Just past Thoreau Falls, the Zealand Valley Railroad splits, with one branch heading east toward Ethan Pond, the other heading south toward your next destination: Shoal Pond via the Shoal Pond Trail. An excellent location to break for lunch or a snack, Thoreau Falls offers a great view of Bond, Guyot, and Zealand, and its cool water and numerous wading pools likely made this spot one of the nicer logging camps of the era.
#Hidden ghost town in woods series
Along the way, be sure to make a short detour to Thoreau Falls, a series of small cascades, pools, and ledges. | Credit: Tim Peck Thoreau Fallsįrom Zealand Notch, the Ethan Pond Trail continues to follow the old Zealand Valley Railroad for about 1.5 more miles. While the guidebook’s authors appropriately attributed this recovery to “remarkable and outstanding testimony to the infinite healing powers of Nature,” the contrast is a stark reminder of one ghost town’s haunting legacy. According to the 21st Edition of the A.M.C White Mountain Trail Guide, this area was “reduced to a jumble of seared rock and sterile soil by a series of hot forest fires prior to 1900,” with the recovery only “reasonably complete” by the guide book’s 1976 printing. The scenery in Zealand Valley is much better today than it was at the tail end of its heyday. With the talus-filled slopes of Whitewall Mountain climbing to the east, Zealcliff’s rocky cliffs rising steeply to the west, and a wonderful White Mountain vista spilling out in between, Zealand Notch is a perfect spot to take a break, snap some pics, and fuel up. About a mile from the junction, hikers enter Zealand Notch. Below is Whitewall Brook keep an eye out for its several brookside camping options in the initial half mile. Backpackers can hike (or drive) the three miles to the trailhead, then continue along the mostly flat Zealand Trail, largely following the same former railroad bed for 2.5 miles to the Twinway-Ethan Pond Trail junction.Īt this junction, the Ghost Town Traverse joins the Ethan Pond Trail, which continues to follow the former bed of the Zealand Valley Railroad. Much of the initial portion of that railroad, which brought logs from the Zealand Valley to the sawmill in Zealand, is now Zealand Road. The first eight-ish miles of the Ghost Town Traverse use the bed of what was once the 11-mile-long Zealand Valley Railroad.
Little remains of Zealand today the vestige of the kilns still stand, but are off route and hard to find. The community included a sawmill, boarding house, store, homes for employees, charcoal kilns, and two railroad stations. Like other communities in this area, Zealand was a company town, where everything was built and owned by White Mountain lumber baron J.E. Now a ghost town, Zealand was short-lived, sprouting up in the mid-1870s and abandoned less than two decades later due to deforestation and forest fires. The Ghost Town Traverse starts appropriately enough-at the historical marker for Zealand at the junction of Route 302 and Zealand Road. Credit: Tim Peck Getting Started: Zealand and Zealand Valley Best done as an overnight when the foliage is at its peak, the temperatures are crisp, and the bugs are gone, the Ghost Town Traverse should be on every White Mountain hiker’s to-do list. Along the way, hikers pass the remnants of now-overgrown logging camps as well as modern scenic vistas like Zealand Notch, Thoreau Falls, and the Mount Carrigain summit overlook, all while spending a significant chunk of time deep in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. For much of the Traverse’s 20+ miles, hikers travel along old logging railroad beds that have since been transformed into fire roads and hiking trails. Running in an almost north-to-south line from the abandoned logging town of Zealand to the remnants of the once-thriving town of Livermore, the Ghost Town Traverse immerses hikers in the White Mountains’ logging history. But as we found on our recent Ghost Town Traverse, if you look closely, it’s still pretty easy to see the extensive legacy of the area’s extractive history. With the creation of the White Mountain National Forest, nature has slowly reclaimed the land and hidden the relics of the past.
Unsustainable logging practices, however, put a damper on the industry in the region and led to the abandonment of these once-thriving logging towns and camps. A little more than a century ago, the White Mountains were home to a booming logging industry and all its accompaniments: railroads, camps, and towns.
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