WHITE MOUNTAIN
TRAILS
TALES OF THE TRAILS
TO THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON AND
OTHER SUMMITS OF THE WHITE HILLS
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
_Author of "Florida Trails," "Literary Pilgrimage
of a Naturalist," "Wild Pastures," etc._
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1912
By Small, Maynard and Company
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers' Hall_
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
TO THE
APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN CLUB
WHOSE PATHS MADE IT POSSIBLE
THIS BOOK
IS APPRECIATINGLY DEDICATED
FOREWORD
The author wishes to express his thanks to the editors of the "Boston
Evening Transcript" for permission to reprint in this volume matter
originally contributed to the columns of that paper; to Mr. Frederick
Endicott of Canton, Massachusetts, for permission to reproduce his
photographs of "Sunrise on Mount Washington," "Clouds Cascading over
the Northern Peaks," "Fog on Mount Cannon," and "Lafayette from Bald
Mountain"; to the Appalachian Mountain Club for the shelter of cosy
camps so hospitably open to all wayfarers; and to many mountain
people, especially those who dwell summers in the tiny hamlet on Mount
Washington Summit, for unassuming hospitality and friendly guidance.
CONTENTS
Page
I. Up Chocorua 1
II. Bobolink Meadows 17
III. Climbing Iron Mountain 32
IV. June on Kearsarge 48
V. Rain in the Mountains 64
VI. Carter Notch 79
VII. Up Tuckerman's Ravine 96
VIII. On Mount Washington 112
IX. Mount Washington Butterflies 128
X. Mountain Pastures 144
XI. The Northern Peaks 160
XII. The Lakes of the Clouds 175
XIII. Crawford Notch 191
XIV. Up Mount Jackson 206
XV. Carrigain the Hermit 222
XVI. Up the Giant's Stairs 238
XVII. On Mount Lafayette 252
XVIII. A Mountain Farm 268
XIX. Summer's Farewell 284
Index 299
ILLUSTRATIONS
Sunrise from the summit of Mount Washington _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
"The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles
skim in long summer processions from
Massachusetts to the Mountains" 2
"You realize the grandness and beauty of this outpost
sentinel of the White Hills" 8
"The shadowy coolness of evening was welling up and
blotting the gold of sunset from the treetops" 16
The Glen Ellis River at Jackson, New Hampshire, Thorn
Mountain in the distance 20
Down the Wildcat River, over the brink of Jackson Falls,
Moat Mountain in the distance 24
"From nowhere does one get a better view of Kearsarge
than from this little cairn on the plateau which is
the summit of Iron Mountain" 44
Sunset over Iron Mountain and Jackson, seen from Thorn
Mountain 46
Kearsarge and Bartlett, seen from Middle Mountain,
near Jackson 48
From Eagle Mountain one may see Kearsarge, blue
and symmetrical in the distance, peering over the
shoulder of Thorn 50
Sunset light on the Southern Peaks, seen from the summit
of Mount Washington 64
Clouds on Mount Washington, from the Glen Road,
Jackson 78
Carter Notch seen over Doublehead from Kearsarge summit 80
"Always climbing by easy gradients toward the great V in
the Carter-Moriah Range" 84
The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Carter Notch 90
"The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine
holds winter in its heart all summer long" 96
"Then the shadows are deep under the black growth
that spires up all about the little placid sheet of
water, though it still reflects the sapphire blue of
the clear sky above" 100
The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Tuckerman's
Ravine 104
"The giant is awake, has tossed his bed-clothes high in
air, and is striding away along the notch behind
their shielding fluff" 108
"It all depends on what winds Father Æolus keeps
chained, perhaps in the deep caverns of the Great
Gulf, or which ones he lets loose to rattle the chains
of the Tip Top House" 112
"The more distant valleys were deeply hazed in this
amethystine blue, but the nearer peaks and plateaus
stood so clear above them that it seemed as if one
might leap to the Lakes of the Clouds or step across
the Great Gulf to Jefferson in one giant's stride" 118
"Dawn on the mornings of those days was born out of
