double d mountain runner: New Hampshire Town Bagging

Kevin Tilton and I are both working on running in every town in New Hampshire (along with about 100 other lists each of us is working on), so this weekend we met up and did some “town bagging”.

I came up with an aggressive agenda that included four runs in 10 towns. It was aggressive because I’ve only been running for a month and it would be a 17 mile day.

We met up at 6:30am in North Conway and headed north to our first destination. We reached the Imp trail at 7:30am in just about ideal conditions. Temperatures were in the mid-40’s and the sky was clear. Our goal was the “Imp Face” a 2.2 climb gaining 1,900’ and giving us a run in both Martin’s Location and Bean’s Purchase.

We headed into the woods as it was just getting light enough to run. The trail was pretty nice although a bit difficult to watch were you were stepping due to all of the downed leaves. The climb went by quicker than I expected and we reached the top where there was a great view of some of the Presidential range right in front of us. The view of the Auto Road was especially interesting to me, I’m used to seeing it up close (way up close).

We took a couple of pictures then loped back down to the car.

Imp Face - up 37:07, on top 2:17, down 35:07 = Total 1:14:32

Then it was off to Jefferson Notch road where we got in an easy 4 mile run (33:15) that got us the towns of Randolph, Jefferson, and Low&Burbanks. Jefferson Notch road was commissioned in 1903 as the highest maintained New Hampshire state throughway. We only had to climb/descend 300’ of it (at this point).

30 minutes later we were over the top of the road and parked at the aptly named Boundary Line trail. This short trail (.9) is one that KT hadn’t run on before so we modified our run and did a neat 4 mile loop. The first .9 was on the Boundary trail which was very interesting and very green. It really looked more like a trail in the Pacific Northwest.

From the trail we dropped down Base station road as we ran through Chandlers Purchase and Beans Grant. Most of the 600’ of climb we had during this run was climbing back to the car on Jefferson Notch road. The four miles took us 43:03.

Our fourth and final run of the day (11:30 am) was the Davis Path up/down Mt Crawford. This would get us the towns of Harts Location and Hadley’s Purchase. I was already pretty tired from the previous 12+ miles and 2,600’ of climb and descent. The trail was in great shape and we ran into a few groups of hikers who offered encouragement.