Walmart Parking Lot
Gorham, New Hampshire
April 12, 2022
As you can see from the above map, I spent most of my day in the north of Vermont and New Hampshire. Words that came to mind as I drove were rugged, long winter, still some ice around, poor, uber rural, sparsely populated, few stores, weathered, rough roads. The part of Vermont I was in are far from the idyllic small towns you see in southern Vermont. Flat with some “mountains.“. New Hampshire is more mountainous than Vermont. Lots of rivers and ponds. The sun came out and the sky reminded me of the sky in Colorado and Utah. New Hampshire was as rural but not as worn and poor looking.
Getting closer to 333,333 miles!
Flat Vermont.
Not flat Vermont.
A kinder way of saying DO NOT PASS!
A gray day.
A town located about a mile from the Canadian border.
The border:
From Wikipedia:
Frost heaving (or a frost heave) is an upwards swelling of soil during freezing conditions caused by an increasing presence of ice as it grows towards the surface, upwards from the depth in the soil where freezing temperatures have penetrated into the soil (the freezing front or freezing boundary). Ice growth requires a water supply that delivers water to the freezing front via capillary action in certain soils. The weight of overlying soil restrains vertical growth of the ice and can promote the formation of lens-shaped areas of ice within the soil. Yet the force of one or more growing ice lenses is sufficient to lift a layer of soil, as much as 1 foot or more. The soil through which water passes to feed the formation of ice lenses must be sufficiently porous to allow capillary action, yet not so porous as to break capillary continuity. Such soil is referred to as "frost susceptible". The growth of ice lenses continually consumes the rising water at the freezing front. Differential frost heaving can crack road surfaces—contributing to springtime pothole formation—and damage building foundations. Frost heaves may occur in mechanically refrigerated cold-storage buildings and ice rinks.
Paris, New Hampshire -- it is down a dirt road — Paris Road. There is not much to it. From Wikipedia:
Paris is an unincorporated community located within the towns of Dummer and Stark, New Hampshire. The community is located along New Hampshire Route 110 and north of the Upper Ammonoosuc River, in an area north of West Milan. The majority of the Paris community is located in the western part of the town of Dummer, but it also includes a small portion of Stark around the area of Pike Pond. The Stark portion of Paris is sometimes referred to as "Crystal".
They had a reunion??
Dummer. Yes, it is pronounced like “dumber.”
Dummer is a town in Coös County, New Hampshire. The population was 306 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Berlin, NH–VTmicropolitan statistical area. Dummer is home to the Pontook Reservoir, popular with canoeists, kayakers and birdwatchers. In the western part of Dummer lies the village of Paris.
The town was granted on March 8, 1773, by Governor John Wentworth to a group of wealthy Portsmouth investors, including his father, Mark Hunking Wentworth, Nathaniel Haven and others.[3] He named it after MassachusettsGovernor William Dummer,[4] who successfully defended the eastern English provinces from the French and Indians in Dummer's War.[5] But the town remained unsettled until 1812 when William Leighton arrived from Farmington, New Hampshire, with his family. Dummer was incorporated by the General Court on December 19, 1848.
Mountainous terrain and sterility of the soil prevented cultivation. But the region had forests, and the Upper Ammonoosuc River provided water power for mills. There were two sawmills operating by 1859, with a considerable trade in timber. Log drives on the Androscoggin River supplied the papermills downstream in Berlin. Pontook Dam, which created Pontook Reservoir, was reconstructed in the mid-1980s to generate hydroelectric power.
