North Conway

Lia and I rolled into North Conway at dusk, tired from a long drive, and the first thing I noticed was the light on Mount Washington — the whole summit block catching a last flare of pink while the valley had already gone blue. We stood in a parking lot, of all places, just watching it fade. North Conway is not a delicate village; it has outlet shops and traffic and a workmanlike honesty to it. But it sits in the lap of the White Mountains, and every street seems to dead-end into rock and forest. By morning the peaks were sharp against a hard blue sky, and I understood why climbers and hikers have used this town as a doorway for a century and a half.

Into the Notch

Our first full day we drove north into Crawford Notch, and the mountains simply took over. The road climbs through a deep glacial pass walled by cliffs, and we stopped at nearly every pull-off — for Silver Cascade tumbling down bare rock, for the old Willey House site with its dark landslide history, for a hawk riding the thermals far above. We hiked a stretch of trail toward Arethusa Falls, New Hampshire’s tallest, the path soft with pine needles and loud with a hidden stream. Lia, who claims not to be a hiker, kept getting ahead of me. At the falls we ate our sandwiches on a wet boulder in the spray, cold and completely happy, the water thundering off a wall of granite well over sixty metres high.

Riding the Rails

Because North Conway grew up as a railroad resort, we could not resist the Conway Scenic Railroad, whose Victorian station sits like a wedding cake at the edge of town. We took the longer run through Crawford Notch aboard restored early-twentieth-century coaches, the carriage swaying as the train edged along the Frankenstein Trestle and hugged ledges above the valley. It is a slow, indulgent way to see country you might otherwise rush past, and Lia spent most of it hanging out the open vestibule window with her hair everywhere, grinning. The conductor, an older man who clearly loved his job, pointed out peaks by name and told us which slides had come down in which storms. History delivered at fifteen miles an hour.

The Mountain That Rules Them All

You cannot spend long here without your eyes drifting to Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeast and famous for some of the worst weather on earth. We did not have the conditions to summit, but we drove to the base of the auto road and hiked up into the lower forest of Pinkham Notch, where Tuckerman Ravine bites a great bowl out of the mountain’s eastern face. The air changed as we climbed, colder and cleaner, smelling of balsam. We turned back at a granite outcrop with the ravine spread above us, cloud tearing across its rim. Lia said the mountain felt alive, indifferent, a little frightening — and she meant it as the highest compliment. We sat and let it ignore us for a while.

Getting There

North Conway sits in the Mount Washington Valley of eastern New Hampshire, about three hours by car from Boston, most scenically via Route 16 through the trees. There is no passenger rail or regular bus service into town, so a car is essential — and it’s what you’ll want anyway for the notch roads and trailheads. Autumn brings spectacular foliage but heavy weekend traffic on the main strip; visit midweek if you can, and always pack a warm layer, because the mountains make their own weather no matter the season.