Crawford Notch from the Gateway
— — the cut the Saco River made on its way out of the mountains.
Not only on a wall.
“The Gateway is the narrow southern entrance to Crawford Notch, where US-302 threads between Mount Webster and Mount Willard and the Saco River begins its run down into the Mount Washington Valley. The cliff walls close in fast on both sides. Trains on the Conway Scenic line still come through. The Willey House sits a few miles up, where a landslide took the whole family in 1826.
Crawford Notch from the Gateway, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Crawford Notch is a mountain pass in the southern White Mountains, between Mount Webster on the east and Mount Willard on the west. The pass tops out near 1,900 feet at Saco Lake, the river's source. US-302 follows the notch from Bartlett up to Bretton Woods at the base of Mount Washington. The Gateway, the narrow southern entrance near the Notchland Inn, is the tightest cut in the valley, with cliff walls rising over a thousand feet on either side of the road and rail line.
The walls of the notch are Conway granite, a coarse pink granite roughly 175 million years old, intruded during the Jurassic into older metasedimentary rock. The 1826 Willey landslide stripped the slope above the Willey House down to bedrock; the bare scar is still visible from US-302. Frankenstein Cliff, on the east wall above the Mount Washington Cog Railway approach, is the climbing wall most identified with the notch and shows the granite in full section. The river runs through the same rock all the way down to Bartlett.
Crawford Notch State Park covers the upper end of the pass and is open all seasons. The Conway Scenic Railroad's Mountaineer service runs from North Conway through to Crawford Depot from late June into October, on the original 1875 Maine Central line. Arethusa Falls, the highest waterfall in New Hampshire by some counts, drops about 140 feet on the east side of the road and is reached by a 1.3-mile trail from a parking turnout south of the Willey House. The notch is plowed in winter but not the side roads.