By Carrie Thompson for the NY Times

On the first day of 2020, my anxiety roared as I approached the summit of Mount Pierce in northern New Hampshire. At about 4,300 feet elevation, the wind was picking up, the visibility dropping to near zero. I was about to turn around in defeat when I heard faint voices ahead of me: two women, zipping up their coats as I approached.

“Are you heading for the summit?” I asked. “Could I tag along?”

We left the shelter of the tree line, leaning forward slightly as gusts of wind whirled blinding snow around us across the open mountaintop. When we reached the peak, they waited patiently as I held out a battered green hat, took a picture of it and threw a tiny bit of ashes into the snow. It wasn’t until we descended back to the safety of the trees that they asked about the hat.

“It was my son’s. I lost him to suicide in July.”

There was a long silence. Then the older woman told me she lost her sister too. I remember thinking my son had brought us together. We connected over our shared stories, and they understood — something so rare for me those days.

My son, Ben, 23 when he died, was always most at home when he was outside. As I struggle with his unimaginable loss, I’ve found peace in the rush of rivers and streams, the open majesty of the New Hampshire mountaintops where he spent his childhood.

The year after his death, I hiked 48 of the state’s tallest mountains in his memory. Hiking has been a way to hide from the trauma of loss, the judgment and stigma of suicide and the reaction to my family’s openness about it. Every step, trail and summit — whether socked in or wide open — has been a way to heal.

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  It was well after dark on a recent evening when Philip Carcia, a record-breaking hiker, emerged from another 28-mile day in the woods, his legs streaked with mud and crisscrossed with bloody cuts, into a desolate parking lot near New Hampshire’s border with Maine.

Mr. Carcia, 36, has been living out of his red Toyota Yaris on the outer reaches of the White Mountain National Forest all summer, attempting to break the record on an obscure and extreme hiking challenge known as the Redline: a journey through all 650 trails in a guidebook of the White Mountains, for a total of 2,000 miles and half a million feet of vertical gain.

The trip almost didn’t happen. Like so much else canceled amid the coronavirus pandemic, serious hiking has been in doubt. In the early months of the outbreak, venerable organizations like the Appalachian Mountain Club closed their mountaintop huts, and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy emailed hikers attempting the trek from Georgia to Maine in March and asked them to stay home.

Mr. Carcia watched some of his hiking friends get off the trail. He thought about canceling his trip, but then decided to press on. The intentional isolation of hiking might hold some answers for the forced isolation of the virus.

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People are getting outside this summer to take socially distant walks on the beach or go on hikes – anything to get outdoors. But many people who visit scenic areas are noticing trash is piling up.

More than 100 people worked together to try to change that in the White Mountain National Forest.

“I was seeing a lot of posts about trash,” said an organizer of the event. She called on hiking communities on social media to help clean up New Hampshire’s beloved trails.

Hikers found everything from t-shirts to tires, metal scraps and subwoofers. Teams of up to four checked in at at Mount Washington Observatory Weather Discovery Center in Conway and in Lincoln for a day of trekking and cleanup.

“We chose the more loved areas that are easier to get to because you find, like 3 or 4 miles in 4,000 feet up, you don’t find that much trash obviously and the hikers usually pick that up so it’s great. So we went to the waterfalls and things that get a lot of visitors,” she said. “I would say that we probably had between 275 to 315 pounds collected.”

The hundreds of pounds of trash is off to be destroyed. An incinerator service volunteered to do that for free.

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Any visitor to New England looking to escape to the mountains faces one major question: The Whites or the Greens? Both of the Northeast’s dominant ranges offer plenty of opportunities to explore but have markedly different environments.

Steep and rugged, the White Mountains are concentrated in north-central New Hampshire, extending from the Connecticut River east to just across the Maine border. The bulk of the range is contained in 796,000-acre White Mountain National Forest, which includes six federally designated wilderness areas and more than 7,700 acres of alpine habitat. Forty-eight peaks in the Whites exceed 4,000 feet in elevation, capped by 6,288-foot Mount Washington, the highest point in the northeastern U.S.

