Dixville Notch — New Hampshire

A tiny far-north mountain pass famous for casting the country's first presidential votes at midnight, though what struck Lia and me more was just how empty and wild it feels up there. We didn't see another car for an hour.

Dixville Notch sits almost as far north as New Hampshire goes, a steep, narrow pass through the northernmost White Mountains that most Americans have heard of for exactly one reason — every presidential election, its handful of registered voters gather at midnight to cast the first ballots in the country, a tradition dating back to 1960 that turns this speck of a place into a brief media circus once every four years. Lia and I came in a quiet October between elections, and found something much stranger and better: a genuinely wild, nearly empty mountain pass with almost no cell service and barely a building in sight.

Driving the pass at dusk

Route 26 threads through the notch between sheer granite cliffs that close in fast, Table Rock rising dramatically on one side, and we drove it slowly at dusk with the windows down, moose-crossing signs the only real indication anyone had thought much about this road recently. We didn’t pass another car for close to an hour, and pulled over twice just to stand in the silence — no traffic noise, no wind, just the occasional call of a bird settling in for the night. It’s one of the emptiest stretches of road we’ve found anywhere in New England.

Steep granite cliffs of Table Rock rising above the narrow highway through Dixville Notch, New Hampshire

The Balsams and a ghost of a grand hotel

Just off the road sits the shuttered Balsams Grand Resort, a sprawling nineteenth-century mountain hotel that closed in 2011 and has sat empty ever since, its turrets and wide porches visible from the highway behind chained gates. We couldn’t get close, but even from a distance it’s a striking, slightly eerie sight — a Gilded Age resort built for crowds that stopped coming, in a place so remote it’s easy to understand why. Locals we asked in the nearest town, Colebrook, spoke about it with real hope that redevelopment plans might someday bring it back.

The shuttered turrets and porches of the historic Balsams Grand Resort near Dixville Notch, New Hampshire

Getting There

Dixville Notch is remote — the nearest airport with meaningful service is Manchester-Boston Regional (MHT), about three hours south by car, or you can fly into Portland, Maine (PWM) and drive roughly two and a half hours northwest. A car is completely essential; there is no public transit this far north, and cell coverage is unreliable through the pass itself.