From the green, it's only a three-quarter mile sprint out North Main Street and Rope Ferry Road to the Dartmouth Outing Club, which in winter becomes the Dartmouth Cross Country Ski Center. The facility sits on the bank of Occom Pond, making for groomed skating out the back door as soon as the pond freezes hard.
The center also grooms 25 kilometers (about 15 1/2 miles) of trails for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in several locations. The easiest trails trace the contours of the adjacent golf course, the Hanover Country Club, founded in 1899 by Dartmouth College. (Dartmouth has a long tradition of encouraging exercise.) The gentle slopes at the edge of the course are a favorite sledding hill for youngsters.
Farther north of town along Route 10, the roughly 3-mile loop at Garipay Field is the choice of skate skiers, although classic Nordic skiers also enjoy the mix of easy and moderate terrain. The most challenging trails lie farther up Route 10 at Oak Hill. The approximately 8.5-mile Silver Fox Trail starts out easy, progresses to moderate, and works up to difficult as it passes through what is called ''the roller coaster." Skiers can get a real workout by choosing the difficult Back and Outback loops off the main trail -- or circle back instead on moderate terrain.
There wasn't enough snow in the woods for us to test the hard-core trails last time we were in Hanover. But once we learned that Oak Hill used to be a Dartmouth downhill facility and that cross-country trails were cut as recently as the 1960s, we were just as happy not to join the members of Dartmouth's Nordic ski team on their training runs.
