Beyond Slopes and Boats
What the Lakes Region and the North Country Have in Common
I should tell you upfront that this particular piece is written very much in situ while I’m still learning how the rhythms of season and life play out differently, and similarly in different communities across and within regions.
I’ve been a year-round resident of the Lakes Region for three years. Three years is enough to know where the ice goes out first on Lovell Lake and which local Facebook group will tell you the truth about the best Chinese food in driving distance and what the shoulder season actually feels like when you’re not checking out of a rental cottage on Sunday. It is not enough to know everything. I’m still learning. I say this not as a disclaimer but in awe — that after three years of choosing this place, I’m still being surprised by all that choice means.
The North Country I know differently. I know it the way you know a place you’ve returned to for half your life as a guest. North Conway, Jackson, the valley towns tucked up against the Whites. I know which weeks are impossible for parking at Cranmore and where to eat breakfast when the tourist spots have a line out the door. I know the particular quality of a March afternoon up there when the snow is still deep and the light has started to change. I know it well enough to notice things. I do not know it well enough to claim I understand it from the inside.
I want to write about both places anyway, because I think the comparison is worth making even imperfectly and because I think both places have such value for those looking for a life different than what they’re living right now.
First, a definitional note: when I say the North Country, I’m using a loose definition that some people will push back on. Technically, the North Country is Coos County — Lancaster, Colebrook, Pittsburg, the Great North Woods. Genuinely remote. A different set of realities entirely. NHPR did a series on this in 2019, Word of Mouth‘s North Country project, and one of the first things it tackled was exactly this question: where does the North Country actually begin? The answer, as it turns out, depends on who you ask.
I’m drawing my line at North Conway and up. The Mount Washington Valley, the villages along Route 302, the towns that orient their whole identity around the mountains rather than the water. Some purists will say that’s just the White Mountains, not the North Country at all. Fine. I’m less interested in the geography argument than in what that collection of places shares with the Lakes Region at the level of how people actually live there.
Here’s the story some tell about the two regions: the Lakes Region is summer and lakes. The North Country is winter and skiing. People split time accordingly. A camp on Winnipesaukee or Great East Lake from Memorial Day to Indigenous Peoples Day; ski weekends in Bartlett from January through March. The regions function, in this telling, as two continguous halves of a seasonal New Hampshire life. You get your water and your mountains and you spend the intermezzos in Boston or New York and call it a full year.
This is not entirely wrong. The seasonal economy in both places is real and it shapes everything. But it is a visitor’s understanding of each place, and I think it flattens something true and rich about both of them.
What actually defines year-round life in the Lakes Region is not the water, though the water is always in the background. It’s the relationship between the people who stay and the economy that was built for the people who visit. Every small business owner in a lake town knows the math: you make as much as you can in twelve to fifteen weeks and then the rest of the year becomes about the quieter, but just as critical, support of the year round folks. The restaurants that survive year-round do it by becoming something different in January than they are in July. More local. Quieter. Hubs of the community. The owners of those restaurants are often the same people coaching youth soccer and running the food pantry and showing up to planning board meetings. They are the connective tissue of a place that, from the outside, can look like it exists purely for summer visitors.
There’s an identity that comes with that. Year-round Lakes Region residents tend to have a particular relationship to the summer crowd that is warm and wry and not at all resentment but something in the neighborhood of pride. This is our place, it says quietly. You’re welcome here. You are part of what we love about this place. And you’re visiting something we live inside. And we know it in a different way. Not better, just different. That’s okay.
The North Country towns I have spent time in carry a version of the same thing, pitched only slightly differently. The ski economy is the organizing force rather than the lake economy, and it creates a slightly different community psychology. Skiing concentrates its visitors more intensely — a good snow year is genuinely good, a bad one is genuinely bad, and everyone in a valley town knows it. The relationship between the mountain and the town is more explicit, more economic, less easy to romanticize. When Cranmore or Attitash has a strong season, you feel it at the hardware store. When they don’t, you feel that too.
What I’ve noticed, as a fifteen-year guest, is that the North Country towns have a stronger orientation toward the working landscape than the Lakes Region does. Not that the Lakes Region lacks it; there are working farms and logging operations and trades people everywhere. But the mountains up north make the land’s indifference to human convenience more visible. The passes close. The weather moves faster. There’s a directness in how North Country towns talk about what they need, what they’re losing, what they’re trying to hold onto, that I’ve found bracing and honest.
Both regions are navigating a version of the same tension: how do you preserve what makes a place real when the economic pressure pushes everything toward serving visitors? How do you keep a school open when the year-round population is aging and the teachers and tradespeople that are the backbone of the community can’t afford the housing that the vacation market has inflated? These aren’t abstract questions. They show up at school board meetings. They show up in who can and can’t stay. And they connect the two places in more ways than one.
The continguous-halves story — summer lakes, winter mountains — flattens some of this. It treats both regions as singular activities rather than rich and varied year-round communities. I drive the hour or so north regularly to have dinner at Stonehurst Manor or ride the cog railway up Mt. Washington. And I see stickers on my neighbors cars that show me they’re regulars at Loon or Attitash. Last week I went boating on Great East with some friends who own a camp there. They live most of the time up in Lincoln, we met on the slopes a decade ago and stayed in touch.
One thing that genuinely surprised me about life up here is the density of entrepreneurial artisans and craftspeople working quietly in both regions — potters, coffee roasters, candle makers, woodworkers — people building livelihoods from and inspired by the same landscape that draws visitors in. It's part of what led me to start Lakes & Peaks Provisions Co. in March 2026 with my sister and brother-in-law, who have a camp bordering the White Mountain National Forest near Loon. We wanted to offer our take on what's good and beautiful from smaller makers across the region to the visitors who love this place and the people who've made it home. And more than that, we wanted to contribute something back — some predictable income to the farmers, artisans, and craftspeople whose work makes these communities worth returning to. Because when they thrive, so does the place itself.
See, what both places actually are is more interesting and more complicated. They are year-round communities with year-round cultures and year-round stakes in their own futures, built around and sometimes in tension with the seasonal economies that bolster them. The people who live in them full-time have made a choice that goes beyond preferring a view. They’ve chosen a pace and a level of participation and a willingness to be present for the versions of these places that don’t appear in the travel content.
I’m three years into that choice. I’m still learning what I chose. I think that’s probably how it works.
Here’s to knowing when you’ve found your place.
🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes
