built 250 Italian craftsmen, who implemented meticulous detail to its woodwork and masonry, it featured an extraordinary steel framework and progressive heating, electric powerplant, plumbing, and personal telephone structures, together with its still-existent post workplace, reworking woodland into luxury within the form of the grandest of the grand inns.

Staffed by way of 350, it opened its doors on July 28, 1902, catering to rich visitors from the northeast, celebrities, and dignitaries, along with Thomas Edison, Babe Ruth, Joan Crawford, Princess Margaret, and 3 US presidents, who all had area get entry to by as much as 50 daily trains that served 3 local stations.

In 1944, it hosted the Bretton Woods International Monetary Conference, throughout which delegates from forty-four international locations hooked up the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, placing the gold fashionable at $35.00 and designating America dollar as the spine of a global alternative.

In 1978, the motel was brought to the National Register of Historic Places and 9 years later was designated a National Historic Landmark through the Department of Interior.

Echoing its century-old beauty are its 900-foot verandah and “Great Hall” foyer, which features high ceilings and rock fireplaces.

Other opulent generation echoes sound within the shape of afternoon teas in its Princess Room, five-megastar food in the Dining Room, lighter fare in Stickney’s Restaurant, cocktails inside the Rosebrook Bar, Verandah, or rock-formed Cave, operator-attended elevator, and horse-drawn carriage excursions of the grounds, which can be surrounded through the White Mountain peaks and Crawford Notch.

A 25,000-square-foot spa, with 13 treatment rooms and golf publications round out the facilities, the latter of which include the nine-hole Mount Pleasant Course opened in 1895 and the 18-hollow Mount Washington Course, which turned into restored to its 1915 Donald Ross layout.

The equally Omni-owned Bretton Arms Inn is a mattress-and-breakfast.

Across Route 302 from the Fabyan’s Station Restaurant is the Bretton Woods Ski Resort at Mount Rosebrook. It functions 433 acres of skiing and snowboarding, 101 alpine trails, one hundred kilometers of Nordic trails, four terrain parks, night snowboarding, and a canopy tour with ten zip lines, two sky bridges, and 3 rappel stations.

Besides snowboarding itself, winter sports include canine sledding, sleigh driving, snow tubing, ice skating, snowshoeing, and mountaineering. In contrast, summertime sports encompass trekking, bicycling, swimming, fly fishing, tennis, and path and carriage riding.

Dining options encompass Lucy Crawford’s Food Court and the Slopeside Restaurant within the base, and the Top O’ Quad Restaurant on the summit.

Further east on Route 302 in Crawford Notch, State Park.

Discovered in 1771 while Timothy Nash, a Lancaster hunter, determined a gap at the same time as monitoring a moose over Cherry Mountain, its lands changed into promised to him through Governor John Wentworth if he should both experience a horse and assemble an avenue thru it-feats he, in the end, carried out, despite enormous topographical boundaries.

The region itself become named after Crawford’s own family, its first settlers. Establishing motels for vacationers and forging the first direction up Mount Washington, they performed climbing expeditions.

Thwarting the vicinity’s excessive deforestation, New Hampshire’s nation acquired a maximum of the nearby land in 1913, designating it a state park. Its five,775-acre area now encompasses the mountain summits that border the Saco River Valley.

Aside from picnicking, fishing, and hiking, it offers quick, smooth trekking trails: the half of-mile Pond Loop Trail leads to perspectives of the pond itself, while the only-mile spherical-trip Sam Willey Trail follows the Saco River. Extensions and separate paths cause Ripley and Arethusa to fall.

Even further east, but still on Route 302, is Attitash Mountain Resort, whose height rises to two,350 feet. Aside from the usual iciness sports offerings, it opened its doors to summer season activities in 1976. A couple of of-mile-long, chairlift-accessed slide imported from Germany that features rolling slopes and S-turns.

Progressively delivered points of interest now consist of the rail-installed, two-individual cars plying the 2,280-foot Nor’Easter Mountain Coaster, with 360-diploma loops; a hiking wall; a trampoline; water slides; mountain motorbike riding; horseback riding; and 1,700-foot scenic chairlift rides.

Day, afternoon, and single-experience adult and toddler tickets allow traffic to optimize their experience.

At the foothills of 2,050-foot Bear Peak is the Attitash Grand Summit Hotel and Crawford’s Restaurant, at the same time as the Attitash Mountain Village is located throughout Route 302.

C. On Route sixteen:

While the Cog Railway affords west facet access to the mountain’s summit, the Mount Washington Auto Road gives an east side, self-pressure alternative.

Tracing its origins to the in the beginning-unique Mount Washington Carriage Road, which was the USA’s first guy-made traveler enchantment whilst it opened on August 8, 1861, it lets in motorists to “take the excessive street,” because it advertises itself, by way of having access to it from Route sixteen in Pinkham Notch.

