Elevation: ranges from sea level to just over 1900 meters or 6288 ft. (How did I know that? Check out onlineconversion.com, an indispensible tool for anyone who needs to convert English to metric, find Pascals in terms of millimeters of mercury, or calculate their blood-alcohol content BEFORE getting behind the wheel.)
Motto:"Live Free or Die" (a sentiment that rears its head whenever some well-meaning person suggests making health insurance coverage mandatory for students of the state's universities and colleges, but is interestingly silent when institution of the E-Z Pass replaced the brass tokens formerly used on toll roads.)
State Flora and Fauna:The state wildflower is Cypripedium acaule, the pink lady's slipper. The state amphibian is the very cute Notophthalmus viridiscens, or red-spotted newt. The state tree is the Betula papyrifera, the white birch.
The state profile used to be the Old Man of the Mountain - a rock formation overlooking Profile Lake, near Franconia Notch State Park. The Old Man apparently decided enough was enough, and slid off the mountain in May of 2003. He is immortalized on the reverse of the NH state quarters, minted in 2000.
The state is primarily of interest to me because one of my humans temporarily relocated there in August of 2004. She is a graduate student in the Department of Natural Resources at the University of New Hampshire. Feel free to email me if you have questions about UNH, the NR department, or grad student life at UNH, and I'll have her get in touch with you.
Despite the humidity caused by more trees than I could pee under in a lifetime, New Hampshire offers compensations. These include downhill skiing (though strapping boards onto one's feet - even if there are only two - and hurling oneself down a steep hill is an activity guaranteed to prove that humans, even mine, are not the rational creatures they fancy themselves), and appreciating fall foliage. In Arizona, it's largely the sycamores and aspens that turn, and they only turn yellow or brown. So my human took these pictures to show me what autumn in New England looks like:
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