BUILDING THE COHOS

How a Major New Trail in New Hampshire Was Born
By Charles J. Jordan

It was 20 years ago, while working as a reporter for the Coos County Democrat that the idea of the Cohos Trail first came to Kim Nilsen. Kim, who grew up in the state of New York, had moved to northern New Hampshire with his wife in the early 1970s. While traveling around the county gathering stories and taking pictures for the county newspaper, he became enamored with the terrain. "Working for the newspaper, I could go all over the county," Nilsen recalled. "I'd see things that made me curious and on weekends I'd go back and bushwack through the backcountry."

He was struck by the fact that the interior of New Hampshire's northernmost county is filled with all sorts of disconnected trails, remnants of a century and a half of "civilization." "There are an awful lot of logging roads, abandoned rail lines, snowmobile trails, game trails, you name it." For Kim, hiking this backcountry was an experience quite different from that of the White Mountains. For one thing, there were no people. "Hiking in the Whites has become like going into the Adirondack Park in New York State," Nilsen lamented. "You go in there in the summer time and it's wall-to-wall people. When I hike I like to enjoy the quiet."