The image that will appear on a new quarter honoring the White Mountain National Forest has been narrowed down to five artists’ designs. But New Hampshire folks won’t find out what the final design looks like until the rest of the country does — in early 2013.

Tiffany Benna is public affairs officer for the WMNF. She’s seen the five finalists for New Hampshire’s “America the Beautiful Quarter” design, but is sworn to secrecy by the U.S. Mint, which is producing the series.

The 56-coin series, honoring national parks and historic sites, is being issued at a rate of five designs a year, in the order in which the national parks were established. New Hampshire’s is the 16th in the series, the first quarter scheduled for release in 2013.

Benna and others in the WMNF office sent the U.S. Mint a variety of landscape and wildlife images that reflect the diversity of the forest. It’s a more difficult task, she said, than for some of the other national sites that have iconic images, such as Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park or Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon.

“So we picked views and landscape features and wildlife features and we submitted quite a few...and then out of all those images, five emerged.”

“Now it’s completely out of our hands,” she said.

Among those who get to weigh in on the final design are the secretaries of the interior and agriculture departments, and New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch. The final say belongs to the head of the U.S. Treasury.

Benna said the folks at the U.S. Mint sent design images back to her office to check for accuracy, and the WMNF staff did nix a few ideas. For instance, “There were suggestions about having lilacs on the quarter, and of course, they don’t grow wild in the forest.”

Then there were the designs “that just maybe needed some attention to the anatomical mechanics,” as Benna put it.

Anatomical mechanics? “Funny features in them....little bobbles that needed to get out. I can’t really say much more than that,” she said, laughing.

It seems there were inaccurate details in how some sort of wildlife was depicted. “They did get cleaned up,” she said.

There may be a possible clue to the design on the official web site for the series (americathebeautifulquarters.gov). If you click on the U.S. “program map” for the New Hampshire quarter, there’s a pretty photo of a covered bridge over a river with a mountainscape in the background.

Benna said she’s excited about seeing the final design. She thinks the first quarters released in the series are attractive and said, “I’m confident that ours will look good too,”