White Mountain Guide

A hiker at Zeacliff, overlooking the Pemigewasset Wilderness, White Mountains, N.H.

The Best Hikes in the White Mountains

By Michael Lanza

If you’re a hiker in the Northeast and especially in New England, you know about the White Mountains and either love them already or are eager to explore the tallest peaks north of the southern Appalachians and the most rugged mountains in the East. If you’re a hiker who lives outside the region, don’t be deceived or dissuaded by the fact that the highest in the Whites, Mount Washington, rises to a mere 6,288 feet. You risk missing out on hiking dozens of rocky summits with breathtaking panoramas, alpine ridges that stretch for miles above treeline, and some of the most challenging—and rewarding—trails found anywhere.

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Still Crazy After All These Years: Hiking in the White Mountains

By Michael Lanza

The sun beams down approvingly as Mark and I start hiking from Crawford Notch, the head-turning cleavage in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The temperature sits in a perfect zone somewhere between warm and cool. Not a trace of humidity moistens the air, while an idyllic breeze stirs it enough to keep the ravenous mosquitoes and black flies at bay. Recognizing the rarity of this meteorological gift, the birds sound like they’re singing an enthusiastic ode to the morning.

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A hiker going through Mahoosuc Notch on the Appalachian Trail, Mahoosuc Range, Maine.

A Path Too Far: Hiking Maine’s Mahoosuc Range in a Day

David and I pause to catch our breath in quiet forest of wind-stunted conifers at the junction of the Old Speck Trail and Mahoosuc/Appalachian Trail, near the northern end of Maine’s Mahoosuc Range. Since we started hiking shortly after 6 a.m. from the Old Speck Trailhead on ME 26 in Grafton Notch, we’ve climbed 3.5 miles and nearly 3,000 vertical feet up this relentlessly steep trail in under two hours. Given our seemingly absurd objective today—to complete a 30-mile, north-south traverse of the notoriously rugged Mahoosucs before we sleep tonight—our strong pace on the day’s biggest uphill buoys our hopes.

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A hiker on Bondcliff in the White Mountains, N.H.

Being Stupid With Friends: A 32-Mile Dayhike in the White Mountains

By Michael Lanza

As we near the top of Mount Flume in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the first of nine summits we hope to reach today, a light shower begins falling. It seems a less-than-ideal portent near the front end of one of the longest and hardest days of hiking any of us has ever undertaken—especially for three people somewhere between two and three decades past their hiking prime. But this only strikes us as one more in a long list of reasons to laugh at the absurdity of our self-imposed mission: to see whether we still have the stuff to knock off a dayhike that few mountain walkers would even contemplate. In that context, the arrival of the rain we knew was forecasted comes all in a day’s foolishness.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once opined, “It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”

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A teenage boy dayhiking up Mount Washington in the Presidential Range, White Mountains, N.H.

Big Hearts, Big Day: A 17-Mile Hike With Teens in the Presidential Range

By Michael Lanza

Like two spooked deer, Marco and Liam bound ahead of us on the trail, pause to wait for us to catch up, and then sprint ahead again. Powered by the blindly stratospheric self-confidence of athletic teenage boys, they do this repeatedly as we hike a trail paved with rocks the size of bowling balls and dorm-room refrigerators. We are in the early hours of a marathon dayhike over the four peaks of New Hampshire’s Northern Presidential Range, but they are treating it like a short, interval-training workout.

Something tells me this strategy won’t carry them through our long day. But I say nothing. I’m just curious to see how long a pair of fit young bucks can keep this up.

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