Teresa Gallagher didn’t set out to hike a patchwork of trails from the Connecticut shore to the New Hampshire-Canada border.
But that’s just what happened as one trail led to another and Teresa realized she could link them all the way to Canada.
The result is a roughly 500-mile route through three states, starting at the southern terminus of the New England Trail on Long Island Sound to the northern terminus of the Cohos Trail on the New Hampshire-Canada border, with shorter trails in between.
And as she progressed on her journey, Teresa realized she wasn’t alone in thinking about hiking from her home state of Connecticut to Canada.
“People have been thinking about this for decades,” she says. And like her, some have been doing it.
But it was her creation of an NET to Cohos Trail Facebook group in mid-2021 that started an enthusiastic online discussion of the route.
Kim Nilsen, who spent decades building the Cohos Trail in far northern New Hampshire, says Teresa’s Facebook page has given new life to an idea he had years ago, when he invited trail representatives from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to his New Hampshire house, hoping to link together a Long Island Sound to Canada route. His idea went nowhere.
Now, years later, he’s a major contributor to the discussion on Teresa’s page.
Andreas Frese section hiked most of the route in summer and fall 2021 and posted his trip reports on the NET to Cohos Trail page.
The route follows established trails for most of the northward journey:
New England Trail: 215 miles from Long Island Sound in Guilford, Connecticut, to Royalston, Massachusetts, at the New Hampshire border. Traverses Connecticut and Massachusetts. Read about backpacking the trail here.
New Hampshire Metacomet-Monadnock Trail: 18 miles from the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border to the summit of Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire.
Monadnock Sunapee Greenway: 48 miles from Mount Monadnock to Mount Sunapee, New Hampshire. Read about backpacking the trail here.
Sunapee Ragged Kearsage Greenway: A 75-mile loop trail leading from Mount Sunapee to three patchwork routes to the Cohos Trail in New Hampshire.
Cohos Trail: 170 miles from the trail’s southern terminus in Crawford Notch to the northern terminus in Pittsburg, New Hampshire, on the Canadian border. Read about backpacking the trail here.
It’s the roughly 100-mile gap between the Sunapee Ragged Kearsage Greenway and the Cohos Trail southern terminus that gets dicey.
Three routes have been mapped, but two of them seem the most probable.
One swings west and connects with the Appalachian Trail at Moose Mountain east of Dartmouth, and follows the AT to the Cohos Trail near Mount Eisenhower in the White Mountains, skipping a southern section of the Cohos Trail.
Eli Burakian followed this route on a 9.5-day hike this year from the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border to Canada, averaging 37 miles a day.
“If this route is really to be a highlight of hiking in New Hampshire, I felt it needed to hit the Appalachian Trail and climb some of the most iconic peaks in the Whites,” Eli says. “So, I chose to get on the Sunapee Ragged Kearsarge Greenway for about 18 miles and some additional trail and road connections up to Enfield.”
From Enfield he took the Moose Mountain Ridge Trail to the Moose Mountain shelter on the AT.
“As far as overnight camping spots,” he says, “there are some on the MSGT, a fair number on the AT, and some on the Cohos Trail. I had to cowboy camp at a few spots along the way but always respected private property signs.”
Teresa and Kim don’t like that route because the AT is so busy. “The whole point (of the route) is get them off the AT,” Kim says.
Their choice is a route that swings east, combining roadwalks and trails on public lands that connect to trails in the White Mountain National Forest that lead to the Cohos Trail in Crawford Notch.
Kim began calling it the Ghost Trail years ago, and the name has stuck.
The Facebook discussion about the Sunapee to White Mountains gap is robust. Kim, Teresa, and Andreas have pitched in with suggestions, along with hikers who live in the gap.
Kim, who knows a little something about creating hiking trails, says it will take someone who lives in the Ghost Trail region to lead the way.
“I can really see somebody doing that,” Kim says.
It would take talking with private landowners for permission to put a trail across their property, reclaiming old trails, and identifying existing trails. No one has emerged to take the lead with those efforts.
So for now, says Teresa, “It’s just a choose your own journey.”
Featured photo courtesy of Teresa Gallagher