Lake Winnipesaukee

The name is Abenaki, and its meaning has been argued over for two centuries. The beloved translation is "Smile of the Great Spirit," which comes from an old folk tale; scholars believe the name more literally means "the land around the lake." Either way, people have lived here for thousands of years. At the lake's outlet stood Aquadoctan, one of the largest Native villages in New Hampshire, where the Abenaki built wooden fishing weirs across the channel to catch migrating shad. Those weirs named The Weirs, and Endicott Rock, carved by a Massachusetts Bay survey party in 1652 to mark the colony's northern boundary, still stands there, one of the oldest public monuments in New England.

The lake itself is a glacier's work, carved in the last Ice Age. The ice did something strange here: Winnipesaukee once drained southeast through Alton Bay toward the Atlantic, but glacial debris blocked that path, and the water now exits west through Paugus Bay into the Winnipesaukee River. The islands, more than 260 of them, are drowned glacial hills.

The railroad reached The Weirs in 1848 and the steamboat age followed. The Lady of the Lake launched from Lakeport in 1849 and ruled the lake for decades (she now rests upright in 30 feet of water off Glendale, a favorite dive site). The original 187-foot Mount Washington launched at Alton Bay in 1872 and carried more than 60,000 passengers a season at her peak, until she burned at The Weirs in 1939; her successor, the M/S Mount Washington, has run since 1940. The mail still goes out by boat: the M/V Sophie C, built in 1946, is the oldest floating post office in the continental United States.

Grand hotels crowded the shore in the golden era, most spectacularly at The Weirs, until the great fire of 1924 took the finest of them. What endured is a quieter tradition: ice-out. Records have been kept since 1887, and each spring ice-out is declared the moment the Mount Washington could reach all five of her ports. It is the unofficial opening day of summer on the big lake, and the whole region still watches for it.