By Kim Robert Nilsen
The call came in late. An ancient voice drifting from deep time, from the Cretaceous. Haunting. Maniacal laughing. I had hiked up the Cohos Trail in the light of a full moon evening just to eavesdrop on the caller. Oh, I wish I could sing like a loon.
On the Cohos Trail, the Granite State's newest, longest, and most remote foot trail system, you can lose yourself in a lost world. There are a million acres of neverland forest to roam in up here in Coös County, well above the White Mountains. There are no cyberlinks here, hard by the Canadian line. No billion-served hamburgers, no cell phone conversations, no deadlines, no boss. No one tells you to get moving, except perhaps the big cow moose with calf standing around the turn in trail. The water cooler is an icy stream in July pouring out from an ice gulch. The office comedian is the little pine marten, cute as a puppy, staring at you from eye level on a tree trunk.
Six years ago, there were thousands of miles of foot trails in New Hampshire, and not a dozen of them north of Route 110. Today, you can walk from near the town of Bartlett to the Canadian border on this new trail called the Cohos (coe-ahss). You can tiptoe along the central elevated spine of the state's largest and most remote county for 162 miles. If you carry a big pack and a sleeping bag, you can make the journey in a little under two weeks. If you just want to sample the path for a day, well, let me give you just a little taste.
On the Cohos Trail, you can hike into arctic tundra, the sort of environment you would find in northern Labrador. You could dip a toe in a cobalt blue, 3,000-acre lake. You could relax in a natural granite Jacuzzi, snorkel in a kettlehole as big as a kitchen, jump off many a cliff and fall unimpeded 724 feet (from one of them), eat yourself blue in a 3,418-foot high blueberry barren in August, wash your weary soul clean in eight waterfalls. Like to bag mountains, do you? There are over 30 of them on the trek. Put your feet up on the porch rail of a summit cabin. Get some shuteye in a lean-to that looks out on half the world, and listen to the eastern coyotes sing a western lullaby a thousand feet below.
I hike the Cohos Trail to leave the busy homo sapiens behind. I come to see the wild things. Like the blazing Milky Way night on which I awoke - zipped tight into my sleeping bag at the edge of a meadow - with a 900-pound bull moose standing at my feet, breathing like a steam locomotive. Big fellow. About the size of a Brontosaurus, I'd say.
I've met small creatures on the trail, too: a barred owl that shadowed me for a quarter-mile, coyote that vanish before my eyes as if in a magic act, and red fox. There's more: an American bittern with its impossible pumphouse voice, leeches much bigger than they have a right to be, fish eagles and bald eagles, ermine, and tail-slap-happy beaver. Then there was the Mexican standoff with a porcupine at 3,701 feet on Mt. Sugarloaf, the tracks of bobcat, snowshoe rabbit, a full squadron of snow geese floating on Nathan Pond, flying squirrel, red squirrel, countless small-footed bats.
There is black bear sign everywhere, but I have seen just one in the Coos forests after 30 years of tramping. I can't wait to shake a paw with one, though.
The Cohos Trail passes through seven wild regions, each with its own distinctive personality. In the south, there is the Presidential Range region with the highest peaks of all. Jefferson Dome comes next, an area that was, to a great degree, underwater just 11,000 years ago and which now features critical wildlife and bird habitat. The lofty Pilot and Pliny ranges make up the Kilkenny region near Lancaster and Stark, where high-elevation ridge-running is the hallmark of the trek there.
In the midsection of the adventure, the Cohos Trail soon enters the complex geology and ecological rebound country of the beautiful Nash Stream Forest, devastated by a dam breach flood in 1969. Move on to the dramatic cliff and chain-of-ponds country that makes up the Dixville Notch region. In the far north now, enter a kingdom of water in the Connecticut Lakes region, a vast territory festooned with expansive frigid lakes and unexplored summits.
Finally, step into the Boundary Mountains region, with its boreal forests and wetland environments tied tight to the Canadian border. The Cohos Trail is there for the taking. About 150 miles are complete, with a dozen more to go. With a map or guidebook, you, too, can go get lost. And why not? What's keeping you? Hmmm? Just can't wait for another telemarketing call? Or maybe you like to hike but just can't stand being atop Mt. Washington with 2,000 other people in July. Is that it?
Sometimes, you just want to be in a remarkable place by yourself. Sometimes you just want a back-of-nowhere to explore for your little ol' lonesome. That's what Susan Kenn of Lincoln, NH did, the first person to hike the Cohos Trail from end to end. She hiked the whole thing‹by herself.
Susan had that up and close black bear encounter that I've been missing all my life. It came calling at her tent at 3 a.m. She told it to come back at a more civil hour.
I like to think of far-flung Coös County as "New Hampshire's great unknown." And I like to think of hiking on the Cohos Trail‹through this great, undiscovered county‹as time travel. The trail will take you into New England's deep past, to a time when the quiet of the forests was so quiet, it was deafening. All that ever broke the roar of that silence was the maniacal laugh of the loon, carried loud across the dark cold waters.
The Cohos Trail was built and is maintained by the Cohos Trail Association. Go to its Web site at www.cohostrail.org, or contact TCTA by e-mail at wilshy@worldpath.net. The author of this article first wrote about his idea for a remote, long-distance foot trail at the top of New Hampshire in 1978. Work on the trail itself began in 1999.
