White Birches Camping Park

We originally booked in here for a month in order to maximize our available hiking time by not having to move around between NF campgrounds every other weekend. We ended up extending to two months and considered three. We stuck around for the hiking, which is plentiful. You can access the AT just up the road, head down Pinkham Notch from Gorham, get to 113 south in ten minutes, the Presidential trailheads are 10 - 20 minutes away, you can go north past Berlin to access Mt Cabot and the surrounding area and both Franconia and Crawford Notch trails are available if you are willing to make a longer drive.

Groceries were available in Berlin and the weekly farmer's market kept us in fresh organic produce which would have been a struggle otherwise.

The campground has a large open area of full hookup sites surrounded by some additional full hookup sites that back in to the woods. There is another large open area across the highway from the main office / CG. If you don't need hookups there is another section in the woods that has some fantastic sites, a few that are amazingly private.

There is lots of room to walk through the campground including a trailhead that leads up above the campground. You can also cross the highway and walk all the way down to the river.

Facilities were well maintained, the owners were on site and are super friendly. There is a well equipped laundry. WiFi is available and reliable. They have a new system they put in this year, signal was good and not a problem. Bandwidth, like in all parks, is subject to others use of the system. Users are on a 1 hour lease before having to authenticate with the proxy again which I suppose might cut down on some streaming use. We experienced both good and unusable times and ended using it just for backup to Verizon.

Verizon signal is difficult. Without an external antenna and unboosted our hotspot would bounce between 1 bar of 4G and 3G. Boosted and on an omni antenna we could get decent 4-6 mbps download but < 1 mbps upload. In order to have a reasonable connection for working on we ended up using a directional antenna which got us good upload and download. Still the bandwidth was not always sufficient for video conferences. We added a ProjectFi phone and tethered with it when necessary. On Fi we could get 20 mbps down and 10 up, unboosted.

Overall, we really enjoyed our stay. The owners are great and with some work we had a reasonable internet connection. Access to insane numbers of trails and availability of good groceries made for an excellent extended stay.

We stayed here for 4 nights in August 2018. We were tucked in up in one of the wooded sites which seemed pleasant at first but later was a bit dreary due to the lack of almost any sunshine.

Both AT&T and Verizon, had signal but neither was very usable I boosted. Verizon boosted was fine unless you needed any sort of speed. It was super inconsistent, bouncing between 20ms pints and 1s pings Their WiFi was fasting, but would also occasionally cut out or stop working entirely.

The gate is another pain: either put a $10 cash deposit and get a key, or deal with disgruntled owners whenever they have to buzz you in.

The owners were ok to interact with until any kids were around, then they turned trollish. My wife reached annoyed levels I’ve rarely seen in nearly 14 years of marriage.

This campground is much larger that it appears at first. As Passport America visitors, we were located just inside the park. The sites were level and the view was clear (good sat signal). While walking around the park, we discovered there are amazing camp sites deep in the woods and back near the connecting paths to the Appalachian Trail.

On the plus side, the location of this park is great for visiting Mount Washington and touring the White Mountains. The pool is very nice and there are extensive play areas. When kids are in the park, they inflate the Bounce House.

On the down side, this park is located adjacent to US Route 2 and a major truck route (including lots of logging trucks). If you keep your windows open, road noise is a bit of a problem, even back in the woods.

Nice campground for an overnight stay. Has WiFi which was a plus. Camped in the trees and enjoyed the view. You can hear the street but slept with the window open and weren’t bothered

We were at this CG for 3 nights. Most likely, we would stay here again, although just as an overnighter. Janet and her husband, the owners, lived onsite so this made interacting with them very easy; they kept a close eye on the CG. There was a mix of seasonal campers and those who were staying short-term. Also, there was a huge area for tent campers (although there were very few there during our stay). The campsites were plenty long, big-rig friendly and level. There were two downsides to this CG: The road noise and how cramped the campsites were. The CG is located right on Highway 2, which is a main thoroughfare through the White Mountains of N.H. We used earplugs and that helped us sleep soundly at night. The closeness of the sites – it is what it is. We took advantage of the full hookups and everything worked as expected. We used the showers and restrooms while there. The showers were slightly dated although full-sized, which was nice. The showers and toilets weren’t heavily used so they were fairly clean. The showers used to charge $.25 per 5 minutes, but that functionality no longer exists. We used the laundry facilities while here and the big, new commercial machines were excellent. The laundry facilities were in the back of the camp store, which was fine. At night, the CG itself was pretty quiet (except for the campers next to us the first night. They seemed to think the CG was theirs so they visited loudly into the night.) We had good Verizon coverage during our stay. This campground is nicely located near Mount Washington, the Kancamanagus Highway and a number of other White Mountain attractions.