The Great Glen Lodge, located at its base, offers an eating place. The adjacent Douglas A. Philbrook Red Barn Museum, the remaining of the horse and hay barns that had been critical to the Carriage Road’s staging procedure, features a group of restored wagons, carriages, stagecoaches, and vehicles that once accompanied the summit surmounting course.

The basic price to enter the Auto Road includes the auto, its driving force, an audio or CD cassette excursion. The famed “This automobile climbed Mt. Washington:” bumper sticker and automobiles ascend from 1,543 to 6,288 toes, with an en-route elevation benefit of between 594 and 880 toes in line with a smile, even as traversing the 7.6-mile road. They have to get entry to the same summit perspectives and historical buildings as their rail passenger counterparts.

A short distance from the Auto Road on Route 16 is Wildcat Mountain, itself a sister appeal to Attitash. Its forty-nine trails and glades reached using the maximum powerful quad chairlift in New England, including the two.75-mile Polecat Trail for novices, the 2,112-foot, vertically dropping Lynx Trail for intermediates, and the Wildcat Trail for experts.

Summer activities consist of the Wildcat Mountain Express Skyride. Silently ascending to the 4,062-foot summit of Wildcat Mountain all through their 15-minute journey, the four-character gondolas initially flow amongst, and in the long run above, the tsunami-towering waves of green encompassing the White Mountains and Tuckerman Ravine, Lion Head, Raymond Cataract, Mount Washington, and Huntington Ravine amid distant, however still-seen, sugar-dusted spots and specks of height-clinging snow, even within the summer season.

Seeming to comb the erectly-status evergreens, which resemble arboreal, forest-guarding sentinels, as they approach the top, they open their doors and emit olfactory onslaughts of pine, as though the rider has been deposited in his local nursery for his annual Christmas tree spree. The air, skinny and natural, is some ten ranges cooler than it is at the bottom.

“You are standing on the part of the Appalachian Trail,” a sign straight away advises, “exact by Congress as a National Scenic Trail in 1968.” Stretching extra than 2 a hundred and forty miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin, Maine, it crosses 14 states, eight national forests, six countrywide park regions, and several kingdom lands.

The brief stroll to the summit’s other part presents perspectives of the White Mountain National Forest’s eastern slope and the Kearsarge North, South Doublehead, and Black Mountain silhouettes directly beforehand. Toward the east, within the foreground, is the Wild River Valley. Even as a sequence of smaller, rounded mountains fashioned over the last glacial length are seen past this vicinity, along with the New Hampshire-Maine country line. Clear days enable the Atlantic Ocean, ninety miles away, to be glimpsed.

The Appalachian Trail traverses the Presidential Range, Mount Washington, and the Great Gulf Wilderness to the west. The Mahoosuc Range and the Berlin and Gorham lurk cities in the north, and Jackson, Bartlett, and the Conways are within the south.

Wildcat Mountain’s four-man or woman Zip Rider, suspended from a cable 70 feet above the floor, descends 2, one hundred feet over trails, treetops, and the Peabody River at a 12-percent grade and speeds of up to forty-five mph, an enjoy it describes as “an excessive-pace cable experience with a sudden, abrupt touchdown.”

Hiking on The Way of the Wildcat Trail provides perspectives, through a branch off, of Thompson Falls, and fishing may be enjoyed on the Peabody River.

Packages encompass such features as the gondola trip, lunch at the Mountainside Café, disc golf, and motels at the Attitash Grand Summit Hotel.

Further south on Route 16 is the Appalachian Mountain Club. Founded in Boston by using Edward Pickering and 33 different outdoor fanatics for the later-defined motive of “promote(ing) the safety, leisure, and know-how of the mountains, forests, waters, and trails of the Appalachian region,” it forged its first hiking trail in Tuckerman Ravine in 1879 and presently keeps extra than 1,500 miles of them, in conjunction with huts and inns, inside the 12-bankruptcy device that stretches from Maine to Washington, D.C. The employer, with 450 seasonal and complete-time workforce and sixteen,000 volunteers, has 100,000 members.

It’s New Hampshire bankruptcy, at the base of Mount Washington on the east facet, has been a hub for hiking, climbing, skiing, and snowshoeing since the 1920s, and nowadays continues the Joe Dodge Lodge, a cafeteria, a present shop, and 8 mountain trail huts, and offers lectures, workshops, and out of doors abilities commands.

The Pinkham Notch Visitor middle is also placed here.

Story Land, some other family-oriented theme park “wherein fairy tales come into existence,” is placed further south, a quarter of a mile from the junction of Routes sixteen and 302 in Glen.

Kids are served a buffet of rides and sports, inclusive of antique automobiles, Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage, park plying chunk-chew trains, Dr. Geyser’s Remarkable Raft Ride, a Polar Coaster, Bamboo Chutes, a Whirling Whale Ride, a Crab Crawl, Oceans of Fun, Turtle Twist, Splash Battle, and Cinderella’s Castle.

