Peepers appreciate silence

Stunning quietude in the southwesternmost park in NH

In the late 2010s, when I was working in the backcountry as an AMC hut manager, my crew members and I had this weird habit. On the occasions when we would shower, shave, and briefly venture into the Real World for a couple of days, we would case city streets, athletic grounds, or wherever we found ourselves, searching for interesting signs to plunder after dark. I’m talking street signs with peculiar or funny names like “Bilbo Terrace,” and evocative facility signs with service information such as “Clothing Optional!” The destinations for these stolen signs were the walls of our hut, where we mounted them like taxidermized moose heads. When you live in the woods, even seasonally, you have to create your own world, and it’s usually a very strange world.

I only nicked a small handful of signs myself, but my brightest trophy came from a tennis court in Los Angeles. It was a big metal sign that read “PLAYERS APPRECIATE SILENCE.” It caught my eye on a day hike with two friends, as we were coming out of the woods near the tennis court. I couldn’t get the sign out of my head, entranced by the words and their layers of meaning. I had to have it. So that night, I went back to the tennis court with clippers. A few days later, I checked a suitcase at LAX with the sign stuffed under folded clothing. It lived at Madison Spring Hut for at least one summer and fall. I’m not sure where it is today. AMC hut signs have a way of disappearing. But every now and then, I’ll remember those three words, and I’ll chew on them for a while.

In the most literal sense, the meaning of the sign is obvious. Of course tennis players are going to appreciate silence when they’re locked in a sweat-soaked match. But if we define “player” more broadly as someone involved in a game of any kind—say, the manipulation of a person’s emotions, or the pursuit of something beautiful yet elusive—could silence be a showing of strength and confidence? Let’s say you work at a car dealership and two of your coworkers are trying to a sell that shitty Jeep Patriot that’s been sitting in the back lot for years, accumulating moss on the undercarriage. The first salesperson, whom we’ll call Joey, is bragging about how he’s got the latest prospective customer hooked, and how he’s about to go in for the kill. But the second salesperson, whom I’m calling Beth, is cagier; merely alluding to a prospective Jeep Patriot buyer and offering little more than a cool smile when you ask, “How?!?” If I have to place bet on who’s selling the old Jeep, it’s Beth, with her self-assured silence.

woodfin CC BY 2.0

Now let’s apply this idea to one of the most beloved recreational activities in New England—Leaf Peeping! It’s now late September, which means that far northern New England is already approaching peak foliage, and the southern realms are rapidly trending toward auburn. People are scrambling to make their plans for leaf peeping voyages, and many of them will face a conflict. They want the most ethereal views of golden-hued valleys and canopies, ideally all to themselves, without the cacophony of car engines and iPhone camera sounds. But they also want that grease-stained bag of donuts at a cider mill, that mug of Hefeweizen in a beer garden, and that first cup of coffee on the porch of a fully-booked B&B at sunrise. In other words, they think they want silence but they actually crave the affirmative sound and fury of leaf peeping season; the satisfaction of being part of the commercial leaf peeping scene. But what if you did choose silence as your north star, skipping some of the commercial rituals of leaf peeping and allowing the quietude of an overlooked space to nourish you?

This is, in my opinion, the most debonair way to leaf peep. Because quality time with the trees is what leaf peeping is supposed to be about, and New England’s autumnal tree canopy really is the stuff of dreams. So whenever I’m hiking in the New England backcountry and I stumble upon a place that engulfs me with tranquility, I file it away in my internal PEEPERS APPRECIATE SILENCE notebook; as a future venue for leaf appreciation. And this week, I want to tell you about the deafening, seductive calm of Pisgah State Park—the southernmost state park in New Hampshire, and the largest.

The southwest corner of the Granite State is a curious place where the environmental character of craggy and piney NH fades away, blending with the physical attributes of Southern Vermont and Western Massachusetts. The mountains get much smaller, the waterways are gentler, and the woods become profoundly deciduous. The entire area looks softer than the forboding peaks and valleys of the north. Pisgah State Park sits at the nexus of these three states. At 21 square miles, it’s the biggest property in the entire NH State Parks system. And it’s the only state park I’ve visited where I spent three hours on a trail network without encountering another soul—in early summer!

