North Conway & Mount Washington Valley

Where to stay

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 close enough to walk. The cost is noise and traffic — you are staying on the corridor everyone else is driving through.

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.

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. It is also the best base for Black Mountain and Wildcat. The tradeoff is real: far fewer places to eat, no supermarket, and everything else in the valley becomes a drive.

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.

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. Allow roughly three and a half hours from Boston.

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

This is where the valley is honest about itself. There is no ski shuttle linking the mountains. Individual resorts have run their own lodging shuttles in some seasons, but nothing connects Cranmore to Attitash to Black to Wildcat, and nothing runs after the lifts close.

If you arrive without a car you can genuinely ski Cranmore for a week and live well in the village on foot. What you cannot do is use the valley the way it is meant to be used. The whole argument for basing here is that you can ski a different mountain every day, and that argument depends entirely on having a vehicle.

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.
• Skiers who dislike resort bubbles. North Conway is a working town first.

It suits experts least. There is terrain here that will hold your attention for a few days, particularly at Wildcat in a good year, but nothing that rewards a week.

Living for a season

Mount Washington Valley supports a real winter workforce — Vail operates both Attitash and Wildcat, Cranmore runs independently, 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.

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 railway 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. 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.