"It is truly shocking to see the extent of the clearing that has been done."
That was North Conway resident Curtis Detzer, a 30-year regular on the trails at Whitaker Woods, describing what he found on a walk in June 2024. Detzer isn't a casual visitor. He's run, biked, and skied that ground for three decades and served on the board of the North Conway Community Center. When he says a familiar place looks different, it's worth taking seriously.
If you walk your dog through Whitaker Woods, ski the loops in winter, or cut through on a bike to reach Cranmore, you've probably noticed the same thing Detzer did. There are gaps now where there used to be solid tree cover. Sightlines open up in places that used to be closed in by pine and oak. It reads like damage, or neglect, or a construction project that ran wild.
It's neither. It's the terms of a deed written more than fifty years ago finally showing up on the ground.
The Deed Behind the Dog-Walking Loop
Whitaker Woods exists because Charles W. "Chubby" Whitaker, a lifelong North Conway resident, sold roughly 100 acres of his family's farmland to the town in July 1971, with help from the federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. That sale came with conditions attached, and they're specific. The deed states the land is to be used for public recreation and "maintained forever in a wild and natural state," while requiring that any cutting of timber follow good forestry practices. There's also a restriction against motorized vehicles except for maintenance work, and a carve-out letting Whitaker's heirs cut wood for their own domestic use.
Read quickly, "wild and natural state" sounds like a promise to leave the forest alone. It isn't. The same sentence that protects the woods from bulldozers and pavement also obligates the town to manage the timber actively when forestry practice calls for it. Whitaker Woods is now registered as an official Tree Farm, which means the Conway Conservation Commission operates under a written Forest Management Plan built around the phrase "good forestry management practices," balanced against the property's recreational, cultural, and educational uses. That plan is the actual authority behind what happens to the trees, not sentiment about how the woods have always looked.
How the Preserve Grew, One Unrelated Deal at a Time
The 1971 purchase wasn't the end of the story. In 1979 the town added the 36-acre Ryefield lot. In 1998, a 44-acre tract came from Edith Bancroft, Chubby Whitaker's sister, deeded to Conway as compensation for the state's use of part of the original property during highway construction. Stack those three transactions together and the town's holdings run to roughly 180 acres, a trail network that stretches to about 45 kilometers once every loop, spur, and connector is counted.
None of those additions happened because the town was assembling a master recreation plan. The Ryefield lot and the Bancroft parcel arrived because of a land sale and a highway mitigation deal, respectively. The property you walk today is a patchwork stitched together by three separate legal transactions across three decades, which is part of why it doesn't behave like a designed park. It behaves like a working piece of land that keeps absorbing whatever obligations come with each new acre.
The Whitaker family's fingerprints extend past the woods themselves. Granite quarried near the west end of Oak Street, on land that was once part of the same farm, supplied stone for most of North Conway's pre-1900 building foundations, including the original portion of the North Conway Public Library, donated by the Whitakers. The Whitaker Barn still stands on the property and now stores trail grooming and athletic equipment, and the old Horatio Carter blacksmith shop survives next door on what's now a gas station lot.
What Happened in the Spring of 2024
By the spring of 2024, the stands of red oak nearest the trails were dying. Two consecutive years of spongy moth defoliation between 2020 and 2022, compounded by drought conditions in the same stretch and a killing frost in mid-May, had left enough dead and dying trees along the main paths that the Conservation Commission approved a 13-acre salvage cut. Town Forester Tim Nolin, who runs Forest Land Improvement in Ossipee, hired Khiel Logging and Chipping of Denmark, Maine, to do the work.
The cut started May 15, 2024, by the power lines off Kearsarge Road and moved southwest along the Conway Scenic Railroad tracks toward Oak Street, wrapping up in about a month. The trails stayed open during the work, with signage marking off active cutting zones as crews moved through.
The timing wasn't arbitrary. Once a hardwood stand starts dying from insect stress, timber value degrades fast. Forestry guidance from UNH Extension notes that a saw-log tree dead for three years or more is worth very little, since rot and secondary insect damage set in and drop the wood's sale value along with it. Waiting past that window means the town loses the salvage revenue and still has to pay someone to clear hazard trees before they fall across a trail. Nolin made a version of that same argument when residents pushed back: the wood still had enough value to sell, and the alternative was paying to clean up the mess as it came down on its own.
That's the part of the reaction that got lost in the shock of seeing open ground where a canopy used to be. Detzer's reaction, and a similar one from Conway resident Misty Delavan, who described losing "the natural beauty and enjoyment" her family found skiing, biking, and running through the same stretch, came from people who know the woods intimately and were caught off guard by how much ground the cut covered. Conservation Commission Chair Nat Lucy didn't dispute how stark the clearing looked. He pointed to what it opened up instead: a clear view of the Ledges and the Moat Mountains from the middle of the property, and a sightline to Mount Washington that some of the larger pines had been blocking for years.
What You'll Find on the Trail Right Now
The practical result is a woods that looks different depending on where you are standing, with cleared corridors near the power lines and railroad tracks giving way to intact forest everywhere the cut didn't reach. The recreation infrastructure around it hasn't slowed down. If anything, it's as active as ever:
- The Mount Washington Valley Ski Touring and Snowshoe Foundation has maintained the property's cross-country ski trails under an agreement with the town since the late 1980s, and the trails serve as home course for Kennett High's cross-country ski teams.
- The Perimeter Trail connects the center of North Conway to the Cranmore and Eastside trail systems, and the property is popular enough with mountain bikers that the White Mountains NEMBA chapter lists it as a maintained network.
- The 2.9-mile Powerline, Whitaker Lane, and Vista loop remains one of the more established walking and running routes on the property.
- The Whitaker Wander 5K and 1-mile fun run, timed through Granite State Race Services, runs through the woods each year as an annual community event.
Access itself keeps getting debated too. In December 2024, longtime resident Al Hospers wrote to the Conway Daily Sun defending a proposed paved connector path near the woods, arguing it would let people with mobility limitations share the same outdoor space that able-bodied users take for granted. Hospers, who told the paper he'd spent 27 years riding bikes, climbing, and skiing around North Conway, framed the paving question as one of inclusion rather than aesthetics, a fitting echo of the same tension that ran through the 2024 logging debate: what looks like a change to the woods is often an argument about who gets full use of them.
None of this points to a preserve in decline. It points to a piece of land doing exactly what its founding deed asked of it more than fifty years ago, which was never a promise of permanence. It was a promise of stewardship, applied acre by acre, decade by decade, in whatever form good forestry practice happens to take next. The next time you see equipment parked near the Kearsarge Road entrance or a gap where a stand of oak used to stand, it isn't a departure from what Whitaker Woods is supposed to be. It's the same 1971 agreement, still being kept.
If you're the kind of North Conway resident who already has an opinion about which loop skis best after a fresh snow, or which corner of the woods has the best new view of Mount Washington now that the pines are gone, Pinkham Real Estate would genuinely like to hear it. We keep close tabs on the pieces of this valley that don't show up in a listing, because we live around them too.