Travel through History on Waterville Valley’s 125-mile Trail Network

(Durham – November 14, 2019) New Hampshire hikers love bragging rights, from climbing the state’s 4,000-foot peaks, to taking in the vistas of the 52 with a View list or completing The Grid – climbing all the 4,000-footers during every month in a calendar year. Waterville Valley has a new opportunity for hikers to prove their mettle: the Waterville Valley Redliner 125 Patch, earned by traveling all 125 miles of the nation’s first network of hiking trails.

Willem Lange, host of New Hampshire PBS’s Windows to the Wild, recently climbed The Cascade Path with a group of hikers dedicated to preserving and promoting this historic network of trails. Waterville Valley, Lange notes, is “a place where history was made and still lives.”

“One of the beauties of these trails is that they’re relatively untraveled,” says Steve Smith, owner of The Mountain Wanderer, a Lincoln, NH store specializing in maps. Lange calls Smith an expert on “where to hike, how to fish and just about anything to do with the outdoors.”

Smith is currently focusing his expertise on Waterville Valley, as he writes a guide book on the area. While hiking The Cascade Path, Smith points out that many of the trails used to earn the Redliner Patch are the same paths travelled by 19^th century hikers.

The network of trails was created by local farmer turned innkeeper Nathaniel Greeley in the 1850s. “Around the time they greeted their hotel guests, they cleared their first trail through the pass,” says local historian Preston Conklin. While there were other individual hiking paths by this time “connecting paths into a network created something others hadn’t before the Civil War.”

Conklin gives tours highlighting the many historic points of interest left by early settlers, including cellar holes, family graveyards, even the remains of apple orchards planted in the 1800s. In addition to sites of historic interest, the 125.5 miles of trails in the Waterville Valley network includes 19 peaks, 57 natural features, including rivers and waterfalls, and 48 trails.

“We’re really trying to promote hiking more than just the beaten down paths” says Brooke Wakefield, the Recreation Director for Waterville Valley.  Wakefield encourages hikers of all skill levels to go at their own pace and “try to accomplish all the different trails and spread the love.”

Learn more about Waterville Valley’s historic network of trails, as well as how to earn your own Redliner patch, on the next episode of Windows to the Wild, premiering Wednesday November 20th on NHPBS or go online to see all the episodes at nhpbs.org/windows.

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Carla Gordon Russell
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