Willem's Yankee Notebook - August 20, 2007 - Cohos Trail
THE AMPHIBIOUS LIFE: FROM THE WATER INTO THE WOODS
DIXVILLE NOTCH, NH Kim Nilsen is a big man, powerful-looking and obviously fit. He matches my image of what Ethan Allen must have been like: in love with his wilderness, familiar with its every corner and with a wee bit of mountebank thrown in. Standing in a highway pullout in spectacular Dixville Notch, he pointed across the road and up almost straight up, it seemed to a rocky crag high above us. "We're going up there first," he said. "About a ten-minute hike."

That was my introduction to what Kim's friends call "a Nilsen mile." Not only was it a lot more than a ten minutes' climb; the trail was paved with quartz-veined metamorphic rock, squeezed and turned up on end about 400 million years ago, tortured by glaciers about 100,000 years ago, and currently being shattered into unstable bits by ice wedging. Concrete Jersey barriers beside the narrow road through the Notch catch most of the rubble that occasionally cascades down the slope. Hiking poles clicking on the rocks, I heaved my body up the tortuous trail behind Kim, one of his friends, and a toiling television crew with tripod, camera, and earphones. Another friend, a woman, trailed behind me, claiming to be terrified of the exposure on the rotten open slabs, but I suspect she was also there to catch me if I fell over backwards.

The view from the top was worth every drop of sweat and every moment of incipient terror. Far below us, Route 26 snaked through the Notch, and where it leveled out a bit, the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel rose in Alpine splendor beside its golf course and its private Lake Gloriette, formed by an impoundment of the infant Mohawk River. A couple in a rowboat battled a breeze as they tried to return to their dock. Farther away, the Connecticut Valley plowed a deep furrow in the forest, and beyond that, the northern Green Mountains formed a north-south barrier. One of those mountains, I reflected sadly, had been renamed Bunnell Mountain, in honor of Judge Vickie Bunnell of Colebrook, who was gunned down, with three others, by a disgruntled loner named Carl Drega just ten years ago this week.

"Okay," announced Kim. "Now to our next spot, Panorama Leanto. Easy to get to, if you know where it is. We can drive to within 600 feet of it." Translating feet to yards in my head, I slowly followed the others back to the vehicles.

Returning last week from a canoe trip in northern Canada, I had to change gears, as it were; I found myself right in the middle of a harmonic convergence of long-distance pedestrians. August is the month that the Appalachian Trail thru-hikers pass through this part of New England, and meeting them and learning their trail names is always a pleasant experience. Vermont's 270-mile Long Trail was celebrated this week at a festival on the Vermont State Fairgrounds in Rutland. A section of the lawn beside the grandstand bloomed with bright-colored domed mountain tents, bluegrass music floated everywhere, and soft-spoken men and women in shorts and boots sat and swapped stories of life on the trail. Then there was this trip up north to hike portions of the new Cohos Trail with its founder and a couple of its volunteer maintainers. Monday, I'll be hiking in the White Mountains with the same long-suffering television crew. And, finally, next week I'll get a chance to share some sections of the Appalachian Trail with a group of Elderhostelers in the Connecticut Valley. I'm glad I learned amphibious land-or-sea outdoor skills at an early age.

The Cohos Trail is the new one on me. I've heard of it for years, and receive its occasional e-mails reporting on its newly improved sections, news of developments along its corridor, and its current fund-raising success. But not till now did I get a chance to meet Kim Nilsen, who dreamed it up, planned and flagged its route, dickered with multiple landowners for permission to cross their territory, and flogged the bushes for funds and volunteers to help in the work.

Today the Cohos Trail stretches northward 162 miles from Crawford Notch State Park to the Canadian border crossing at Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Along the way, 90 per cent of it passes through country as empty as any east of the Mississippi. Nilsen's goals, anomalous in one so obviously extroverted, are solitude and silence. Those, he says, comprise "the Spirit of Cohos."

The trail's southern end will soon be altered, as the Forest Service, through whose domain it passes, plans to close the Davis Path because of overuse. The northern end, Nilsen hopes, will connect with the Sentieres Frontieres, a Canadian trail that ends at Mont Megantic in Notre-Dame-des-Bois in Quebec, 50 miles farther north. In between, the Cohos Trail markers (an outline of the twin Percy Peaks near Groveton, emblazoned with a yellow "CT") lead from the high peaks of the Whites north through the beautiful Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge; then through virtually unbroken forests to Nash Stream Forest; up and over Percy Peaks, with detours to hidden falls where a sweaty hiker can wash clothes, body, and soul in icy water and utter seclusion.

Beyond Nash Stream Forest and its artifacts of old-time logging, the trail disappears again into roadless forest. It passes along the upper Connecticut River and at last reaches Fourth Connecticut Lake, a tiny, beaver-dammed tarn at the very source of the 400-mile-long river. The trickling spring that feeds it will reach the Atlantic Ocean at faraway Old Saybrook. Beyond Fourth Lake, the trail follows the 20-meter-wide swath, like a power line right-of-way, that marks the border between the United States and Canada, down to the crossing station at the highway. A rustic little outpost, but up to date without appearing to be. Approaching it and still about 100 yards away, I wondered aloud whether it had a washroom. When we stuck our heads inside to sign out with the agent, he said, "If you're looking for a bathroom, it's just around the corner."