A river road where the hills got the names
A National Scenic Byway through Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont whose lookouts are named for hills, and whose covered bridges carry the dates.
Fourteen lookouts are on the roster for the Connecticut River Byway. For a road named after a river, the names keep looking uphill. Summit House. Dort Knob Vista. Hubbard Hill Vista. Beal's Knob Vista. Beacon Hill Vista. Balch Hill. Indian Ridge. Seven of the fourteen carry a word for high ground: summit, knob, hill or ridge.
Seven lookouts named for a summit, two knobs, three hills and a ridge. Two named with a word for water. None named for the river.
What the other seven are called
View of Bellows Falls and Post Pond Overlook are the two with water in their names. Martin's Mill Covered Bridge is a bridge, catalogued as a place to look from. Norman Overlook. Sunset Viewing Spot, named for an hour of the day rather than a feature of the land. Then stone post view, recorded in lower case and as plainly as a name can be, and Angel Dog Overlook, which explains nothing at all.
Where the hills sit
Read the coordinates and the roster gathers in two places. In the south, Dort Knob Vista and Hubbard Hill Vista are just over a third of a mile apart, and Beal's Knob Vista and stone post view join them inside seven miles. In the north, Indian Ridge, Norman Overlook, Sunset Viewing Spot and Balch Hill all sit within three miles of each other.
The two ends of the list stand alone. Summit House is more than thirty-eight miles from its nearest neighbour on the roster. Angel Dog Overlook is forty-three miles from its nearest. The two are a hundred and fifty miles apart in a straight line.
The road keeps going
Angel Dog Overlook is the northernmost lookout, but the byway does not stop there. Mount Orne Covered Bridge and Columbia Covered Bridge are both marked on the route farther north. So is a historic site recorded as the Republic of Indian Stream, about fifty-two miles beyond Angel Dog in a straight line and almost two hundred from Summit House.
The bridges keep the dates
Where the lookouts carry hills, the covered bridges within two miles of the route carry years. Creamery Covered Bridge, a detour of under a mile and a half, was built in 1879. Mount Orne was built in 1911 and Columbia in 1912, both on the National Register and both on the byway. Willard Twin Covered Bridge, also on the byway, was built in 2001. A hundred and twenty-two years separate the oldest from the newest.
The hills took the names and the bridges took the years. The river's name went on the road itself.
Stop at the hills for the views. Then find the Mount Orne bridge, built in 1911 and marked on the byway itself, and let the river set the clock for the rest of the day.