the sky above the summit, as if the fading stars left
some of their shine behind them" 120
Butterfly-time on Mount Washington, the summit seen
over the larger of the Lakes of the Clouds 128
The fantastic lion's head which, carved in stone, guards
the trail along Boott's Spur toward the summit cone
of Washington 136
"Semidea persistently haunts the great gray rock-pile
which is the summit cone" 138
"The stocky, square-headed, white-faced cattle may well
feel themselves superior to these beings far below
who groom and feed them" 144
Mountain Sandwort in bloom on a little lawn near Mount
Pleasant on the last day in July 154
Clouds on the Northern Peaks, Mount Adams seen from
Mount Washington summit 160
"Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson" 164
Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into
the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount
Washington 168
"Dwarfed firs, beautiful in their courage, set spires along
portions of their borders, dark, straight lashes for
clear blue eyes" 182
Spaulding Lake at the head of the Great Gulf, Mounts
Adams and Madison in the distance 188
"Profile of Webster," looking toward Crawford Notch
from the old Crawford farm-house site 192
"Where railroad, highway, and river draw together and
touch elbows in passing through the gateway of the
Notch" 198
"Just below the nick of the Notch you may see where
the Silver Cascade and the Flume Cascade hurry
down from their birth on Mount Jackson, and farther
down the vast slope of Webster" 202
In the heart of Crawford Notch, the summit of Jackson
on the distant horizon 204
"As if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of
a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass" 224
"Nor is this to be said in any scorn of the lumberman.
He bought the woods and is using them now for the
purpose for which he spent his money" 232
"My way to the Giant's Stairs lay over the high shoulder
of Iron Mountain, where the road shows you all the
kingdoms of the mountain world spread out below" 238
"From the top tread of the Giant's Stairs one sees half
of the mountain world, the half to southward" 248
"On the way the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in
through the gaps in the foliage" 256
Profile Lake, Franconia Notch, and Mount Lafayette
from Bald Mountain 264
"Such beauties as these the mountains set daily before
the eyes of the man who hewed out the highest farm
in New England on the high shoulder of a westerly
spur of Wildcat Mountain" 270
"The Glen Boulder has a George Washington nose, a
Booker Washington chin, and the low forehead of
the cave man" 288
The Crawford trail along Franklin, Mount Pleasant in the
distance 294
"The world was blotted out in a gray mass of scudding
vapor that gradually became black night out of which
by and by rain came hissing" 296
WHITE MOUNTAIN TRAILS
I
UP CHOCORUA
_The Mountain and Its Surroundings in Mid-May_
The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles skim in long
summer processions from Massachusetts to the mountains, coquettes with
Chocorua as it winds through the Ossipees. Sometimes it tosses you
over a ridge whence the blue bulk and gray pinnacle stand bewitchingly
revealed for a second only to be eclipsed in another second by the
lesser, nearby beauties of the hill country, and leave you wistful.
Sometimes it gives you tantalizing flashes of it through trees or by
the gable of a farm-house on a round, hayfield hill, but it is only as
you glide down the long incline to the shores of Chocorua Lake that
the miracle of revelation is complete. Then indeed you must set your
foot hard on the brake and gaze long over the Scudder farm-house gate
down a green slope of field to the little lake, and as the eye touches
approvingly Mark Robertson's rustic bridge, set in just the right spot
to give the human touch to the wild beauty of the landscape, and leaps
beyond to the larger lake framed in its setting of dark growth, and on
again to the noble lift of the great mountain with its bare pinnacle
of gray granite, you realize the grandeur and beauty of this outpost
sentinel of the white hills. It is hard to believe that Switzerland or
Italy or any other country has anything finer than this to show the
traveller.
