CHASING NEW ENGLAND'S TRAIL GHOST

Twenty years ago, I began working on a long-distance foot trail in northern New Hampshire that today rambles up to a little drink of water called Fourth Connecticut Lake hard by the Canadian border. Five hours’ drive to the south, the old Massabesett Trail dips a big toe into the Atlantic at the Long Island Sound community of Guilford. In between these two distant points is a long-distance ghost treadway, a trail that’s stillborn, a path that’s pathetic for its inability to comingle with its kin.

An email arrives at the house from cyberspace once in a while from an adventurous tramper who wants to perambulate from the Atlantic to Canada. I send him some boilerplate copy, always the same. It’s a list of dozens of trails that, when strung together, trace a knobby backbone to trek upon almost all the way—virtually none of it on the Appalachian Trail. But, you see, the vertebrae are disarticulated. There are gaps in this grand trans-New England trackway. So the skeleton can’t be fleshed out, the skin can’t be stretched. The trail remains ephemeral, in Neverland, a ghost.

Yes, trekkers can take off from the well-marked NEST – the New England Scenic Trail over the three M’s: the Massabesett, the Metacomet, and the Metacomet-Monadnock – and alight atop Mt. Monadnock in the southern Granite State communities of Dublin and Jaffery. Beyond Mt. Monadnock, the Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway wriggles away northward and terminates at Mt. Sunapee. And between Mounts Sunapee, Kearsarge, and Ragged, yet another greenway is at the ready to underpin hikers all the way to little Danbury township huddled in unpopulated forests at the state’s narrowing midsection.

Then everything falls apart. Vertebrae are missing. Yet, atop Ragged Mt. you can see where you need to go: the bony, treeless topknot of Mt. Cardigan. Cardigan with its extensive trail system shuffling out of Alexandria Four Corners over the 3,000-foot summit, over the Firescrew, and then down the north and east flanks almost within a belly flop of big Newfound Lake. Cardigan, so close but yet so far. It’s less than twenty crow-fly miles distant, if only there were new miles of trail to tramp. There aren’t.

To the northeast of Cardigan, the trail goes cold once again once the Weldon Falls Trail meets the Valley View Road. The gap now is courtesy of the waters of Newfound Lake. The shore road across the northern reaches of the lake is the only avenue open to the explorer.

But salvation is at hand, directly. An old cut, not maintained and on precious few radars anywhere, runs up Plymouth Mountain’s southwest flank and reaches the summit. There the neglected route reaches the Sutherland Trail that has gained elevation from the opposite side of the peak, toward the university hamlet of Plymouth. The Sutherland descends into the midst of a gaggle of pathways hewn out of the forest by the Plymouth Conservation Association. These trails point the way into town and almost reach the city limits.

Nothing like a college town, you know. Beer, pizza, the usual fortifications. But Plymouth offers little solace for the hikers hungry for a banquet of undisturbed forest. The way north, into the low sumits of the Sandwich Range and onto the myriad trails of the White Mountain National Forest, is thwarted by a dearth of woods ways. Yet, Cotton Mountain is no farther away to the east than the summit of Plymouth Mountain is to the west. But you can’t get there unless the time honored task of bushwhacking is employed from Perch Pond Road’s south corner, heading due east to Cotton’s summit.

Atop Cotton that broken backbone knits its bony self back together, for the Crawford Ridgepole Trail begins its snaking course along the many fine low peaks of the Sandwhich Range mountains eastward and northward to link with more than a dozen pathways through the Whites.

Now the going is a trekker’s dream, always in sight of the waters of a dozen great ponds and vast lakes below. The summits tick by: Livermore, Webster, Morgan, Percival, Squam and Doublehead. Greeley Pond awaits, a glacial tarn now fully in the cupped hands of the White Mountain National Forest

Ever northward now, the trans-New England experiment reaches Whiteface, the Sleepers, the Tripyamids one, two, three, and many a tramper’s favorite, Mt. Carrigain with its stubby firetower. Drift downhill out the the Pemigewasset Wilderness along the Nancy Ponds Trail and Route 302 interrupts the journey. A mile away to the north along the road is the Davis Path trailhead parking lot and the Bemis bridge over the Saco River. Once there, the Canadian line is under two weeks away over the Cohos Trail’s 170-mile route, one week and a day if a trekker’s soul is on fire.

SEEING THE GHOST

There it is, maybe 500 miles of trekking to rival the Appalachian Trail and yet it’s invisible. Nobody knows it’s there. Just a handful of people have threaded the lost miles together to amble from salt water to that little freshwater fen on Canada’s eastern bottom.

Despite several attempts to father this thing, it has proved to be a mother. Despite coffee and cookies at my house 15 years ago, consumed by eight earnest souls, the long walk in the woods passed out of memory. Someone built a website extolling the virtues of this hollowed hike, but virtual reality set in. A third attempt in a book shop in Fitzwilliam, NH proved to be a delightfully diversion, but little else.

So the ghost walks the ridges alone because the warm bloods just don’t seem to have the intestinal fortitude to tackle the job.

What’s the problem here? In 500 miles of track there are no more than 30 miles of gap and probably a good deal less. The chasm in the Newfound Lake section north of Mt. Cardigan can be bridged with five miles of road walk and a good brushing out of the Plymouth Mountain Trail. There is no choice to reach the North Country but to road walk out of Plymouth, cross the Pemi River bridge, and amble on Holderness back lanes for a day, but one one-mile new hiking trail is all the trail work that’s needed to close the second gap west of Mt. Cotton.

The last breach is the charm, or rather the ghost’s nightmare. Some of the Danbury township low country north of Ragged Mt. is bog and deadwater. Beyond, angling northwest toward Mt. Cardigan, are humpback rises with names the likes of Littlefield, Taylor, Pinnacle, Tinkham and Braley that eventually exhaust themselves at a water impoundment in Alexandria just off Wild Meadows Road. Once there, Alexandria Four Corners is just a stone toss away as is the trailhead of the Skyland Trail to Mt. Cardigan.

In that Ragged to Cardigan wilderness the ghost could be driven out with some sweat and cursing by tracking down landowners to gain property access (never a sure thing). Once those signatures dry, a month of trail cutting and puncheon span building might just tie the two mountains together with fresh treadway.

OH, CANADA

Once the last weed falls to the swizzle and the last branch is cleaved with a lopper, New England could celebrate a whole new long-distance pathway to call its own. Champagne, please.

But why stop there? The Cohos Trail links with more than 70 miles of trails maintained by the Sentiers Frontaliers hiking club in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. That system reaches the summit of Mont Megantic where Canada’s largest astronomical observatory resides.

There is so much more ahead, northward, however. The grand prize over the horizon is North America’s true European capital and only walled and gated metropolis, Quebec City. Who wouldn’t starve down to bones just to plump up again gorging on French cuisine once inside the massive walls that ring the olde town by le Flueve de St. Laurant. With a crème puff in the mouth on the veranda of the world-famous Hotel Frontenac, one could contemplate that he or she had just trekked from the Atlantic to the St. Lawrence, marched through portions of two nations, and, well, enough platitudes.

Time to get on with it. Time for someone or some bodies to step up and let light into the forest, by gawd. New England ought to finally have a trail it can call all its own.

Time to give up the ghost.

Photo credit: Matt 'Gator' Miller