Part of the smorgasbord of odd objects in the woods of northern New Hampshire are some abandoned train cars that me and a friend determinedly slalomed into waist deep snow for a quarter of a mile to get to.
The White Mountains have a pretty legendary railroad history, so it wasn’t a surprise to learn that there was at least a few old trains that had been forsaken around the region.
Actually, the White Mountains and their notches have had a long history of people being enamored with them. And their motivated endeavors have been just as big and lofty as the peaks themselves.
Being a large outdoorsy area meant that logging railroads inexorably built their iron arteries up into seemingly untamable land to whack a lot of it down, and entrepreneurs built multitudinous grand hotels for tourists within the precipices to admire it – including the formidable Mount Washington; the tallest point east of the Mississippi at 6,288 feet, allegedly haunted by an omnipotent dwelling known to Native Americans as simply “the presence”, and the site of the highest wind gust ever recorded – at 231 miles per hour on April 12, 1934. Even today, it’s colloquially known as being home to the world’s worst weather.
Randall E. Spaulding wrote in his The Grand Hotels, The Glory, and the Conflageration: “I doubt very much that anywhere on this continent there existed any such concentration of palatial wooden structures as here in the White Mountains region of New Hampshire”.
But the Taj Mahal of White Mountain infrastructure might possibly be the former Maine Central Railroad’s Mountain Division Line. In 1875, craggy Crawford Notch was decided to be the swiftest east-west passage from Portland, Maine to Chicago, so they railroaded its western walls with an awesome set of tracks that seem to defy sensibilities, and clutch high up along the cliffs of the notch.
Even today as we a drove down Route 302 which travels the notch floor along the cursed Saco River – said to take 3 lives each year – it’s confounding to crane your head upwards out the windshield and imagine the line being constructed up there over a century ago.
The most curious part of the tracks might be the intriguingly named Frankenstein Trestle, which isn’t named after who you think.
The trestle was named after the cliff it bestrides, and the cliff was named after a German immigrant landscape painter named Godfrey Frankenstein – which was not an uncommon surname in Germany.
Though his original last name was Tracht, his father changed it to Frankenstein when they immigrated to America in 1831. Frankenstein wasn’t doing anything nefarious in these hills, though, even if they can look sinister and foreboding when inundated by seasonal mists, or in my case, a nor’easter.
Instead, he wanted to paint them after becoming enchanted with them in the mid-1800s. No inhuman like experiments culminated up there within better lightning striking distance. Well, at least I don’t think so…
The body of Crawford Notch is both a fantastic part of the White Mountain National Forest (with 8 different waterfalls!) and New Hampshire’s smallest town.
Hart’s Location is 11 miles long and 1.5 miles wide – most of that mileage being the granite flanks of Crawford Notch and the nearby mountain slopes. But it’s marked by a typical vertical NH town line sign, and 41 people have managed to squeeze in the spaces in-between.
But man oh man, upstate New Hampshire had some serious snow. The snowdrifts had accumulated above the tops of the road signs, and the howling wind was whipping it onto our windows and making visibility not so visible.
We stopped at the Bartlett General Store to grab some cheesesteaks, because nothing goes better with an adventure than spontaneous food from a general store, and devised a plan.
The plan was; see how far we could make it and hope that we wouldn’t want to give up and turn back. Seriously. We had really underestimated just how much snow there was going to be, and as soon as we left asphalt and began our trek into the woods, we were already awkwardly sinking in waist deep snow, doing our best to scramble out of our holes, and then repeating the process.
About ten minutes into our dutiful beeline and we saw the cold, rusted forms of a sequence of abandoned train cars underneath bending birch trees. We had made it!
There are three coaches, a swayback flat car, and a coal car here. But what’s their story? The vintage cars were originally from the Erie and Lackawanna railroad, were electric, and were mounted with a pantograph that glided below power lines through Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.
The Conway Scenic Railroad – who now utilize those remarkable aforementioned tracks through Crawford Notch – bought them in the 90s with the intent of restoring and utilizing them. Two of them were revived, and I guess this stretch of tracks was the chosen site for the flotsam and jetsam.
