The White Mountains & Lakes Regions, NH

I have realized that the formatting of my pictures doesn’t always work with the emailed version of my blog posts. If that is the case, please go to the website. There are a lot of pictures in this one!

After our month in Vermont, we moved over to New Hampshire where there is no sales tax or seatbelt law if you’re over 18 and the state motto is “Live Free Or Die”.

We had booked another month-long stay at an RV park from mid-September to mid-October and chose Ames Brook Campground in Ashland, NH because of its reputation of having great campsites. Of course, we weren’t in one of the best, but it was still very nice. The “premium” sites in the high numbered section were truly the nicest we have seen during our travels and definitely worth paying extra for.

The campground was in a fantastic location in the foothills of The White Mountains and just minutes from Squam Lake and Lake Winnipesaukee. We were also relatively close to Franconia Notch State Park. The cover photo of this blog post is a view of I-93 traversing Franconia Notch from the Artist Bluff Trail overlook.

The first thing we did was take a drive through the White Mountain National Forest on scenic Rt. 112, called the Kancamagus Highway (the “Kanc”) for 35 miles between the towns of Lincoln and Conway. Much like the Blue Ridge Parkway, there are numerous campgrounds and visitor centers, scenic viewpoints, and trailheads.

During the workweek, we frequented the West Rattlesnake Mountain Trail. Just a 15-minute drive from the campground and about a mile hike up to this amazing view of Squam Lake. Squam is known for being the filming location of On Golden Pond.

The following weekend we did an ambitious 8.5-mile loop hike with 3800ft of elevation gain. The hike started out in Franconia Notch State Park. We took the Falling Waters Trail up to the Franconia Ridge Trail (the AT) and back down the Bridle Path Trail. This is one of the best hikes we have done.

After the hard work getting up the Falling Waters Trail, we were rewarded with a 2-mile trek above the treeline and across three peaks, Little Haystack, Mount Lincoln, and Mount Lafayette.

That weekend we also decided to kayak around Squam Lake before it got too cold! We launched at the Squam Lakes Association and paddled over to Moon Island, one of two islands open to the public where the association has made trails and several paddle-up campsites. This paddle was a little scary with boat traffic and wakes.

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Another good hike that was very close to our campground was the Welch-Dickey Loop.

At the end of September, Michael’s parents came to visit!! We love their visits! Michael took a few days off work and we packed a lot into the 3 days they were with us.

We started out with the extremely popular Flume Gorge Trail at Franconia Notch SP. This 2-mile hike is so popular that reservations are recommended and costs $18 per person, which is still hard for me to believe. We did it on a Monday morning so it wasn’t very crowded.

The trail goes next to a beautiful covered bridge that crosses the Pemigewasset River. We’ve learned that bridges were covered in this area because protecting the wood from snow doubled their lifespan. They were built to be “a load of hay high and a load of hay wide”, which is apparently smaller than our F350 because we do not fit through many of them.

The actual Flume Gorge part of the trail goes through a narrow area between 90ft granite walls that were pushed apart by molten lava filling a crack and cooling. Most of the lava has eroded away, leaving the gorge, but some can still be seen in the gorge walls. After the last Ice Age, the Flume Brook found its way through the cracked granite, widening the gorge further.

From Franconia Notch, we made our way towards Crawford Notch State Park located in the Presidental Range of The Whites.

We stopped to have a picnic lunch at the Crawford Depot, which seemed to be a deserted train station. And then a train arrived bringing a couple of hundred people. We have since realized that the Conway Scenic Railroad would be an awesome train ride that we’d like to take someday.

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On our way back towards home, we found this pretty waterfall and a great view of Crawford Notch!

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The second day, we took a thrilling drive up to the summit of Mount Washington. Mount Washington is the highest peak in the northeastern US at 6288′ and is notorious for having the “worst weather in the world”. Obviously, there is worse weather, just not systematically measured and recorded as it is at the weather station on Mount Washington.

There is an informative museum at the summit. Mount Washington held the world record for highest wind ever recorded (231mph!!) until it was broken a couple of decades ago by a tropical cyclone. Hurricane-force winds occur over 100 days per year.

We would like to hike to the summit via Tuckerman’s Ravine one day, but it needs to be earlier in the year and we need to camp closer to the trailhead in Pinkham Notch.

On the third day, we stayed closer to “home” in the Lakes Region. We hiked up to the West Rattlesnake view of Squam Lake followed by Lockes Hill to see Lake Winnipesaukee.

Our third weekend in NH was very rainy and while we don’t mind our small cozy camper most of the time…rainy weekends are not our favorite. We decided to drive 1.5 hours to Portsmouth.

We started out at Strawbery Banke, a 10-acre outdoor museum that preserves the historic neighborhood and stories of the residents of Puddle Dock. There are buildings from colonial times, the years that the neighborhood thrived as a port area around a tidal inlet (hence named Puddle Dock), and last, as a 20th century working-class/immigrant neighborhood. We were able to go in about half the buildings.

After the museum, we walked around downtown Portsmouth and shared a lobster roll and chowder at The River House.

A couple of times during our month in NH, we had tried to ignore the weather and hike anyway.

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On our last weekend in New Hampshire, the Fall foliage was finally at its peak in the mountains (10 days later than normal!) so we tried to make as much of it as we could.

On our way to Crawford Notch, we stopped and hiked North and Middle Sugarloaf Trail which was spectacular for leaf-peeping.

Crawford Notch was incredibly busy on an October Saturday.

And finally, we hiked the Mount Willard Trail to this view of Crawford Notch.

Now that we’ve seen a New England Fall, we’ll pick up the pace and start making our way back to NC with several one-week-long stops along the way.