HANOVER — On Tuesday, a group of six hikers meandered up a narrow track cut through a grassy field single file before picking a point near the top with the best view.
The collective of Appalachian Trail Conservancy staff and Joe Danna, a Hanover resident and volunteer trail steward, then set out on their individual jobs for the morning; logging GPS coordinates, taking a panoramic photograph, and completing a data sheet to document the type and quality of the view.
The group used a framework designed by the National Park Service to evaluate what they were seeing; a sloping meadow overlooking Mount Ascutney and dotted with skinny scorched trees remaining from a controlled burn a few years ago.
The range of colors at the site stood out to Amelia Dunkin, a part-time conservancy employee from Florida, including vibrant green grass, yellow wildflowers, a close green ridgeline and the more distant blue peak of Mount Ascutney.
“I like when there’s mountains far out, and the blues get lighter,” Dunkin said. “I think that’s really pretty.”
The nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy, or ATC, is documenting and assessing views along the 2,000-mile trail to create a public inventory to help guide hikers and to track development and changes.
Since starting the project in 2021, the ATC has inventoried more than 500 views, about half of those along the entire trail, Joe Earles, the ATC’s visual resource inventory coordinator, said.
This summer, a group of ATC employees will collect “scenic quality data” on the New Hampshire section of the trail, which Earles said “boils down to, how nice does the view look?”
“I think the AT wouldn’t be itself if it weren’t for (the views),” Earles said. “The views have novelty when you’re in the woods for a long time and you get out and you see something beautiful.”
Despite managing a national scenic trail, the conservancy doesn’t have a “good handle on what all our views are,” Pam Roy, senior visual resource manager for the ATC, said in Hanover Tuesday. The project is an opportunity to track the trail’s visual resources and share the data with the public.
While the Appalachian Trail spans a great distance from start to finish, it is “unique” because the protected area is narrow compared to other National Scenic Trails, Roy added. In many sections, hikers are looking out at land that is not protected and might be subject to development or other changes. Creating a views inventory will help the ATC keep track of these changes, Roy said.
Each view is rated on nine categories including color vividness, visual harmony, focal points and forms and lines.
The group collectively ranked the Hanover field highly for “forms and lines,” noting that the expanse of small dead trees added a lot of visual interest to the field.
“While these trees are of poor condition, I think they look really cool and what’s cool about them is the lines of them,” Earles said.
One category, quality and condition of elements, took a hit from the team because those same trees that made the view more interesting are dead and more likely to change with time.
About half of the sites the crew surveys don’t have a name, Roy said. On Tuesday after consulting with Danna, who said there are no other views of Mount Ascutney along the trail that are quite as good as the perspective from the field, they settled on “Ascutney Overlook.”
Details about the view will be publicly available as the project is completed.
The ATC is taking a broad look at what constitutes a “view” as part of the years-long surveying project. A view might be a panoramic mountaintop vista, a waterfall, or an interesting rock formation, Earles said. If something is a novelty on a certain section of the trail, it’s more likely to be noticed.
“We’re stopping for a field,” Earles explained. “If we were hiking through Kansas, we would not stop for a field. But, since what we’re used to is what surrounds us I can tell you as a through-hiker, walking through a field on a warm day is really, really nice.”
Over the course of the summer, the crew will continue their route through New Hampshire, logging and rating views. The ATC has already inventoried the Vermont portion of the trail, including sites like Ledyard Free Bridge where the trail crosses the Connecticut River into New Hampshire and Luce’s Lookout in Barnard.
In the fall, Earles and the ATC will focus on holding meetings with local volunteers and trail partners to learn more about the New Hampshire views, such as how important they are to people in the area, how popular they might be and if the view contains other protected areas.
