Ghost Rails in the Woods

As we drive this stretch, look at the shape of the land through the trees on your left — and specifically, look for anything suspiciously FLAT. A river bank that runs too level and too straight for too long. A low earthen shelf cut into a hillside. Those aren't natural, and once you can see them you'll see them everywhere in these mountains.

They're railroad grades. In the logging era there were something like a dozen separate logging railroads threaded through the White Mountains — narrow, rough, temporary lines built to haul spruce logs down to the mills. The crews laid track up every valley they could reach, ran it for a few seasons until the timber was gone, then tore up the rails and moved on, leaving the grade behind. The forest closed over them.

But a railroad grade is a stubborn thing. A hundred years on, the trees growing on it are still younger and smaller than the trees beside it, and the ground is still level. Which is why so many of the hiking trails in this forest are so improbably flat and easy for their first mile or two — you're walking a hundred-year-old railroad bed. Hikers still turn up spikes and rusted rail, and here and there a rotting trestle timber in a streambed.

So the wilderness you're driving through is stitched with the ruins of heavy industry, hidden just under the moss. Boone's already told you about the man who ran the biggest of those operations. Keep an eye out for that unnatural flatness — it's the ghost of the railroad.