Lincoln

We rolled into Lincoln at the tail end of a foliage weekend, the little downtown clogged with cars bearing plates from five different states, everyone chasing the same maple-red ridgeline. Lia and I found a parking spot by sheer luck outside a diner smelling of maple syrup and bacon grease, and over pancakes we watched the Pemigewasset River churn brown and fast just beyond the window, swollen from a week of rain. Lincoln itself is small and a little unglamorous — outlet stores, ski shops, motels with flickering vacancy signs — but it exists entirely in service of the mountains that surround it, and that’s exactly why we’d come.

The Kancamagus Highway

The “Kanc” begins practically at Lincoln’s doorstep and climbs thirty-four miles through the White Mountain National Forest without a single gas station or traffic light to interrupt it. We drove it slowly, pulling off at Sabbaday Falls to walk a short trail to a granite gorge where water dropped in three tiered plunges, and again at the Hancock Overlook, where the whole valley unfurled in a wash of orange and rust under a sky that couldn’t decide between sun and storm. Lia kept the window down the entire drive despite the cold, saying she wanted to smell the balsam fir, and by the time we reached Kancamagus Pass at nearly three thousand feet, the car smelled like it too.

Loon Mountain and Franconia Notch

Loon Mountain’s gondola hauls you up above Lincoln for a summit view that stretches clear to Mount Washington on a clear day, and we rode it twice — once at midday for the panorama, once near sunset when the ski trails below turned the color of dried blood in the low light. The next morning we drove north into Franconia Notch, where the Flume Gorge’s boardwalks thread through a narrow granite chasm carved by glacial meltwater, moss furring every ledge. We finished at Echo Lake, dead still and mirror-flat, the Cannon Cliffs doubled perfectly on its surface. It was the kind of New England scene that photographs never quite capture — the cold coming up off the water, the particular hush of a mountain lake in October.

Getting There

Lincoln sits about two and a half hours north of Boston via I-93, a straightforward drive that turns increasingly scenic once the highway narrows through Franconia Notch itself. Manchester-Boston Regional Airport is the nearest airport with regular service, roughly ninety minutes south, while Boston Logan offers far more flight options for an extra hour of driving. There’s no meaningful public transit into the White Mountains, so a car is essential — and worth having anyway, since half the point of Lincoln is the freedom to pull over wherever the mountains demand it.