Four Summits, One Town: What's New on New Ipswich's Stretch of the Wapack Trail

Ask most people in the Monadnock region what they know about the Wapack Trail and they will mention two things: the fire tower on Mount Watatic and the granite dome at North Pack Monadnock. Both are worth the climb. Neither one is in New Ipswich.

The stretch that actually sits inside town lines is the four-mile run in between, the part of the ridge most casual hikers never learn to name. That stretch changed recently, and if you have not checked the trail notices lately, you are hiking on a route that moved without telling you.

A Four-Mile Ridge, Entirely Inside Town Lines

The Wapack is one of the oldest interstate hiking trails in the country, a 21.5-mile skyline route opened in 1923 that runs from Mount Watatic in Ashburnham, Massachusetts to North Pack Monadnock in Greenfield, New Hampshire, crossing seven towns along the way. New Ipswich's share of it is not a pass-through. It is the trail's own backbone. As one hiker who backpacked the route described it, the peak of Barrett Mountain is the first in a four-mile ridge extending south, crossing New Ipswich Mountain, Stony Top, and Pratt Mountain, all before the trail leaves town.

Rick Blanchette, who has served as trails chair for the volunteer group that maintains the route, grew up on this exact stretch. Asked about the ridge, he said simply that as a teen, he would climb Pratt and New Ipswich Mountains and wander the Wapack. He has volunteered with the group for more than thirty years, and the spring 2026 newsletter still carries his signature as trails chair.

Two Ways to Walk the Same Ridge

Local trail guides describe this section two different ways, and knowing both saves you from committing to the wrong afternoon.

The first is rated hard and eats most of a day. The second covers the same three summits in roughly two-thirds the time, at about half the total climbing. Neither is wrong. They are just answering different questions: how much ridge do you want, and how much daylight do you actually have.

What Actually Moved This Year

Here is the part a lot of regular hikers have not caught up on. The Friends of the Wapack, an all-volunteer nonprofit that has maintained the trail since 1980, currently posts a trail notice on their site stating plainly that the Wapack Trail was relocated in New Ipswich. If your mental map of this section is more than a season old, it is out of date.

The group's spring 2026 newsletter lays out exactly where the work is happening. A crew is doing general maintenance on the Kidder Mountain Trail, meeting at the Newest Mall on Turnpike Road before carpooling to the trailhead. Later in the fall, on Saturday, October 24, a second crew will handle general trimming and maintenance along the Barrett and Pratt Mountain sections, meeting at 8:30 a.m. in the Windblown Camping parking lot. Both are open to anyone who wants to see the relocation firsthand, or just wants to know what the trail crew is actually doing when you pass the yellow triangle blazes.

"There's some views we are losing with the trees growing up. I remember views from years ago and I go there now and I can't see Monadnock any more."

That line came from Blanchette in an earlier interview about the trail's upkeep, and it is a useful reminder that a trail this old is never finished. It is maintained, season after season, by the same handful of people who grew up on it.

The Trailhead That Outlived the Ski Area

For four decades, Windblown Cross-Country Ski Area was the reason people turned onto that stretch of Route 124. It closed in 2020. The parking lot did not go anywhere. The Wapack Trail's own access point sits directly across the road from the old Windblown entrance, and the property still operates as a camping base for overnight hikers on the trail. The recreational reason for pulling in changed. The pull-in itself never stopped working.

The Pond Nobody Can Build On Anymore

A short walk along the ridge brings you to Binney Pond, a small beaver pond inside the Binney Hill Wilderness Preserve. The Northeast Wilderness Trust bought the preserve's core acreage in 2016, then added a final 47-acre parcel purchased from Shirley Sawtelle, protecting the last stretch of the pond's shoreline that was not already conserved. That purchase connected the Binney Hill preserve to the neighboring Wapack Wilderness, land owned and protected by the Hampshire Country School. Every foot of Binney Pond's shoreline is now off the table for development, permanently.

The boardwalks that carry hikers across the wetland near the pond were not built by a contractor. They went in back in 2001, laid by the Ashby Boy Scout Troop as an Eagle Scout project for a scout named Jacob Varney, designed specifically so foot traffic would not disturb the fragile wetland soils underneath.

A Landmark on Its Own Schedule

Down off the ridge, on Main Street, sits a Federal-style mansion most drivers pass without a second look most weekends, because most weekends it is closed. Barrett House, also known as Forest Hall, was built around 1800 by Charles Barrett Sr. as a wedding gift for his son and daughter-in-law. It has a third-floor ballroom, sits on more than seventy acres with a Gothic Revival summer house on the grounds, and was one of the filming locations for the 1979 Merchant Ivory adaptation of Henry James's The Europeans. Historic New England has owned the property since 1948.

Here is the detail that catches people off guard: tours run on the hour from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., but only on the second and fourth Saturdays, June through mid-October. Miss those two Saturdays in a given month and the house simply is not open, no matter how good the weather looks from your driveway.

One Weekend in Lord's Valley

New Ipswich's summer calendar had one more marker this year. Hillfest, the region's Christian music festival, filled Lord's Valley on July 18 and sold out, with a lineup that included Josiah Queen, CAIN, Jamie MacDonald, Patrick Mayberry, Band Reeves, and Jenna & Zoë running from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. It is not everyone's afternoon, but it is a genuine measure of how much foot traffic a single valley in this town can pull on the right Saturday in July.

The Town in the Middle of the Map

Put it together and the pattern is hard to miss. The two peaks most people associate with the Wapack sit in Ashburnham and Greenfield. The four-mile chain of named summits connecting them, the section carrying a fresh trail relocation, a scheduled fall workday, and more than thirty years of one volunteer's attention, sits entirely inside New Ipswich. The pond you cannot build near, the ski area that became a trailhead, the mansion open two Saturdays a month, the valley that sold out this July. None of it is what shows up on a highway sign. All of it is what the town actually is once you spend a season paying attention.

If you are weighing a move to this stretch of the Monadnock region, or simply curious what a property near this ridge is worth in today's market, Andrew Peterson has spent more than four decades getting to know towns like this one from the inside. Let's connect.