Mountain biking across the wilds of Northern New Hamphire
Coös County Traverse — Extended Photo Collection
Forty miles. Two days. Maine border to the Connecticut River, with Vermont waiting on the other side. On paper the Coös County Traverse sounds like a straightforward point-to-point mountain bike route across the top of New Hampshire. On the ground — on a raw, gray October day, threading fire roads, snowmobile trails and deer paths through the Second College Grant and the deep North Country wilderness beyond — it felt like something else entirely.
I'd been in this country before. Writer Jay Atkinson and I brought Chris Pierce and his son Will up here a couple of years earlier for the Dead Diamond River fly fishing piece, and I knew what the Grant was capable of giving you — the quiet, the scale of the forest, the way the landscape just keeps going. This time we had a bigger crew: Jay, Piercey, Bridget Freudenberger, Mike Zizza and his daughter Anna. Six people, six bikes, one long diagonal line across the wildest county in the state.
What I was after photographically was the same thing I'm always after in a place like this: the moments between the effort. A group pushing through a section of slash-choked trail for two hours and coming out the other side still laughing. Anna and Mike trading stories about other hard days in the field. Piercey sorting almonds out of trail mix at Sam's Lookoff while the Swift Diamond moved through the valley below. The camp at Dixville Notch with the northern mountains spread out behind the tents. These are the images that tell you what the day actually cost and what it gave back.
The photos here go deeper than what ran in the magazine — more of the terrain, more of the people, more of what it looks and feels like to cross New Hampshire's North Country on two wheels in October.
Read Jay Atkinson's full story at New Hampshire Magazine