If you continue north from the base of the Auto Road, nine miles to Gorham, then eleven miles west on Route 2, you can avail yourself of a shortcut to the resort town of Bretton Woods: friendly Jefferson Notch Road.This route feels more like a tunnel than a road—a dappled gravel lane burrowing through the forest, past decaying stone walls of abandoned homesteads, across spring creeks on narrow bridges where you might see fly fishermen casting their lines below. At its 3,009-foot acme the road passes through Jefferson Notch and then descends along the west side of the Presidentials. Where it meets the access road from the cog railway's base station you can drive out to Route 302.
I overnighted in Bretton Woods, at the grand old Mount Washington Hotel, and next day went on westward, 23 miles to Franconia, where I visited the Frost Place. Robert Frost lived here, just south of town, from 1915 to 1920, and summered here for many years after that. A battered old mailbox with his name still on it marks the spot. The farmhouse was unremarkable, but what made the trip worthwhile was the interpretive nature walk, a short loop through the woods that led me past stations where Frost's poems were mounted on trees. I paused to read "The Wood-Pile," one of my favorites, and saw at my feet an old woodpile, there "to warm the frozen swamp as best it could, with the slow smokeless burning of decay." At "The Road Not Taken," I had to pause, knowing the caretakers would prefer me to stay on the path, though the poem urged otherwise.
The next day I turned southeast, taking Route 3 to nearby Franconia Notch State Park. If you just say "The Notch," New Hampshirites know you mean Franconia, though there are other notches. The park, at 6,500 acres, is perhaps the state's finest. As I drove into the notch, ranges rose 2,300 feet on either side of me—sloping walls of tangerine and lemon, magenta and apple green veined in black.
It's an easy walk to one of the park's main attractions, the Flume Gorge, via a two-mile loop trail. The Flume is a crack in the granite—800 feet long, 12 to 20 feet wide, and 80 feet deep—through which a brook cascades. A boardwalk led into the gorge, the incline just steep enough to make me steam my glasses. Beneath the canopy, the leaves were still green, the gorge dark and cool.
The next day I continued south to the Kancamagus Highway, Route 112, which runs 34 miles from Lincoln eastward to Conway through national forest land. While free of tourist traps, much of the Kancamagus was just a high fence of trees to either side, colorful but linear. Kancamagus Pass, however, and the last third of the road, from the Passaconaway Campground eastward, were truly scenic, with mountain panoramas and glimpses of the Swift River paralleling the road.
The Kancamagus also has some lovely campgrounds and trails. About two-thirds of the way along it, I left my car at the head of the 1.8-mile Potash Mountain trail. I climbed through speckled alder, red maple, and basswood, its large round leaves turned ocher. Basswood seedlings, club moss, and sprays of wintergreen carpeted the ground, giving way to a mattress of fallen pine needles as the path climbed through a dark grove of spruce. Higher, the trail turned into a mass of gnarled roots on bare rock. The last quarter mile was boulder to boulder, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached the top. It was a broad granite knob with ledges open to the blue sky, and vistas of the Passaconaway Valley, Pemigewasset Wilderness, Saco Valley, and the Presidential Range to the north. Far below, the Kancamagus was a thin ribbon of gray on a bed of old copper. The breeze cooled me. I liked the view better than the one from Mount Washington, if only because, as my grandfather might have said, you hear nature's voice best when you earn it.
Peter Nelson writes about the outdoors from Northampton, Massachusetts.
The information in this article was last verified in September 1995.
