Littleton & Franconia

Where to stay

Littleton is the right answer for most people, and the reason this page exists. It is a working town of the kind the White Mountains mostly stopped producing — a compact Main Street above the Ammonoosuc River, the Littleton Food Co-op on Cottage Street, a regional hospital, a hardware store, a two-screen cinema, and restaurants that are open midweek in March because their customers live here. Thayers Inn has been on Main Street since 1850 and there are motels out by the interstate exits. The cost is distance: you are twenty minutes from Cannon and thirty from everything else, every single day.

Franconia is the trade in the other direction. It is a small white-clapboard village at Exit 38 with a clock-towered former academy, an iron furnace by the river, the Frost Place up the hill, and Cannon about ten minutes away. What it does not have is a supermarket, a hospital, or more than a handful of places to eat. Franconia Market and Deli on Main Street is the grocery, the deli and the bus stop all at once. Stay here if the skiing is the point and you intend to cook.

Sugar Hill and Easton are the quiet options — inns and rentals a few minutes off the notch road, beautiful and completely car-dependent. Bethlehem, on US-302 between the two main villages, splits the difference: a real village core with a summer arts scene, ten minutes from Littleton and about twenty from Cannon.

There is no slopeside lodging at Cannon. It is a state park, not a resort, and that is deliberate.

Getting there

Concord Coach Lines runs daily service from Boston South Station and Logan Airport up the I-93 corridor, and it stops in both towns. The Franconia stop is Franconia Market and Deli at 347 Main Street, at Exit 38 — you step off in the village. The Littleton stop is the Irving/Circle K at 336 Cottage Street, at Exit 41 across from the Eastgate Motor Inn, which is about a mile from Main Street and not a pleasant mile with a ski bag in February. Allow roughly four hours from Boston; check the current timetable, because departure times shift seasonally and the schedule is the thing on this page most likely to have changed.

Driving from Boston is about two and a half to three hours up I-93 in good conditions. Manchester-Boston Regional is roughly two hours south; Burlington is about two hours west via I-89 and US-2, though that estimate has not been verified against a routing source. From the Mount Washington Valley the connection is US-302 over Crawford Notch, which is scenic and slow.

Getting around

There is no ski shuttle here at all. Not between the villages, not to Cannon, not to Loon, not at night. Individual inns occasionally run guest transport to Cannon, but nothing is published, scheduled or dependable enough to plan a trip around.

The only fixed-route public transit is Tri-County Transit’s Tri-Town flex service, a weekday loop linking Littleton, Whitefield and Lancaster. It is a genuine public bus and it matters for people who live here, but it runs north and west, away from every mountain in the matrix, and its current timetable has not been verified for this page.

So the practical position is this: you can arrive by bus, and you can live in Littleton on foot for a week — the co-op, Main Street, the riverwalk and the covered footbridge are all walkable, and Franconia’s village core is small enough to cross in five minutes. What you cannot do without a car is ski. That gap is the defining constraint of the destination.

Winter driving here also has a specific hazard worth naming. The Franconia Notch Parkway carries I-93 through the notch as a single lane each way, and in snow it behaves like a mountain road rather than an interstate. Leave early, and know that if it closes you are going the long way around.

Who it suits

• Skiers who want Cannon specifically. It is the mountain in New England most likely to ruin you for groomers — steep, exposed, honest, with a tram to the highest ski-area summit in the state and a reputation for firm snow that is entirely earned.
• People who want a town that is not a ski town. Littleton has a year-round economy, a hospital, a school system and a population that does not evaporate in April. Prices reflect that. So does the atmosphere.
• Long-stay visitors and remote workers who need a supermarket, a pharmacy and a working internet connection more than they need a base village.

It suits families learning to ski least well. Cannon has a separate beginner area at Tuckerbrook, but the main mountain is unforgiving in a way Bretton Woods and Loon are not, and both of those are half an hour away rather than ten minutes. It also suits anyone travelling without a car poorly, whatever the bus timetable implies.

Living for a season

Cannon is a state operation, which changes the employment picture. The staff is modest by resort standards, hiring runs on a state calendar rather than a corporate one, and there is no employer housing complex of the kind Vail or Alterra properties maintain. If you want a season at Cannon, you are finding your own room.

The upside is that Littleton is a real housing market rather than a resort one. It is genuinely more affordable than North Conway, Lincoln or anywhere in the Mad River Valley, and because the town’s economy runs on the hospital, the schools and light manufacturing as much as on tourism, year-round rentals exist. Littleton Regional Healthcare is one of the largest employers in the region, which is worth knowing if you need work that is not seasonal.

The constraint is the same one squeezing every desirable small town in northern New England. Second-home and short-term-rental demand has thinned the long-term stock, prices have risen sharply since 2020, and the town launched a housing initiative in 2025 specifically to address workforce supply. Start looking in September, not December.

What the town is like

Littleton is the strongest argument in this guide. Main Street runs a few blocks along a bluff above the Ammonoosuc, and it has the things a Main Street needs to be more than a photograph: an independent bookshop, a toy and book shop, a candy store with an absurd 112-foot counter that has been there since the 1930s, a 1951 cinema at number 32, the 1890s opera house at the end of Union Street, and Schilling Beer occupying a red mill building right over the river. Behind it a riverwalk and a pedestrian covered bridge loop back to Mill Street. The chain grocery and the big-box retail sit out on Meadow Street where they belong, and downtown is left to do its job.

Franconia is a different and smaller thing — a notch village, tight against the mountains, handsome and quiet, with the Frost Place and the Dow Academy clock tower and not much else. Sugar Hill above it is postcard country. Bethlehem in between has an odd, good arts-and- antiques character left over from its era as a hay-fever resort.

None of it is organised around skiing, which is precisely the point. The North Country here was a manufacturing and railroad economy long before it was a recreation one, and it still half behaves that way. That is why the restaurants stay open in mud season, and why the place does not feel like it is performing for you.