Sit at the light where Route 16 threads between Conway Village and North Conway on a Friday in September and you will have time to notice the tree line running along the river side of the road. Most people read it as scenery, the strip of woods that keeps one village center from bleeding into the other. It has a name, an owner, and a reason for existing that has nothing to do with scenery. It is the Pine Hill Community Forest, and the same 594 acres that look like a buffer from a car turn out to be the fastest way between the two villages once you get out of one.
The Woods Have a Name and an Owner
Pine Hill isn't unclaimed land behind the high school. The Upper Saco Valley Land Trust acquired the core of it, 460 acres, from the Kennett Company in 2018, then added another 134 acres in 2022 to bring the total to 594. That makes it one of the larger pieces of conserved land inside a working commercial corridor anywhere in the valley, sitting between Route 16 to the west, the Saco River to the south, and Route 302 to the north and east.
It is not managed by one organization quietly hoping nobody notices it. A standing group called the Pine Hill Management Committee runs it, and the membership tells you what the forest is actually for: Tin Mountain Conservation Center, Kennett High School and the Conway School District, the Mount Washington Valley Trails Association and its Rec Path Committee, the Mountain Meadow Riders Snowmobile Club, and the Town of Conway itself. A school district and a snowmobile club sitting on the same committee as a land trust is not a coincidence. Pine Hill was built to serve overlapping, sometimes competing groups of people who all need to move through the same 594 acres in different ways and different seasons.
A Trail Built Because of the Road, Not Around It
Here is the detail that flips the story. The land trust's own description of the property calls out more than 6,600 feet of undeveloped frontage along Route 16, framed as a green corridor that divides Conway village from North Conway village. Read at face value, that's the buffer story: trees as a wall between two commercial districts.
But inside that same acreage runs the Commuter Trail, a 0.7-mile path that parallels Route 16 specifically to give walkers and cyclists a way to get between the two village centers without using the road shoulder. The forest that reads as a divider on a map is the connector on foot. Route 16 through this stretch carries steady commercial traffic, and the Commuter Trail exists because someone on the management committee decided pedestrians and cyclists needed an alternative to sharing that shoulder with delivery trucks and tourist traffic. It is infrastructure in the plainest sense, built to solve a specific traffic problem rather than to look pretty from a car window.
The rest of the trail system inside Pine Hill backs up the same point. This isn't one loop. It's a small network, each piece built for a different kind of trip:
- The Conway Recreation Path, 1.7 miles along the Saco River, running from the Smith-Eastman trailhead west under the Route 302 overpass and on toward Kennett High School.
- The Ravine Trail and its connector, 1.2 miles of packed gravel linking the Rec Path to Kennett High School and Route 302 by way of the Cold Brook ravine.
- The Commuter Trail, the 0.7-mile Route 16 alternative described above.
- The Summit Trail, a 2.4-mile multi-use and mountain bike route to the top of Pine Hill at 883 feet, paired with the 0.7-mile Eagle's Way connector to form a 3-mile loop.
- More than 3,000 feet of groomed corridor used by the Mountain Meadow Riders Snowmobile Club in winter.
Add it up and you get a forest that functions as a commute, a school connector, a river walk, and a snowmobile route depending on the week and the season, all inside the same tree line drivers see as a gap between two shopping districts.
Who's Actually Building This
None of this appeared on its own. The Ravine Trail and its connector were completed in 2021, giving students and staff at Kennett High a direct link to the softball and baseball fields and on to the Rec Path. The Summit Trail followed, with layout and design work from Matt Coughlan of Recon Trail Design and early uphill construction in 2022 by volunteers from the White Mountain New England Mountain Bike Association, including Rob Adair working the route with an excavator and Mike Simoneau handling hand tools. This is not abandoned acreage that happens to have paths worn into it. It is actively built and maintained trail, funded in part through the New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program and the U.S. Forest Service's Community Forest Program.
The land carries an older history too. Before it was conservation land, the site was home to the White Mountain Mineral Spring Company and the Nash House, a Victorian inn that hosted travelers and rusticators drawn to the mineral spring. The Nash House itself burned around 1970 during a fire department training exercise, but the smaller Mineral Spring House survives, restored, just upslope from the western entrance to Kennett High School. It is a quiet detail, but it means the trail system sits on ground that has been drawing people to walk it for well over a century, long before anyone called it a community forest.
The One Parking Rule Actually Worth Knowing
If you park at Smith-Eastman, the trailhead at the end of Meetinghouse Hill Road behind the Conway Police Station, there is one seasonal detail worth knowing before you find a ticket on your windshield. Conway and Albany residents need a town parking sticker to park there. Everyone else pays a $5 daily parking pass, and that fee only applies from the Saturday of Father's Day weekend through the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. Outside that window, the lot runs on the honor system with no daily charge at all. The Town of Conway's Parks and Recreation Department handles the sticker applications directly, and it is worth sorting out before the first warm Saturday of summer rather than after.
What a Week Through Pine Hill Actually Looks Like
None of this reads as abstract policy once you picture who is actually using it on a given week. A dog walker takes the Rec Path along the Saco most mornings before the parking lot fills, sometimes pushing on to the spur that reaches the Lamplighter beach. A commuter who works near North Conway rides the Commuter Trail instead of the Route 16 shoulder, particularly once the summer traffic thickens. A Kennett High student walks the Ravine Trail between the athletic fields and the school rather than waiting for a ride down Route 302. A mountain biker closes out a weekday evening with the Eagle's Way and Summit Trail loop to the top of Pine Hill and back. Come winter, the Mountain Meadow Riders groom their stretch of the corridor for snowmobile traffic that has nothing to do with any of the above.
That range of uses is the whole point. A single piece of conserved land, sitting under the same 125 acres of wetland that includes part of Cold Brook and overlays a section of the Saco River Valley Glacial Aquifer that supplies the town's groundwater, is doing double duty as drinking water protection and daily transportation. The trees along Route 16 that read as a gap between two villages are, underneath, one of the more heavily used pieces of infrastructure in town.
Next time you're stopped at that light between Conway Village and North Conway, the woods on your right aren't just marking the space between two commercial districts. They're the reason some of your neighbors aren't stopped at that same light with you.
If you're curious about what else shapes daily life in this stretch of the valley, from trail access to what a specific street or village actually feels like to live on, the team at Pinkham Real Estate has spent years getting to know Conway one village at a time. Reach out anytime you want a local read on the town beyond the map.