Leaf-peeping in New Hampshire

I live in the middle of New Hampshire amid the heart of New England and October is our traditional fall foliage season. This year the foliage was in full, bursting colour for a little longer than usual, lasting almost the entire month. This, apparently, was the result of a cloudy, wet summer and a warm, sunny start to autumn. In fact, we were blessed in New Hampshire with a true ‘Indian Summer’ for much of October and the fine weather and fabulous foliage encouraged me to take a few ‘leaf-peeping’ drives this past month simply to enjoy the scenery.

Much of New England is criss-crossed by well-maintained winding country roads. You’re never far from a scenic drive of some type even on New Hampshire’s two interstate highways. A two-hour drive north from Boston on Interstate 93 will take a tourist to Franconia Notch which cuts spectacularly through the White Mountains. If you choose, rather than going to the White Mountains you can slice northwest to Vermont’s Green Mountains on I-89 which exits I-93 in New Hampshire an hour north of Boston between Manchester and Concord.

At this time of year either route will yield plenty of blazing fall colours. If you make it to Franconia Notch you should go south a few miles to Lincoln where you’ll find route 112, better known as the Kancamagus Highway. This is a winding two-lane road that takes you through the White Mountain National Forest with great views of the Presidential mountain range to the northeast and the Sandwich range to the south.

Many years ago, when my old friend David Loring was a budding young teen-aged racing driver, he bet a friend that he could drive his mother’s VW bug convertible from the Kancamagus’s high point at Sabbaday Falls west through the Kancamagus Pass, which includes a few fierce hairpins, to the entrance to Loon Mountain some twelve miles away without once touching the brakes. With a passenger beside him to confirm the trick, he pulled it off, a feat I wouldn’t recommend trying to recreate.

If you drive east on the Kancamagus you’ll end up in North Conway, a thriving commercial centre where there’s plenty of shopping, good hotels and some fine dining, too. Drive south from Conway and the White Mountains and you’ll soon come upon New Hampshire’s Lakes Region which surrounds Lake Winnipesaukee, the state’s largest lake. Moultonborough, Center Harbor and Meredith are attractive little towns clustered along route 25 on the north shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Wolfeboro, billed as ‘America’s Oldest Summer Resort’, and Alton Bay are on the lake’s eastern and southern shores. The biggest town on Lake Winnipesauke is Laconia located on the western side of the lake and if you drive south from Laconia on route 106 you’ll quickly arrive in Loudon.

On the left or eastern side of route 106 in Loudon you’ll come upon the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The one-mile superspeedway seats 100,000 and annually runs two NASCAR Sprint Cup races and a wide range of other events. Back in 1993, Nigel Mansell scored one of his most satisfying and spectacular Indy car victories at the track, beating a young Paul Tracy after a superb wheel-to-wheel duel.

So that’s my suggestion of a fall foliage tour through New Hampshire with a dash of motor racing thrown in. Gary Gold’s accompanying photographs tell the story.