The Climb — Franklin's Road

Now you're on it — the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway — and you're climbing. Five miles of switchbacks and better than two thousand feet of elevation lie between you and the top, so take these curves easy, use a low gear, and pull off at the overlooks to let your engine breathe and your eyes feast. Because with every turn, the view gets bigger.

Watch the world change as you climb. Down in the notch it was hardwood forest — maples and birches. As you go up, that gives way to dark spruce and fir, the trees getting shorter and more stunted, bent by the wind. And near the very top they'll shrink to a knee-high, wind-flattened tangle, and then quit altogether — because you're climbing up out of the forest entirely, into one of the only true alpine zones in the eastern United States.

This road is a monument, and Boone will tell you the whole story of it — but know as you drive that it was hand-cut into this mountain in the depths of the Great Depression, dreamed up by a New York governor named Franklin Roosevelt to honor the young men who died in the First World War. Every switchback you take, somebody built with a shovel and a strong back, to remember the fallen. Climb on.