The track facing side of these old locomotives has been boarded up and spraypainted a matte black – probably an attempt to keep people out, or at least their interests diluted.
Not to be deterred, we trudged over towards the other side, were whacked in the face with a few tree branches, but were able to climb right on up inside one of the cars, and was immediately thrilled at how photogenic the site was. I had a blast crawling around the cabs and inside the various compartments and observing each car’s different peculiarities.
The range of graffiti inside meant that these weren’t exactly as obscure as I’d originally thought they were (that became more apparent when I got back home and looked them up online) – a lot of the graffiti was understood purely on an attempted personal Rorschach test.
I was reading on an online message board that a few people have encountered a bear while checking these old train cars out, which also happened to be a real local nuisance according to commenters. I’m glad that wasn’t part of my adventure.
I had to make a little room for myself to experience this. This winter has left me feeling disenchanted and lost, and I’ve been really questioning who I am and where I’m going as a creator. This explore was just what I needed to get my train of thought in order again. Ha! Get it?
I don’t think any roadside curiosity I’ve checked out has lived up to its expectations more than “Dismal Pool”. We decided to zigzag through lofty Crawford Notch on the way back to Vermont. “Notch” is northern New England vernacular for mountain pass – and a term I like more than any other geographical labels that describe ways to travel between mountains.
Crawford Notch is huge – violently upthrusted ridges of northern forest and ancient granite hem in route 302 for several miles. The notch is also part of the White Mountain National Forest, so the road was pockmarked with tons of iconic brown and white wayfinding signs enticingly announcing pull-offs for cool and scenic places. None of which we stopped at due to indecision. Eventually, we all decided that we were gonna pull off into the next one, damnit.
That tiny parking lot had a pretty great vista of the notch with a storm beginning to slide over the ridgelines and that sweet telltale smell of oncoming rain. And then we noticed a sneaky brown and white sign that read “Dismal Pool”, with a little “path” that descended down a rocky slope into dark woods.
How could I not be curious about something called Dismal Pool?! Well, if you appreciate your destination not letting you down, then Dismal Pool is the place for you! The vista went from broad and interesting, to, well, dismal.
The wonder that is Dismal Pool is a kinda depressing, dreary, and tepid-looking pond at the bottom of a grim hollow that was filled up with the debris from a huge rock slide off the mountain nearby, chocking a lot of the vegetation. The gloomy light really sealed the deal.I tried doing a little research to see if there was some dismal history here, but I got nothing. But, I’ve always had a fondness for the more macabre and curious place names, and I certainly didn’t expect I’d ever wind up at a place like this, so I took a bummer of a photo to document it, because when at Dismal Pool, do as….. wait. Ok, how about, What happens at Dismal Pool stays at Dismal Pool. Yikes, that sounds even worse!
I had said that the Taj Mahal of White Mountain construction projects was the railroad through Crawford Notch, but that opinion got rickety when I saw the magnificent Mount Washington Hotel for my first time. This iconic establishment is one of the last surviving of the area’s grand hotels, and when we drove by as the night got colder, we just had to stop to grab a few shots of it all lit up under the tall stark forms of Mount Washington and the Presidentials.
Since 2012, I’ve been seeking out venerable examples of Vermont weirdness, whether that be traveling around the state or taking to my internet connection and digging up forsaken places, oddities, esoterica, and unique natural features. And along the way, I’ve been sharing it with you on my website, Obscure Vermont. This is what keeps my spirit inspired.
I never expected Obscure Vermont to get as much appreciation and fanfare as it’s getting, and I’m truly grateful and humbled. Especially in recent years, where I’ve gained the opportunity to interact with and befriend more oddity lovers and outside the box thinkers around Vermont and New England. As Obscure Vermont has grown, I’ve been growing with it, and the developing attention is keeping me earnest and pushing me harder to be more introspective and going further into seeking out the strange.
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