Mount Willard
The Mount Willard trail is maintained by “The New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development Division of Parks and Recreation”. For our purposes let us dispense with this grandiose title and abbreviate it. On second thought, lets abbreviate the abbreviation and just call it the “NHDP”. Agreed?
The Mount Willard Trail, maintained by the NHDP starts near the head of Crawford Notch. If you park at the small lot right next to the northern end of Saco Lake, you can walk directly across Route 302 to the yellow Crawford Depot building and cross the Railroad Tracks to the Avalon Trail. About 100 yards up the Avalon Trail the Mount Willard Trail bears left and shortly crosses Crawford Brook.
From the brook the trail begins its ascent up Mt Willard. Much of the trail was at one time a carriage road and though erosion caused by numerous hikers has made it rocky in places, the constant grade is relatively pleasant. Being above freezing in December, the footing was a bit treacherous with broken ice but on a nice summer day this must certainly be a pleasant hike.
In places the old carriage road has been extremely eroded and the trail relocated off to one side so that it can erode that area of the mountain also. There is evidence that the NHDP attempted to mitigate the severe erosion problem through the use of large, heavy concrete culverts rather than by the common expedient of using simple wooden waterbars and local rock work as is done by most trail crews throughout the region.
Here and there the concrete culverts have been emplaced along the trail, partly buried, broken, and excellent places to snap an ankle. Additional culverts lay where they were dumped, just off the trail near the summit. Silent and moss covered, with decades old trees growing in amongst them, one wonders how they got up there and why they were abandoned after lugging them all that way. My vote is it is the work of The New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development Division of Parks and Recreation.
About a half mile into the hike the Centennial Pool is seen on the right, a small waterfall in the broken rock of Crawford Brook and an even smaller pool. The brook is very steep and during periods of heavy rain or snowmelt the falls may be more spectacular than I witnessed, covered in ice as they were. Of course I may have been spoiled on the subject of waterfalls by a recent hike to Imp Falls in the Carter-Moriah Range.
For a hike of just over an hour you are rewarded with a spectacular view to be sure. I think of all the hikes I have done, for the amount of effort required to climb the Mount Willard trail offers the best view of all. From a high ledge nearly the entire length of Crawford Notch is laid out before you, from Mt Jackson on the left south to Notchland and beyond.
Directly below the ledge is a sheer drop to the Willey Brook Bridge and the old Willey House site on the railroad tracks 1100 feet below.