The Fabyan House, in front of Mount Washington, stands upon the
location of the "Giant's Grave," which was an elongated mound of sand
and gravel formed by the waves of an ancient lake, reacting from the
adjacent mountain slopes, and rising about fifty feet. Being high,
long and wide, it was just the place for a house. The tradition is
that once a fierce-looking Indian stood upon this mound at night,
waving a flaming torch and shouting "No paleface shall take root here;
this the Great Spirit whispered in my ear." The successive burnings of
hotels on this site would seem to indicate this as prophetic, and in
fact no hotel did stand there any length of time until the projectors
of the present large building, after the last one was burnt, as if to
avoid fate, had the mound making the "Giant's Grave" levelled and
obliterated. Here was built the earliest inn of the White Mountains in
1803 by a sawmill owner on the Ammonoosuc River, named Crawford. His
grandson, Ethan Allen Crawford, the famous "White Mountain Giant," was
the noted guide who made the first path to ascend Mount Washington
and built the first house on its summit. Now, the mountain is ascended
from this western side by an inclined-plane railway, reached by an
ordinary railway extending from Fabyan's five miles across to the base
of the mountain. The railway to the summit is about three miles long,
with an average gradient of thirteen hundred feet to the mile, the
maximum being thirteen and one-half inches in the yard. It is worked
by a cog-wheel locomotive acting upon a central cogged rail, and the
ascent is accomplished in about ninety minutes. It is an exhilarating
ride up the slope, for, as the car is elevated, the horizon of view
widens decidedly to the west and northwest, while the trees of the
forest get smaller and smaller, and their character changes. The
sugar-maples, yellow birches and mossy-trunked beeches, with an
occasional aspen or mountain ash, are gradually left behind in the
valley, being replaced on the higher slope by white pine and hemlock,
white birch, and dark spruces and firs hung with gray moss. These
gradually becoming smaller, soon the only trees left are a sort of
dwarf fir intertangled with moss. Then, rising above the limit of
trees, there is only a stunted arctic vegetation, and this permits a
grand and unobstructed view all around the western horizon.
The route of the railway goes over and up various steep trestles, the
most startling of all being "Jacob's Ladder," elevated about thirty
feet and having the steepest gradient. Here is a perfect arctic
desolation, the surface being broken blocks and rough stones of schist
and granite, cracked, honeycombed and moss-grown, having endured the
storms and frosts of centuries. There is a little vegetation where it
may get root, the reindeer-moss, saxifrage clumps and sandwort of
dreary Labrador or Greenland. The view covers a wide expanse far away
westward to the Green Mountains, the landscape being everywhere dark
forests and peaks, with the massive slopes of Mount Clay nearer to the
northward, and the whole Presidential range, Mounts Jefferson, Adams
and Madison, stretching beyond. As one looks over the vast, dark,
undulating wilderness of peaks, it can be realized how the flood of
emotion made an entranced observer exclaim, in the hearing of Mr.
Starr King, "See the tumultuous bombast of the landscape." Nearing the
summit, the railway gradient is less steep, and here an opportunity is
given to peer over the edge of the "Great Gulf," a profound abyss on
the eastern mountain slope between Washington, Clay and Jefferson.
This hollow gulf, its sides and bottom covered with dark trees,
relieved by a little glistening pond at the bottom, stretches out to
the narrow valley along the eastern base of the range, known as the
Glen, down into which one can look at an angle of about forty-five
degrees. Rounding the mountain summit, the train halts at a broad
platform in front of the Summit Hotel.
The top of Mount Washington is the highest elevation in the United
States east of the Rockies and north of the Carolinas. It is what may
be described as an arctic island, elevated sixty-two hundred and
ninety feet, in the temperate zone, and displaying both arctic
vegetation and temperature, the flora and climate being alike that of
Greenland. An observatory gives a higher view over the tops of the
buildings, and the first great impression of it is that the view seems
to be all around the world, limited only by the horizon. In every
direction are oceans of billowy peaks, the whole enormous circuit of
almost a thousand miles, embracing New England, New York, Canada and
the sea. The grand scene is at the same time gloomy. The almost
universal forests overspread everything with a mournful pall of sombre
green. The summit is spacious, and the contour of the mountain can on
all sides be plainly seen. Its slope to the westward, like all of the
Presidential range, is steeper than to the eastward, down which a
wagon-road zigzags into the Glen. Upon the eastern side, two long
spurs seem to brace the mountain, though profound ravines are there
cut into it. The southern slope of the summit pitches off suddenly,
while to the north there is a more gradual descent, both the railway
and wagon-road approaching that way. The original Tip-Top House, the
first inn erected, is preserved as a curiosity, a low and damp
structure built of the rough stones gathered on the mountain. The
newer hotel is of wood, with a steep roof, and is chained down to the
rocks to prevent the gales from blowing it over. There is a
weather-signal station at the summit, one of the most important posts
in the country.