North Conway & Mount Washington Valley

Where to stay

The valley has four bases worth the name, and they answer different questions. North Conway village is the answer for anyone who wants to leave the car parked in the evening; Intervale and Glen for anyone with a car who wants out of the traffic; Jackson for the prettiest village and, since 2026, for a bed at the foot of the valley’s most talked-about mountain; Bartlett for Attitash and little else.

North Conway village

North Conway village is the default and the right answer for most people. It is the only base in the valley where you can park the car for an evening: two supermarkets, a hardware store, restaurants that stay open midweek in March, and Cranmore about a mile uphill — twenty minutes on foot from the Eastern Slope Inn, where the Boston bus stops. Cranmore’s twilight sessions (Wednesdays, Saturdays and holiday weeks, 2–8 pm) are the one evening ski option you can walk to. The cost is noise and traffic — you are staying on the corridor everyone else is driving through.

Intervale and Glen

Intervale and Glen sit just north and west of the strip, five to ten minutes out. They trade walkability for quiet and are the pragmatic choice if you have a car and want to skip the Route 16 crawl in the morning. Glen is also the junction for Route 302 to Attitash and Bretton Woods, which takes it out of the North Conway traffic entirely on those days.

Jackson

Jackson is the valley’s prettiest base by a wide margin — a covered bridge, a compact village, and the Nordic trail network running straight out of town from a trail center on Main Street. It has always been the best base for Black Mountain and Wildcat; what has changed is Black itself.

Black Mountain nearly closed in 2023. Erik Mogensen’s Entabeni Systems, the company behind Indy Pass, ran it for a season, bought it in 2024, and in 2025 sold the land to a community corporation whose shareholders — the first class fully funded — voted in March 2026 to sell it back to him at par. Entabeni now owns the mountain outright, has moved Indy Pass and its own headquarters from Colorado to Jackson, and in July 2026 bought Whitney’s Inn at the foot of the lifts, putting the inn and the mountain under one owner for the first time since 1979. For a visitor the practical consequences are three: Black opens seven days a week from November into May, the 2025-26 season running 15 November to 17 May; it is on Indy Pass with no blackout dates, with its own capped season passes that sell out; and Whitney’s Inn is the one bed in the valley from which you can walk to Black’s lifts. Jackson village itself is two miles below the base — a short drive, not a walk. On Friday evenings the mountain lights an uphill route for ski touring; there is no lift-served night skiing.

The village trade-off is unchanged: far fewer places to eat, no supermarket, and everything else in the valley becomes a drive. Concord Coach will drop you at the covered bridge at 7:47 in the evening and collect you at 8:20 in the morning, which makes a car-free arrival possible and a car-free week impractical.

Bartlett

Bartlett is where Attitash’s lodging clusters. It is convenient to that mountain and to little else; the village has no walkable core, so treat it as a slopeside option rather than a town.

Choosing your part of the valley

• No car, or a car you would rather not use in the evening: North Conway village.
• A car, and the mornings matter more than the evenings: Intervale or Glen.
• Black Mountain or the Nordic trails are the point of the trip: Jackson — Whitney’s Inn if you want to walk to the lift, the village if you want the covered bridge.
• Attitash every day: Bartlett.

Getting there

Concord Coach Lines runs daily from Boston South Station and Logan Airport up the Route 16 corridor, stopping in Conway, North Conway, Jackson (flag stop), Pinkham Notch, Gorham and Berlin. The North Conway stop is the Eastern Slope Inn, in the middle of the village — you step off the bus into town, not at a park-and-ride on the edge of it. On the schedule in force since May 2026 the run takes three and a half to four hours: Boston at 10:00 reaches North Conway at 1:45, Boston at 4:00 reaches it at 7:35. One evening bus continues north to Jackson and Pinkham Notch as a drop-off; the morning bus south collects at Pinkham Notch and Jackson before North Conway.

Driving from Boston is about three hours in good conditions and considerably more on a Friday evening in February. From Portland it is roughly ninety minutes.

Getting around

The valley asks three different questions, and it is honest to answer them separately.

Arriving without a car works. The bus delivers you into North Conway village, or to Jackson’s covered bridge in the evening, and a village bed puts groceries, restaurants and Cranmore on foot.

Skiing without a car means Cranmore — a twenty-minute uphill walk from the village — and, if you are staying at Whitney’s Inn, Black. Nothing else. There is no ski shuttle linking the mountains: we checked the county’s flex-route operator, which reaches no ski area, and every resort’s own site, in September 2026. Individual lodges run guest shuttles in some seasons, but nothing connects Cranmore to Attitash to Black to Wildcat, and nothing runs after the lifts close.

Using the valley as a multi-mountain base — the whole argument for staying here — depends entirely on having a vehicle. If that is the trip you want, bring or rent a car and learn the West Side Road on day one.

Who it suits

• Mixed-ability groups. The single strongest case for the valley. Beginners at King Pine, intermediates at Cranmore or Bretton Woods, and stronger skiers at Wildcat or Attitash — without anyone compromising, and without changing hotels.
• Families with young children. Short drives, several genuinely small hills, and a town with something to do when someone does not want to ski.
• Early- and late-season skiers. Black’s seven-day, November-into-May pattern is unmatched in the state.
• Skiers who dislike resort bubbles. North Conway is a working town first.

It suits experts least as a whole week, though less so than the valley’s own mountains suggest. Wildcat holds attention for a few days in a good year, and Sunday River — about an hour and a quarter east into Maine, the biggest mountain within a day trip of the valley — is a realistic day out that regulars here build a week around. If Sunday River is the reason for the trip, base in Bethel.

Living for a season

Mount Washington Valley supports a real winter workforce — Vail operates both Attitash and Wildcat, Cranmore runs independently under the Fairbank Group, and the hospitality economy extends well past the lifts. Unlike most Northeast ski towns, the valley does not empty out in the shoulder seasons, which means year-round rentals exist and a seasonal job does not have to mean employer housing. Jackson gained a new kind of employer in 2026: Indy Pass and Entabeni Systems moved their headquarters to the village with thirty-plus year-round jobs, and Black Mountain hires well over a hundred seasonal staff for a season that now runs seven months.

The constraint is the same one affecting every desirable New Hampshire town: short-term rental demand has tightened the long-term market considerably. Budget more than you expect, and start looking well before November.

What the town is like

North Conway is two things at once, and understanding the split is most of what you need to know. There is a genuine nineteenth-century village — a train station, a Main Street, a green — and there is a several-mile commercial corridor of outlet stores that generates most of the valley’s traffic and most of its reputation. Visitors who only ever see Route 16 conclude the place is a strip mall. Visitors who walk two blocks off it find a real town.

The surrounding villages carry the character the strip lacks. Jackson and Intervale look the way people imagine New England looks, and Jackson has become the valley’s most watched village: a ski pass company run from an inn at the foot of a mountain that was nearly lost three winters ago. The White Mountain National Forest starts immediately behind all of it, which is why the valley has a summer economy at least as strong as its winter one — and why, unusually for a ski town, the year does not revolve entirely around snow.