Rambling the ‘Northeast Kingdom’

“MOOSE X-ING,” read the first sign, “Next 15 Miles.” “Brake for moose,” warned another. Added a third, for good measure: “170 moose collisions.” Most assuredly I was in Moose Country, but where were those huge, lumbering traffic hazards?

I was on a long weekend drive through the mountainous northern reaches of Vermont and New Hampshire--the northeast kingdom, as it has been dubbed by tourist interests--where the two neighboring states nudge up against the Canadian border in a forested wilderness of deep lakes and rushing streams. So many moose warnings lined the empty roads, I began to think moose must outnumber residents.

But could I spot one, as I adopted the special “moose-cruising” tactics advised by George Pickering, who staffs the little log information booth on the edge of the rustic New Hampshire village of Pittsburg? Nope. Not ever. Never.

No matter. The pursuit was fun, moose or no, and my drive took me into a beautiful and relatively unspoiled part of New England. It is a rugged land, still possessing a raw, frontier look--the home, as one guidebook author writes, of chain saws and pickup trucks. Obviously, good country for moose.

This is New England above the “tourist line,” a point so far north that the weekend hordes from New York City and Boston rarely venture beyond it. And because they don’t, neither do the builders who have cluttered much of the southern landscape with waterslide parks, pseudo Old West villages, Santa Claus lands and other tourist paraphernalia. In the far north, the rumpled countryside appears to have changed little over the decades. If I saw a stoplight, I don’t remember it.

There are, to be sure, a few tourist attractions up north, but most have a certain authenticity. Near Barton, Vt., we stopped at Sugarmill Farm, where the Auger family has been tapping a hilltop forest of sugar maples and making Vermont maple sugar in the traditional way for three generations. The big barns on the property look as old as the hills.

Not surprisingly, good lodgings are few in the north, so we felt fortunate in finding two very different but appealing places on our drive. One was the Balsams in Dixville Notch, a large and rambling old-fashioned resort hotel that dates to the 1870s. The other was Fox Hall, a whimsical eight-room bed and breakfast inn overlooking Vermont’s fiordlike Willoughby Lake, one of the prettiest lakes in New England.

Our three-day ramble covered about 450 miles as we made our way somewhat randomly in a circle route out of Burlington, Vt., a very attractive college town full of distinctive turn-of-the-century buildings.

Burlington is on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, which suggested a lake theme for our drive. Rarely were we more than a few minutes from a lake, many with swimming beaches, and each evening our room offered a lake view. We toured in early August, so the water wasn’t all that cold. Really.

In both states, we entered the north country through scenic “notches,” the glacially scoured cuts through high mountain ridges that characterize the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

To me, the notches seemed a symbolic dividing line between the popular tourist playground to the south, and an unadorned, hardscrabble world to the north. The northern villages are less picturesque, and pockets of poverty are evident. The north’s appeal, rather, is in the beauty of the unspoiled scenery, and its empty, uncrowded quiet--a place to relax and refresh.

Ah, but first a taste of the other New England, where summer crowds swarm thick and a gift shoppe awaits around every curve of the road. Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve bicycled and skied in central and southern Vermont for many years and stayed in several of its delightfully romantic inns. But many of the roads in summer clog with traffic, and I was in a mood for less bustle. A stop in busy Stowe, Vt., convinced me that I had made the right decision.

About a 40-minute drive east of the Burlington airport, Stowe is a storybook New England village of steepled churches and historic inns set in a splendid mountain valley.

I first visited Stowe as a skier 28 years ago, and quickly fell in love with its quaint charm. In the years since, it has become as popular in summer as winter, and development has mushroomed. Most of it, fortunately, is tasteful, but the traffic has become horrendous. We barely inched along Route 100, Stowe’s main street.

Soon it was time to head north. About eight miles outside Stowe, Route 108, the Mountain Road, winds past the ski slopes of Mt. Mansfield, the state’s highest peak at 4,393 feet. And then it makes a brief but mad scramble up and over Smugglers Notch, a spectacular gap between soaring cliffs and giant boulders.

Our first day’s destination was the Balsams in New Hampshire, which meant we had to cross most of northern Vermont. But distances are surprisingly short, and we had time to meander. We chose whatever road seemed less traveled, pointing ourselves generally northeastward to Newport, Vt., and then a bit south again through Island Pond to the Connecticut River, which is the scenic border between Vermont and New Hampshire.

The posh old Balsams sits at the northwestern end of Dixville Notch, New Hampshire’s northernmost notch, like an ancient castle guarding a strategic passageway. The resort is completely out of character with the surrounding countryside, and yet it has been open for more than 100 years. So it is as much a part of the state’s heritage as the wandering moose.

Traditionally, the local folks gather at the Balsams on election eve every four years to be the first in the nation to cast and tally their ballots for U.S. President.

For my taste, the Balsams is a bit stuffy. Men are required to wear sport jackets in the public rooms after 6 p.m., which is fine in a big city but is not my idea of relaxation in the mountains.

Yet the hotel possesses an old-fashioned charm that soon mollified me. The staff is friendly and I liked the creaky halls and large wraparound front porch, where I sat in a comfortable wooden chair before dinner and watched the sun go down.

From the porch you get a dramatic view of the notch. On the far side of a small, sparkling blue lake rise high, pine-draped mountains cut by a narrow, winding road.

On the other side of the notch, a distance of about two miles, is Dixville Notch State Park, where we spent part of the morning hiking streamside trails and climbing a pretty little waterfall that seemed to tumble in multiple splashes and pools from high above. We never saw another person on the trail.

Afterward, we drove north, intent on serious moose cruising. Our route took us west of the Balsams to the town of Colebrook, where we turned north onto Route 145, a backwoodsy road that dips and curves dizzyingly along a slight ridgeline.

