The other White Mountains
Exploring New Hampshire's mysterious Pilot Range
Every place has some layer of space where few visitors dare to tread. The Overlook Hotel from The Shining had Room 237, where terrible things happened before Jack Nicholson and his family were hired as the new innkeepers. In Middle Earth, there were the Paths of the Dead, where Aragon released a bunch of ornery ghosts on the condition that they would lend a hand in a crucial battle. And in New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, we have the strange, seldom-visited Pilot Range.
If you’ve ever looked at a map of the White Mountains, you might have have noticed how most of the region is a big clump sprawling across the state. But directly north of that bumpy expanse, there’s a lonely parcel of land that’s also designated as part of the White Mountain National Forest. That outlier is a remote ridge consisting of steep and birch tree-speckled peaks where the trails see so little use compared to those near Franconia Notch or Mount Washington that you’ll often find yourself climbing over fallen trees or pushing through green brush so tall and dense that it practically swallows you. This is the Pilot Range—though it’s also called the Kilkenny Ridge. And when it comes to north country solitude, you won’t do much better than this place.
It’s not just the promise of solitude that brings some visitors to the Pilot Range. It’s also the northernmost “4,000 footer” peaks in New Hampshire—Mount Waumbek and Mount Cabot. Both of them are high points of the Pilot Range. Getting to Waumbek involves a fairly efficient 6.9-mile hike (out-and-back) from the village of Jefferson. Cabot, on the other hand, is a heftier undertaking. There used to be a relatively short path to the summit, but a landlowner effectively killed that trail by cutting off public access. Now a day trip to the summit of Cabot and back will involve at least 9 miles of wheezing and whacking your way through seriously grown-in forests. Perhaps the cruelest discovery for some hikers is the fact that Mount Cabot’s summit is wooded.