Its leisure, as indicated with the aid of its colorful titles, is similarly adolescents-orientated: Duke’s Dance Party, Function Celebration, The Story-Bops, A Fairy Tale Fiasco, the Royal Hanneford Circus, and the Farm Follies Show.

Drinks, snacks, and meals can be bought in numerous venues, together with the Food Fair, the Pixie Kitchen, and the Sunny Day Farmstand.

North Conway, placed further south on Route sixteen (additionally called White Mountain Highway), is the location’s most substantial vacationer base.

Chartered with Colonel Governor Benning Wentworth’s aid in 1765, it owes its upward push to its geography, topography, and transportation gets admission to. Named after Henry Seymour Conway, a 20-yr-old Parliamentary elected reliable, it took root-actually-inside the form of sprouting farms, as many different New England villages, after the American Revolution.

Linked to the out of doors global in 1872 whilst the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway Railroad laid its tracks, it hosted the increasing variety of vacationers who had been interested in the region’s wintry weather sports and mountain surroundings, the latter frequently captured in White Mountain Art artwork.

So identifying itself with the activities its topography fostered, it became referred to as “the birthplace of skiing” in 1832, and the railroad deposited as much as five 000 passengers into the town on weekends by its “Snow Trains.”

Today, regardless of its compact size, it gives more than a few and a range of offerings and facilities generally associated with a metropolis triple its length. Accommodation, for example, varies from historical hostelries (which include the Stonehurst Manor and Inn, the 1785 Inn, and the Eastern Slope Inn) to familiar chains (such as the Holiday Inn Express and Marriott’s Residence Inn). Restaurants run the gambit from fast meals to a Bavarian Chocolate Haus, a proper Italian eatery, and eating rooms inside the ancient lodges themselves. Shops are just as multi-faceted-from kitschy gift stores to bookstores, the Settlers’ Green Outlet Village, and the North Conway Mall. Other town services include artwork galleries, a community center with stay performances, a Weather Discovery Center, a model railroad museum, and an ancient railroad station.

It is from this station that traffic can step returned-and journey into the place’s rich rail past.

The North Conway Scenic Railroad Station, as soon as a transportation hyperlink to the relaxation of the country and currently an architectural one to the beyond, became the town’s nucleus and center of residents’ lives, domestically accessed via horse-drawn carts and wagons. Constructed in 1874 for the Portsmouth, Great Falls, and Conway and designed by Nathaniel J. Bradlee-a Boston architect of massive notoriety-it became intended to serve the growing motel community.

The enforcing, twin-towered depot, whose grandeur represents that of then-ordinary stations, sports activities a 136-12 months-vintage, attic-hooked up, brass and iron E. Howard clock appears blind to the track clack suspension and maintains to comb its arms 360 levels, three hundred and sixty-five days of the 12 months.

Its interior, flanked on either aspect via a winding, wood, tower-gaining access to staircases, reflects its golden age with a unique price tag and telegraph office, whole with vintage contraptions, a passenger waiting area/museum (as soon as the Women’s Waiting Room), the Brass Whistle Gift Shop (the former Men’s Waiting room), and a garage place (then the baggage room). It stands as testimony to the metropolis’s railroad beyond and is one of the country’s few final unique and whole depots.

The eighty-five-foot-lengthy, compressed air motor-driven turntable, permitting a locomotive to become both fortune alignment or 180-degree reciprocal orientation, accesses the four-stall roundhouse whose sub-music pits facilitate the protection, repair, and service. Its out-of-town employees frequently bunk within the wheel-much fewer bags vehicle after it.

Along with the depot and the roundhouse with its turntable, the Freight House, constructed in the 1870s as a processing factor for draymen-inspected shipment files, is indexed on the National Register Historic Places. It currently homes the North Conway Model Railroad Club.

The Conway Scenic Railroad’s fleet includes thirteen steam and diesel-electric locomotives, extra than 40 automobiles and coaches, seven privately-owned cabooses, and 3 privately owned snow flangers.

It gives several day vacationer trains at some point in the summertime. “Valley trains,” as an instance, either operate the one-hour, eleven-mile spherical-experience to Conway or the one-hour, 45-minute, 21-mile return to Bartlett, whilst “Notch trains” penetrate Crawford Notch and make the 50-mile, 5-and-a-half-hour tour to Crawford Depot and Fabyan Station. These services use either steam or diesel-electric cause power, and passengers can e-book teach first magnificence or top-class/dome motels with three-course meals.

As befitting a town which serves iciness sports activities fans, it functions a ski hotel, Mount Cranmore, in its very backyard, simplest a mile from the Route sixteen artery which slices it.

Long associated with a unique mountain-ascending gadget, it had featured a fleet of 192 steel, rubber-wheeled, and cable-pulled skimobiles that had climbed Mount Cranmore on a dual-section wooden trestle. Designed by George Morton of Bartlett, New Hampshire, it had transported skies and sightseers alike and have been the oldest operating ski elevate system in North America when it ceased operations in 1989 fifty-one years of non-stop career.