Early on, the road passes Beaver Brook Falls, which cascades like a delicate white veil across the rocky face of a high cliff. At its base is a small park shaded by red maple, white birch and giant ferns.

Pittsburg, where Pickering explained the fine points of moose spotting, is New Hampshire’s northernmost community, an outpost in the midst of an expanse of forests and lakes.

Hidden somewhat by the trees just beyond Pickering’s booth is Lake Francis. The fall foliage begins to change first here, and even in August we saw trees on higher slopes already slightly tinged with autumn color. The 25-mile drive north to the Canadian border and 25 miles back again on U.S. 3--the only road--is outstanding.

The Connecticut River, New England’s longest at 407 miles, rises at the U.S.-Canada border at Fourth Connecticut Lake, which covers about five acres. The river then flows south in succession through Third Lake, Second Lake, First Lake (each larger than its predecessor) and Lake Francis on its way to Long Island Sound. Route 3 touches the four southernmost lakes as it snakes through a wooded corridor formed by Connecticut Lakes State Forest. A short but steep trail to Fourth Lake begins at the U.S. border station.

You could sight a moose anywhere along the lake-view drive, Pickering told me, but we didn’t. Instead, we checked the swimming beach at First Lake and discovered an inviting lodge, the Glen, down a side road. We stopped briefly to chat with Betty Falton, the owner who has run it for 30 years. The lodge, which is rustic-looking but clean and comfortable, is my idea of a woodland retreat, a small place set alone at the lake’s edge.

Falton, of course, has seen lots of moose. “The moose population up here is absurd,” she told me, clucking her tongue when I informed her of my failure. Try in the morning or late afternoon, she suggested, advice that was too late to heed. It was time to head back into Vermont, crossing the Connecticut River for the short drive via Island Pond again to Lake Willoughby, near Barton. A cold rain had begun to fall, and we hurried along to the Fox Hill Inn.

Lake Willoughby is a slender five-mile-long lake running from north to south between two high-forested ridges. At its southern tip rise two humplike mountains, Mt. Pisgah on the east shoreline and Mt. Hor on the west. The lake wiggles between them as if they formed yet another notch.

In the rain, wisps of fog clung to the mountainsides, giving the lake a mystical look and adding to the impression that we had somehow found our way to a remote Norwegian fiord. Fox Hall, at the northern end of the lake, is splendidly situated to take in the grand view.

Looking freshly painted, the two-story inn stands alone in a clearing high above the lake. It, too, has a nice old-fashioned porch, where I settled in with a book until the rain let up. Later, I followed a footpath through a stretch of woods to the lake’s edge. Even under a cloudy sky, the water was clear and inviting.

Fox Hall serves only breakfast, so for dinner we drove to the Willoughvale Inn on the opposite shore. Its dining room is one of the finest north of the tourist line. We ordered cold raspberry soup, baked Vermont trout with pecans, bacon and orange slices, sauteed zucchini with basil, a mixed salad and a chocolate pastry. With wine and tip, the check for two came to about $90, evidence that prices don’t drop as much as might be expected in the north woods.

Fox Hall’s innkeepers obviously are moose-lovers. In the sitting room, a giant moose doll sits in an antique sled, the couch is draped with a quilt embroidered with moose figures, and a wooden “rockingmoose” sits by the fireplace. By the time we left the next morning, I felt I’d been living with a herd of moose.

Just west of Lake Willoughby, we made our stop at Sugarmill Farm to learn about the maple syrup-making process. Once the Augur family collected the clear sap in buckets; now the trees are linked by plastic tubing that channels the sap into huge collection tanks.

From the hilltop tanks, the sap is funneled to the sugaring house, where during the six-week sugaring process, wood fires are kept burning sometimes around the clock. On the average, says Augur, it takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.

A part of his annual output is sold to Ben and Jerry’s, the gourmet ice cream company that is located just south of Stowe on Route 100 in the town of Waterbury.

I had promised myself a look at nature, not tourist attractions, on our drive through the northern kingdom, but who can resist an ice cream factory? The firm offers daily tours, but they were filled for hours ahead when we showed up.

Instead, we bought heaping cones of “Rainforest Crunch,” the firm’s environmentally correct flavor, and watched fat black-and-white cows graze in the adjacent pasture.

If I squint my eyes and pretend real hard, I told myself, I can imagine that they almost look like moose. How could I leave the north country without seeing one ? Everybody else seems to have spotted one.

GUIDEBOOK

Northern New Hampshire and Vermont

Where to stay: Choices are limited, particularly in New Hampshire. We stayed at the Balsams, a historic resort in Dixville Notch, N.H. A standard room for two is $264 a night, including three meals and all activities. The resort offers 27 holes of golf, tennis courts, a heated outdoor swimming pool and hiking trails. For reservations and information, call (800) 255-0600.

More appropriate to the rugged countryside is the Glen, a rustic but comfortable lodge with cabins set alone in the woods on First Connecticut Lake, just north of Pittsburg, N.H. Activities include fishing, boating, bird-watching, hiking and lake swimming.

A lodge room for two with all meals is $112 to $120 per night. A lakeshore cabin for two, with meals, is $136 a night. For reservations and information, call (603) 538-6500.

In Vermont, we stayed at Fox Hall Inn, a comfortable bed and breakfast in a former mansion on Willoughby Lake, just east of Barton. A room for two with private bath is $90 a night.

For more information: Contact New Hampshire Office of Vacation Travel, P.O. Box 856 DA, Concord, N.H. 03301, (603) 271-2666, or Vermont Travel Division, 134 State St., Dept. TIA, Montpelier, Vt. 05602, (802) 828-3256 or (802) 828-3239.