To the west, across the Connecticut River and the Vermont border, lie the Greens. Gently rolling and thickly forested, the range runs the entire length of Vermont from the Massachusetts border to the boundary of Quebec, Canada. Green Mountain National Forest protects 400,000 acres of the range. Within it is 4,395-foot Mount Mansfield, the highest of the state’s five peaks over 4,000 feet in elevation, rising prominently above the ski area of Smugglers’ Notch.

How to decide between New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Vermont’s Greens? Whether you prefer breathtaking vistas, waterfalls, or multi-day backpacking trips, this guide highlights the best outings in each range to help you pick.

Rising up from the heart of New Hampshire, where the state’s main highway intersects the Appalachian Trail, are the woodlands and ranges of the White Mountain National Forest: a mix of rolling hills blanketed by trees and exposed ridges dominated by the cathedral of Mount Washington. Standing 6,288 feet above sea level, it’s the largest geological feature in the region, and the highest peak in New England by nearly 2,000 feet. Ever since the summit was first reached by the Englishman Darby Field in 1642, the mountain has been a lodestone and proving ground for hikers, climbers, skiers and every other elevation-seeking adventurer.

Compared to the peaks of famous American ranges like the Rockies, the Sierras and the Tetons, Washington’s height is modest. But the mountain is not to be taken lightly. For most of the 20th century, Washington’s barren summit held the record for the highest surface wind speed ever recorded — 231 miles per hour — until a tropical cyclone passed over a weather station off the coast of Western Australia in 1996. And despite its seemingly unimpressive elevation, the mountain is deadly. Washington has claimed more than 150 lives since 1849, making it statistically more perilous than Denali, which, at 20,310 feet, is North America’s tallest peak. But when the weather is fair, Mt. Washington is an idyllic backdrop for the surrounding region.

In the shadow of the mountain, 15 miles to the south, lies the village of Intervale. It’s one of those waypoint towns common in New England’s northern states: less a town, more a group of buildings along a major thoroughfare and a scattering of homes spread across a spiderweb of roads both dirt and paved. That thoroughfare is Route 302, also known in the region as the White Mountain Highway, or, deeper into the mountains, the Crawford Notch Road. And less than a quarter mile from 302 sits Peter Limmer & Sons, a decades-old, family-operated shop that makes what is possibly the most coveted hiking boot in the world.

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The next time you find yourself cursing as you stumble and sweat up a steep, rocky trail in New Hampshire, here’s one target for your wrath: Horses. Or, rather, lack of horses.

“Out West, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail were graded for horses, so the incline never goes above 5 percent. That’s a major reason why they’re smoother and less steep,” said Roger Moor, whose 2009 hike of the Appalachian Trial led him to experience New England hiking.

The situation is different in New England, said Laurie Gullion, coordinator of the outdoor education program at UNH.

“Most trails here were created through hiking, not horse-packing,” Gullion said when asked to explain why New England trails have a reputation for being surprisingly difficult. “The conditions out West have always allowed using horses – the forest canopy is much more open than here.”

This has long been recognized by Appalachian Trail through-hikers, whose pace slows considerably as they cross north into New England.

“The generalization that New England trails are rockier and steeper than elsewhere in the country is true-ish. The Long Trail in Vermont and certain New Hampshire trails definitely have that reputation,” wrote Dennis Lewon, editor-in-chief of Backpacker magazine. “These are also some of the oldest trails in the country, I believe, and so perhaps they are rougher than elsewhere because of the standards when they were built.”

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  If the array of trails in Massachusetts’ North Quabbin region, including those along the Millers and Tully rivers, could be connected to the network of trails up near Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, New England would have a world-class hiking jewel of its own.

