Bretton Woods is an area within the town of Carroll, New Hampshire, USA, whose principal points of interest are three leisure and recreation facilities. Being virtually surrounded by the White Mountain National Forest, its vista toward Mount Washington and most of the rest of the Presidential Range includes no significant artificial structures other than the Mount Washington Cog Railway and the Mount Washington Hotel. Bretton Woods was the site of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in 1944 which has given its name to the Bretton Woods system and led to the establishment of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1946. (The system eventually collapsed in 1971.) U.S. Route 302 runs 28 miles (45 km) between the business areas of one through-road intersection and that of the next, with only a town of fewer than 3000, and areas like Bretton Woods or smaller, as concentrations of development between those intersections.
Points of interest
The Mount Washington Hotel and Resort is one in the last surviving handful of New Hampshire grand hotels, and includes two golf courses in its facilities. The Bretton Woods Mountain Resort ski area serves both downhill and cross-country skiing, primarily in the Rosebrook Mountains, located in Bethlehem to the south. The tracks of the "Cog", and its associated buildings, lie up the slope of Mount Washington, in nearby Thompson and Meserves Purchase. The "Base Road" from Bretton Woods and Fabyan's is the preferred route to the low-altitude end of those tracks (the Base Station of the Cog), except in those winters when the Mount Clinton Road is instead the only plowed road to their intersection. (The closing of the lower end of the Base Road had been traditional into 2004.) The Cog was operated during the winter seasons of 2004-2006 to take wilderness skiers partway up the mountain. The scenic Crawford Notch area begins a few miles to the south, along US-302.
