Franconia

Franconia is a small White Mountains village that lends its name to the notch just south of town, a dramatic mountain pass where Cannon Mountain and the Kinsman Range press in on either side of I-93, narrow enough in places that the highway itself squeezes down to two lanes. Lia and I had driven through notches before, but nothing quite prepared us for how sudden this one feels, granite walls rising steeply from the road with almost no buildup.

The Flume Gorge and Cannon Mountain

We spent a morning walking the boardwalks through the Flume Gorge, a narrow granite chasm where a mountain stream has cut a passage barely twenty feet wide in places, moss-covered walls rising ninety feet overhead, mist drifting up off small waterfalls the whole way through. In the afternoon we rode the aerial tramway up Cannon Mountain, which has run some version of a passenger tram since 1938, and from the summit could see clear across to Mount Washington and the Presidential Range, along with the boulder field below where the Old Man of the Mountain — the granite profile that was once New Hampshire’s official state symbol — collapsed in 2003 and was never rebuilt.

Robert Frost’s farmhouse

On the way out of town we stopped at the Frost Place, the farmhouse where Robert Frost lived with his family from 1915 to 1920 and wrote some of his best-known poems, now preserved with a short nature trail through the woods behind it lined with plaques of his verse. Standing on the porch looking at the same mountain view he’d have seen every morning, it was easy to understand the pull — there’s a stillness to this valley that seems to slow your thoughts down whether you’re a poet or not.

Getting There

The closest regional airport is Manchester-Boston Regional (MHT), about ninety minutes south via I-93, or Boston Logan International Airport (BOS), roughly two and a half hours south. A car is essential — Franconia Notch’s trailheads and overlooks are strung along the highway with no public transit connecting them.