Backcountry Camping in New Hampshire: Permits, Routes, Bear Notes

The Pemigewasset Wilderness gets called some of the wildest country in the Northeast, and depending on how you count, it is also second- or third-growth forest standing on roughly a hundred miles of abandoned logging-rail grade. J.E. Henry's East Branch & Lincoln Railroad ran trains out of there until 1948, hauling spruce and hemlock to the mill at Lincoln; the trestles you walk across on the Wilderness Trail are what's left of that, minus the suspension bridge that finally came down in 2009. I think about this every time someone calls the Pemi pristine — it isn't, and that's part of what makes it worth your weekend.

New Hampshire's backcountry is, on the whole, easier to camp in than people from out of state expect. There is no single statewide permit system for dispersed camping in the White Mountain National Forest, which is where most of your good options live. There are, however, a lot of small rules layered on top of each other (Forest Protection Areas, wilderness-specific group-size limits, AMC-managed shelters with caretakers and fees), and the ones that catch people out are almost always the small ones.

The permit question, which is mostly not a permit question

For backcountry camping in the WMNF, you generally do not need a permit. You need to follow the rules — dispersed camping is allowed at least 200 feet from trails, streams, and other water sources, and outside any posted Forest Protection Area. FPAs are the thing to actually pay attention to: they're zones around heavily used trailheads, shelters, summits, and certain trail corridors where camping (and sometimes campfires) is prohibited to let the soil and vegetation recover from a century of being loved too hard. The Forest Service publishes the current FPA list on their site; check the WMNF page at fs.usda.gov/recmain before you go, because the boundaries shift.

The Pemigewasset and Great Gulf wildernesses add their own layer — group size capped at ten, no camping within a quarter mile of certain shelters, no cairns or constructed fire rings. The Dry River and Sandwich Range wildernesses are similar. None of this requires paperwork in advance; it requires reading the kiosk at the the trailhead, which is the part most weekenders skip.

State parks are a different animal. Franconia Notch and Crawford Notch State Park don't really do backcountry camping in the dispersed sense — you're in developed campgrounds or you're hiking through to federal land. The NH State Parks site is the place to confirm specifics; reservations for the front-country sites move fast in summer.

Routes worth the drive

The Pemi Loop is the headline route — roughly 31 miles around the Bonds, the Twins, Garfield, Lafayette, Lincoln, and Liberty, with most people doing it in three or four nights using a mix of tent platforms and dispersed sites. It is famous for a reason, and it is also crowded between mid-July and early October. I would rather walk it in late September, when the spruce-fir at elevation is already cold at night and most of the through-traffic has thinned out.

If you want the Pemi's geology without the Pemi's foot traffic, the Sandwich Range Wilderness south of the Kancamagus is the underused answer. Mount Whiteface and Passaconaway, the Wonalancet area, the network of trails maintained by the Wonalancet Out Door Club — it's quieter, lower elevation, and the views off the open ledges on Whiteface are honest. The land here was Abenaki and Pennacook before it was sheep pasture, before it was logged, before the CCC came through in the 1930s building the trail tread you're still walking on.

Other routes I'd point a competent backpacker at:

• Great Gulf Wilderness (trailhead off Route 16, north of Pinkham Notch) — a deep glacial cirque on the east side of Mt. Washington; the Great Gulf Trail follows the West Branch of the Peabody. Permits not required; FPA rules apply near the headwall.
• Caribou–Speckled Mountain Wilderness (near Evans Notch, Route 113) — straddles the Maine line, low traffic, decent water, hardwood forest that turns first in fall.
• Wild River Wilderness (also Evans Notch area) — designated 2006, so newer; long valley walks and a surprisingly intact shelter at Spruce Brook.
• Dry River Wilderness (south side of the Presidentials, from Route 302) — washed out badly in Irene in 2011 and the trails have never been fully repaired; rough, lightly traveled, not beginner terrain.
• Mahoosuc Range — Appalachian Trail corridor from Gorham north into Maine; Mahoosuc Notch is the famously slow mile and lives up to its reputation.
• Kilkenny region north of Route 2 — the "other" White Mountains, including Mt. Cabot and the Unknown Pond tent site; you will see almost no one midweek.

For trip planning, the AMC's White Mountain Guide remains the only book I trust on mileage and water; AllTrails is useful for trailhead logistics and recent trip reports but should not be your only source for backcountry routefinding.

