The Mad River is a 17.9-mile-long (28.8 km) river located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the United States. It is a tributary of the Pemigewasset River, part of the Merrimack River watershed.
The Mad River begins at the Greeley Ponds in Mad River Notch, a gap between Mount Osceola to the west and Mount Kancamagus to the east, in the township of Livermore, New Hampshire. The river descends to the south, followed by the Greeley Pond Trail, to the town of Waterville Valley, where the West Branch enters.
After winding through the Waterville Valley Resort community, the Mad River proceeds southwest over continuous boulder-strewn rapids into a corner of the town of Thornton, eventually settling out in Campton Pond in the town of Campton. Passing over a small hydroelectric dam at Campton Upper Village, the river descends over some small waterfalls and enters the floodplain of the Pemigewasset River, which it joins near Interstate 93.
For most of the river's length below Waterville Valley, it is paralleled by New Hampshire Route 49.
Famous quotes containing the words mad and/or river:
““With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—”
And—”Are we then so serious?””
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)