[Illustration: "The smooth highway over which thousands of automobiles
skim in long summer processions from Massachusetts to the Mountains"]
It was a wonder day in May when I first stopped, spell-bound, upon
this spot. A soft blue haze of spring was over all the mountain world,
making mystery of all distant objects and lifting and withdrawing the
peak into the sky of which it seemed but a part, only a little less
magical and intangible. Hardly was this a real world on this day, but
rather one painted by some mighty master out of semi-transparent dust
of gems. The lake was a mirror of emerald stippled about its distant
border with the chrysophrase reflection of young leaves, carrying
deep in its heart another, more magical, Chocorua of softest sapphire
tapering to a nadir-pointing peak of beryl. Out of the nearby woods
came the song of the white-throated sparrow, the very spirit of the
mountains, a song like them, built of gems that fade from the ear
into a trembling mist of sound, the nearby notes sapphire peaks, the
others distant and more distant till they seem but the recollection
of a dream. Such days come to the mountains in May and they bring the
white-throats up with them from the haze of the subtropics where they
are born.
* * * * *
If one would climb Chocorua by the Hammond trail he must leave the
smooth road that winds onward to Crawford Notch after he passes
Chocorua Lake. There another, less smooth but still available to
carriage or motor, will take him across Chocorua Brook and end at a
house in the woods. Just before the end it crosses a second brook,
and there is the beginning of the trail, a slender footpath only, but
well defined in the earth and well marked by little piles of stone
wherever it goes over ledges. It is hardly possible to miss it in
daylight; after dark it would be hardly possible to find it. Twice it
crosses the brook, the second time leaving it to gurgle contentedly
on in its ravine and rising more directly skyward. Beech and birch
branches shimmered overhead with the translucent green of half-grown
young leaves along the lower reaches of this trail. Maples flushed the
green in spots with tapestry of coral red. Scattered evergreens, pine,
spruce, hemlock and fir lent backgrounds of green that was black in
contrast to the lighter tints. Smilacina, checkerberry and partridge
berry wove carpets of varying color in the tan brown of last year's
leaves, climbing the slope as bravely as anyone, and painted and purple
trilliums did their best to follow, but had not the courage to go very
far. The pipsissewa, bellwort and Solomon's seal did better. A few of
them dared the ledges well up to the top of the first great southerly
spur which the trail ascends.
It was the day after I had first seen Chocorua and a wind out of the
west had blown the blue haze of unreality away from the mountain,
massing it to the east and south where it still held the land in
thrall. I got the blue of it through straight stems of beech and birch
and through the soft quivering of their young leaves painted with the
delicate coral tracery of maple fruit.
All the way up the lower slope one is drowned in Corot. I watch
yellow-bellied sap-suckers make love among the beeches, the crimson
of their crowns and throats flashing with ruby fire, the blotched
gray and white of wings and bodies a living emanation of the bark to
which they cling. Their colors seem the impersonal fires of the young
trees personified. In this, another wonder day of May, the goodness
of God to the green earth flows in a tide of unnameable colors up
the mountain-side, enflaming bird and tree alike and from the great
shoulder of the mountain I look down through its mist of mystery and
delight to Chocorua Lake, a clear eye of the earth, wide with joy
and showing within its emerald iris as within a crystal lens magic
mountains, upside down, and between their peaks the turquoise gateway
to another heaven, infinitely deep below. The lowland forest sleeps
green at my feet, a green of sea shoals that deepen into the tossing
blue of mountains far to the south, Ossipee, Whittier, Bear Camp and
the lesser hills of the Sandwich range.
Many of the shrubs and trees of the lower slopes climb well to the top
of this great southerly spur of the mountain, but straggle as they
climb and lessen in number as they reach the height. Few of the lowland
birds get so far, but among the dense spruces and firs which crowd one
another wherever there is soil for their roots among the weather worn
ledges, deciduous trees sprinkle a green lace of spring color, and
among the spruces, too, is to be heard the flip of bird wings and an
occasional song. Here the hardier denizens of the country farther to
the north find a congenial climate. Myrtle warblers show their patches
of yellow as they flit about, feeding, making love and selecting nest
sites, and with them the slate-colored juncos glisten in their very
best clothes and show the flesh color of their strong conical bills.
These two are birds of the mountain and they climb wherever the spruce
does.
