New Hampshire Magazine June 2021

Page 22

603 NAVIGATOR / OUR TOWN

photo courtesy paul keleher, visitnh.gov

Ossipee Lake with a view of the Ossipee Mountains

From the Guts of a Volcano

Over the rough terrain of the Ossipee Mountains rose little crossroads settlements BY BARBARA RADCLIFFE ROGERS

O

n the New Hampshire road map, routes 16, 25 and 171 draw a lopsided circle around a huge empty space. It’s not quite empty, as a few roads — some of them unpaved — penetrate the undeveloped mass of the Ossipee Mountains. But none goes through, leaving the largest and least disturbed wildlife habitat in the region. With the slightest excuse, I will always begin with the geology, and in the case of Ossipee, it largely defines the town. The poster child of ring dikes, the Ossipee Mountains are famous among geologists as one of

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the best examples of this volcanic phenomenon. Geologist Stanley Williams described it as “one of the few places in the world that offers access to the guts of a volcano,” and it’s one of very few examples with the outer ring almost entirely intact. Briefly put, it’s what’s left of the cone of a 10,000-foot volcano that first erupted 100 million years ago. Viewed from the air, it’s an almost perfect circle, with Dan Hole Pond just inside its southeast rim. You can get a good view of the circle of mountains from the summit of Bayle Mountain,

roughly in the center. The trail begins on Marble Road, shortly past Connor Pond, and crosses through a boulder field of glacial erratics dropped at the end of the ice age, a later chapter in the region’s geologic story. Although the hills in the southeast corner of Ossipee were more hospitable to farming, settlers began to move into the rougher terrain of the Ossipee Mountains, forming little crossroads settlements.


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