The North Quabbin Trail Association, in partnering with municipalities, naturalists and nonprofit organizations, is expected to announce the completion of the 240-mile “Q and M” Trail in the next year.

The Q and M Trail — the name stands for Quabbin and Monadnock — is set to connect Franklin and Worcester county trails with those of southern and central New Hampshire in one giant loop, and feature 30 to 35 overnight stops along the way.

Nearly all of the trailblazing has been completed. North Quabbin trails the association already has stewardship over — like the Tully Trail in Royalston or the newly completed Poplar Mountain Cliff Ridge in Erving — will finally become one, and also stretch up to Mount Monadnock, the second most hiked mountain in the world.

There will be eight interconnected regions: Tully River basin, Millers River basin, Swift River basin, Quabbin basin, Farley Ledge Loop, Mount Grace, Warwick Forest and the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail.

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In 1907, the Appalachian Mountain Club published a little book called “Guide to the Paths and Camps in the White Mountains.” As its rather wordy title made clear, it was a collection of maps and descriptions of trails through the Presidential Range and beyond.

Through printing after printing, the book changed titles — the 30th edition of what is now known simply as the “White Mountain Guide” was just published — but its basic structure remained largely unchanged: It was an adventure book without a plot.

Then some hikers decided that it most certainly did have a plot, a very long and simple one: To finish the book, you must walk every trail in it, all 1,420 miles. Called “redlining” — the idea being that you draw a red line over every completed trail — it has become increasingly popular over the last decade.

“It used to be this obscure thing, but I have people coming into the shop all the time now asking about it,” said Steven Smith, the owner of the Mountain Wanderer Map and Book Store in Lincoln, N.H., and the editor of the latest edition of the guide. He’s also the seventh person to redline, a feat he finished in 2010, using the 28th edition of the guide.

Redlining is indeed a challenge, one that took Smith 30 years to accomplish. You’ll need to climb all 48 of the 4,000′ peaks, probably more than once because there may be several routes to the top and many side trails and spurs. Redliners say you’ll easily walk 3,000 to 4,000 miles trying to complete all the trails.

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Following the leaves as they turn color from north to south in New Hampshire, the Five Easy Hikes series will catch the early reds of turning maples in Bethlehem, take in a full-moon hike near Lake Sunapee, catch the breathtaking views over Lake Winnipesaukee in Alton, explore a less-traveled trail on Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey and end with a pre-Halloween visit to a property some believe to be haunted in Chesterfield.

The Five Easy Hike fall series is sponsored by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and WMUR. They are all free.

Reservations are required by calling 224-9945 or by going to event registration.

The first hike in the series is planned for Sept. 24 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Rocks Estate in Bethlehem. The foliage usually turns color first in the north of the state and the series is designed to follow the peak foliage from north to south.

The first hike will allow for an early glimpse at the foliage, set against the White Mountains. The views from the sprawling fields of this historic estate are magnificent in late September and the days are often warm.

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Dartmouth College and The Trust for Public Land entered into a land deal that promises to protect an old farm estate that offers birding and hiking opportunities just 3 miles from Hanover, New Hampshire’s Main Street.

Immediately after purchasing the 175-acre Hudson Farm from Dartmouth, the trust gave it away to the National Park Service so that it could be added to the Appalachian Trail.

It’s a prime location. All the neighbors use it for hiking and snowshoeing and skiing in the fields in the wintertime.

A mixture of forests, wetlands and open fields, the property includes a trail system that links areas of Hanover to the Appalachian Trail.

The preservation of those grassy fields is particularly good news for bobolinks, songbirds that are in decline in the state and have lost about 2 percent of their numbers for a 10-year period ending in 2013, according to New Hampshire’s Wildlife Management Plan, which cited habitat loss as one of the driving factors.

Dartmouth bought the property in 1963 and worked the land, according to a Dartmouth spokeswoman. “For years, the fields were hayed and the land was used by the College for research and teaching” subjects, including biology and terrestrial ecology.

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