* * * * *
Beyond the crest of this great southerly spur the path dips through
ravines and climbs juts of crag and débris of crumbled granite to the
base of the great cone which is the pinnacle. Now and then one gets
a level bit for the saving of his breath and his aching leg muscles
and may find a seat on fantastically strewn boulders, dropped by the
glaciers when they fled from the warmth to come. On up the mountain
go the small things of earth, too. Here are sheep laurel and mountain
blueberries, stockily defiant of the winter's zero gales, the laurel
clinging as firmly to its last year's leaves as it does on the sunny
pastures of the sea level hundreds of miles to the south, the roots set
in the coarse sand that the frost of centuries has crumbled from rotten
red granite. Poplars climb among the spruces and willows are there,
their Aaron's rods yellow with catkins in the summer-like heat that
quivers in the thin air. The trees feel in them the call to the summit
as does man.
As they go on you seem to see this eagerness to ascend expressed in
the attitudes of the trees themselves. To the southwest a regiment of
birches has charged upward toward the base of the pinnacle. Boldly they
have swarmed up the steep slope and, though the smooth acclivities
of the ledges about the base of the cone have stopped all but a
corporal's guard, and though they stand, theirs is the very picture
of a turbulent, onrushing crowd. Motionless as they are, they seem to
sway and toss with all the restless enthusiasm of a mighty purpose;
nor could a painter, depicting a battle charge, place upon canvas a
more vivid semblance of a wild rush onward toward a bristling, defiant
height. Few are the birches that have passed this glacis of granite
that forever holds back the body of the regiment, yet a few climb
on and get very near the summit of the gray peak. More of the dwarf
spruces have done so. In compact, swaying lines they rush up, marking
the wind and spread of slender defiles and leaning with such eagerness
toward the summit that you clearly see them climbing, though they are
individually motionless, rooted where they stand. There is a black
silence of determination about these spruces that must indeed carry
them to the highest possible points, and it does, while to the eye the
birches behind them toss their limbs frantically and cheer.
[Illustration: "You realize the grandness and beauty of this outpost
sentinel of the White Hills"]
Whether the little blue spring butterflies climb the mountain or
whether they live there, each in his chosen neighborhood, going not
far either up or down, it is difficult to say, but I found them in
many places along the trail to the base of the cone, little thumbnail
bits of a livelier, lovelier blue than either the sky or the distant
peaks could show, frail as the petals of the bird-cherry blossoms
that fluttered with them along the borders of the path, yet happy
and fearless in the sun. With them in many places I saw the broad,
seal-brown wings of mourning cloaks, and once a Compton tortoise
flipped from the path before me and hurried on, upward toward the
summit. I looked in vain for him there, but as proof that butterflies
do climb to the very top of Chocorua I saw, as I rested on the square
table of granite which crowns it, a mourning cloak, which soared up
and circled me as I sat, rose fifty feet above, then coasted the air
down toward the place where the birches seemed to toss and cheer in
the noonday sun. He had won the height, and more, and I envied him the
nonchalant ease with which his slanting planes took the descent.
* * * * *
One other creature I saw, higher yet, a broad-winged hawk that swung
mighty circles up from the ravine to the southeast, down which one
looks in dizzy exaltation from the very summit. There was a climber
that outdid all the rest of us in the swift ease of his ascent. Out
of nothing he was borne to my sight, a mote in the clear depths three
thousand feet below, a mote that swept in wide spirals grandly up with
never a quiver of the wing. Up and up he came till he swung near at
the level of my eye, then swirled on and on, a thousand feet above
me. A moment he poised there, then with a single slant of motionless
wings turned and slid down the air mile on mile, one grand, unswerving
coast, to vanish in the blue distance toward Lake Ossipee.
Southerly from Chocorua summit the land was soused in the steam of
spring. Chocorua Lake lay green at my feet, an emerald mirror of the
world around it. To its right a little way Lonely Lake was a dark
funnel in the forest, a shadowy crater opening to unknown depths in the
earth below, filled with black water, and all to the east and south the
country lay flat as a map, colored in light green, the lakes in dark
green or steel blue, the roads in dust brown, the villages scattered
white dots, while beyond a blue mist of mountains was painted on the
margin for the horizon's edge.
To look north and west was to look into another world, to realize for
what mountains Chocorua stands as the sentinel at the southeast gate.
