Going home through Franconia Notch, my spouse and I watched the great Whites rising like an apparition glimpsed between darker mountainous slopes. This whiteness—befitting the name of the range—was rime ice, crusting bold surfaces, before disappearing a day or two later. Then we searched for the telltale contour of Agiocochook, as Native Abenakis fitly named the greatest for its vast white summit: The Snowy Forehead. 

Of these Presidentials Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Let us forget the other names of American statesmen that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the loftiest Washington. Mountains are Earth’s undecaying monuments.”