The natural features of Pisgah State Park are numerous and impressive. The park contains four highland ridges, seven ponds, a speckling of wetlands, and plenty of glacial irratics. You can access the park’s 62 miles of trails through gateways in the towns of Chesterfield, Hinsdale, and Winchester. But unlike the state parks found in the White Mountains or the Lakes Region, there’s no obvious landmark that people seek out in Pisgah State Park. While some of the more popular routes on AllTrails often cite Mount Pisgah Kilburn or Baker Pond (both of which I visited on my first ramble here), none of these places feel like scenic outliers, in the way that Mount Katahdin towers over the woods of Baxter State Park. While the high points of Pisgah State Park do offer some tear-jerking views of the surrounding forests and hills, the relatively modest elevation of these high points means that even when you’re on a lookout ledge, you can still feel engulfed by the rustling canopy of the state park.

So you can imagine just how wondrous Pisgah State Park must be in late September and early October, when that canopy takes on a new Pumpkin Spice color. I’ve been thinking about this lately because my inaugural visit to Pisgah State Park had some significant drawbacks. It was black fly and deer fly season, so I hiked in bug netting, often disrupting that great silence by slapping at my exposed arms and grumbling “Goddamn flies” through gritted teeth. When I reached a grassy clearing on top of Davis Hill, where someone had installed a lovely bench, I couldn’t sit down and savor the valley view. I had to keep hiking to outpace the winged pestilence. The same deal applied to the shores of Baker and Kilburn Ponds, and the exposed ledges of Mount Pisgah Kilburn’s northern ridgeline, where I caught a brief glimpse of a purple dusk, a waxing crescent, and the silhouettes of mysterious neighboring peaks such as Mount Caesar and Bullard Mountain. The promise of silence and feeling overwhelmed by ragged beauty had drawn me to Pisgah State Park. But like an investor getting wind of the subprime mortgage time bomb in 2005 and shorting the market, only to spend the next few years paying premiums through the nose to the banks, I was too early.

New England’s foliage season is the season for peepers and hikers who appreciate silence. There are few elemental pests nipping at your heels, whether we’re talking biting insects, blistering winds, or shivery monsoons. The majority of the seasonal backwoods crowd is cloistered in a handful of superlative travel destinaitons in the region, jousting for parking spaces and patio tables. But you’re in the middle of who the fuck knows where, and that’s fine. Actually, it’s more than fine; it’s magnificent. I plan on venturing back to Pisgah State Park sometime in the next few weeks to get more happily lost again. Maybe I’ll nab a cider donut or a Marzen on the drive to the park, if I pass a cider mill or brewery. But if I don’t, I’ll still have the sepia leaves and the calm of an unknown legend of a park. And that puts a player’s smile on my mug.

Pisgah State Park: Davis Hill, Baker and Kilburn Ponds, and Mount Pisgah Kilburn
Hike distance: 5.3 miles loop
Elevation gain: 666 feet (hell yeah)
CLICK HERE for an AllTrails map of the hike route
CLICK HERE for a map of the Pisgah State Park trails network

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Now here’s another hiking idea for the aspirational psychos among us. For National Geographic, Kimberly Bowker recently wrote about the American Perimter Trail, which is exactly what it sounds like: a trail that traces the perimeter of 34 states, at a rough distance of 15,000 miles. Mount Washington is part of the route, and if you’ve hiked to the summit, then you can claim you’ve hiked the American Perimeter Trail. You know, just leave it at that and don’t mention that what you hiked was only 0.01% of the trail. I do this all the time with the John Muir Trail; the one in the Bronx, not the California one.

Also: the bull chronicles of Massachusetts continue! Just a handful of weeks after the rogue bull of Roslindale was caught in the woods by a shopping plaze mall, a squad of eight bulls escaped from a rodeo at a parking lot in North Attleboro. Seven were caught almost immediately but one managed to evade the cops for a couple of days, before finally being found outside the Emerald Square Mall. I’m not sure what’s most intriguing about this story: the fact that the eight bull never crossed municipal lines, or the fact that you can go to a genuine rodeo show at a parking lot in North Attleboro.