Shelters, tent platforms, and the AMC system

The Appalachian Mountain Club operates a string of backcountry shelters and tentsites along the major ridges — Liberty Spring, Garfield Ridge, Guyot, Ethan Pond, Nauman, Imp, Kinsman Pond, and a handful of others. These typically have a caretaker in season, a small overnight fee (cash, usually), tent platforms, a privy, and in many cases a bear box. They are not reservable; it's first-come, and on a Saturday in August at Liberty Spring you will be sleeping on a platform with strangers six inches away. This is fine if you expect it.

The shelters are not the same as the AMC's high huts (Galehead, Greenleaf, Lakes of the Clouds, etc.), which are full-service, expensive, and reservable. I have opinions about the huts but they aren't backcountry camping; they're a different conversation.

If you want to skip the AMC system entirely, the Pemi has enough room to disperse-camp legally if you're paying attention to the 200-foot rule and the FPA boundaries. Bring a real map. The geological terrain — glacial cirques, scoured ledge, talus — does not forgive sloppy navigation in fog, and fog is the default condition above 4,000 feet here for a non-trivial fraction of the year.

Bear notes (which are food storage notes)

New Hampshire has black bears. Not grizzlies, not even particularly aggressive bears by national standards, but they are smart, well-fed, and entirely capable of opening a car door if you've left a granola bar on the seat. The White Mountains have an ongoing problem with habituated bears at the more popular tent sites — Garfield Ridge has had repeated issues, Guyot occasionally, the Wild River drainage now and then.

The WMNF does not require a bear canister. I carry one anyway, or an Ursack with an OPSak liner, because the alternative is hanging a bear bag from a hardwood limb you may or may not find at elevation in spruce-fir forest where there are no usable limbs and the trees taper too fast for a counterweight throw to work. At AMC sites with a bear box, use the box. At dispersed sites, do the work — cook and eat at least 100 yards from where you sleep, store food and trash and toothpaste together, and do not bring anything scented into the tent.

Food storage is also what protects the next person camping at that site from a bear that's learned the local menu, which is the part I wish more weekenders thought about. A bear that gets one bag of gorp from one tired hiker is not a one-time problem.

When to go (and why I keep saying September)

June is blackfly month and the trails are wet from snowmelt at elevation; July and August are warm and crowded and prone to afternoon thunderstorms that you do not want to be above treeline for. September into mid-October is the window I plan around — cold nights, dry days more often than not, foliage building from north to south, and a meaningful drop in trailhead car counts after Labor Day. The trade-off is that water sources start drying down by late September in a dry year, and the higher tent sites can freeze overnight by the end of the month. A proper three-season sleeping bag matters more here than in the southern Appalachians; a 20-degree rating is not overkill in October above 3,500 feet.

Shoulder season also rewards a stove choice you've actually tested in the cold — canister stoves struggle below freezing, which is a thing worth knowing before you find out on a ridge. I'll leave the rest of the gear conversation alone; you've heard it. (See also tents and stoves if you want our picks, though I'd rather you borrow gear than buy bad gear.)

The small stuff that catches people

A few things that consistently bite first-timers in the WMNF backcountry, mostly because they're regional quirks rather than national norms:

Parking passes. The WMNF requires a recreation pass at most trailheads (the daily or annual sticker, sold at ranger stations and many outfitters). The America the Beautiful pass works. The NH state parks pass does not. This is the single most common citation people get.

Above-treeline rules. The Presidentials, Franconia Ridge, the Bonds — anywhere alpine — is closed to camping. The vegetation up there is essentially tundra and it does not recover on a human timescale, which is the kind of sentence that sounds dramatic until you look at the the recovery photos from the 1960s Lakes of the Clouds restoration plots.

Group size. Wilderness areas cap at ten. This includes dogs. It also includes the friend who's "just coming for the day."

Weather. Mount Washington is famous for the wrong reasons and people stop taking the forecast seriously after seeing it cited too often; the forecast is real and the summit observatory's higher-summits forecast is the one to read before you commit to a ridge day. Recreation.gov handles front-country reservations if you're stitching together a trip that starts or ends at a developed campground.

Honest take

If I had a long weekend and decent legs, I'd skip the Pemi Loop in peak season and walk a Sandwich Range traverse instead, or drop into the Wild River from Evans Notch and spend three nights moving slowly. If I had a week, I'd do the Pemi in late September with a tarp and an Ursack and accept that I'd see other people at Guyot. The permits aren't the problem; the FPAs and the food storage and the weather are the problem, and they're all solvable by reading the kiosk and packing a real map. For more on routes and trailheads, our trails index and hiking notes are a starting point; for park-by-park context, /parks. Go in the shoulder. The bugs are gone, the leaves are turning, and the the trail is quiet enough to hear the wind move through the spruce.