Paugus lifted, a blue-black, toppling wave to westward, seemingly near
enough to fall upon Chocorua summit, while over its shoulder peered
Passaconaway flanked with Tripyramid and White Face. Northward and
westward from these toppled the pinnacles of jumbled, blue-black waves
of land that passed beyond the power of vision. Northward again the
glance touched summit after summit of this dark sea of mountains till
the crests lifted and broke in the white foam of the Presidential Range
with Mount Washington towering, glittering and glacial, above them
all. Here was no steam of spring to soften the outlines and blur the
distance in blue. Rather the crystal clearness of the winter air still
lingered there, and though but a few drifts of December's snow lay
on Chocorua and none were to be seen on the other, nearer mountains,
Carrigain was white crested and Washington topped the ermine of the
Presidential range like a magical iceberg floating majestically on
a sea of driven foam. Chocorua is not a very high mountain. Three
thousand feet it springs suddenly into the blue from the lake at its
feet, 3508 feet is its height above the sea level, but its splendid
isolation and the sharpness of its pinnacle give one on its summit a
sense of height and of exaltation far greater than that to be obtained
from many a summit that is in reality far higher.
* * * * *
Yet to him who stays long on the summit of Chocorua thus early in
the spring is apt to come a certain sense of sadness, following the
exaltation of spirits, sadness for the inevitable passing of this
inspiring pinnacle. The work of alternating heat and cold, of sun and
rain, are everywhere visible, beating the granite dome to flinders and
carrying it down into the valley below. The bare granite shows the
sledgehammer blows of the frost as if a giant had been at work on it
making repoussé work with the weapon of Thor. Not a square foot of the
sky-facing ledges but has felt the welts of this hammer of the frost,
each lifting a flake of the stone, from the size of one's thumbnail to
that of a broad palm. These crumble into nodules of angular granite
that make drifts of coarse sand even on the very summit. The sweep of
the wind and the rush of the rain come and send these in streams down
the mountain side. The rain and the water of melted snow do another
work of destruction, also. Such water has a strong solvent power, even
on the grim granite. Always after rain or during the snow-melting
season of early spring, there is a little basin full of this water in
the bare rock just northeast of the very summit. There it stands till
the winds blow it away or the thirsty sun dries it up, and year after
year it has dissolved a little of the rock on which it rests till it
has worn quite a basin in the granite,--a basin which looks singularly
as if it had been hollowed roughly out by mallet and chisel. So the
work goes on, and Chocorua summit is appreciably lowered, century by
century.
Fortunately man thinks in years and not in geological epochs, else
the sadness of the thought were more poignant. After all, the work of
erosion of the centuries to come can never be so great on the mountain
as that of the centuries that have passed, for the geologists tell us
that all the summits of the Appalachians were once but valleys in the
vast table-land which towered far higher above them than they now do
above the sea. The forces of erosion whose patient work one now sees
on Chocorua summit have hammered at the hills thus long. So wears the
world away, but the great square block which sits on the very peak of
the mountain shows none of the bruises which fleck the soft granite
below it, and it may well be many a thousand years before it slides
down into the ravine below.
* * * * *
The black bulks of Paugus and the mountains beyond were rimmed with the
crimson fire of the westering sun as I reluctantly climbed down from
the peak of this hill of enchantment, greeted by the evensongs of the
juncos and myrtle warblers in the first broad patches of spruce about
the base of the cone. A pigeon hawk swung up from the westerly ravine
and hovered a moment so near me that I could see the white tip of his
tail and the rusty neck collar, then slid down the air and vanished in
the ravine on the opposite side of the mountain. He builds his nest
on mountains and was well fitted to show me the easiest way down. I
grudged him his wings as I waked the yelps in a new set of leg muscles,
slumping down the slopes and climbing laboriously down the almost
perpendicular, rocky ravines. The Hammond trail is no primrose path,
for all its beauties, and it was my first climb of the year. I was glad
indeed to drink deep of the mountain brook near the end of the trail
and then rest a bit to the soothing contralto of its song.
The shadowy coolness of the evening was welling up and blotting the
gold of sunset from the treetops as I rounded Chocorua Lake and watched
the sunset fire the summit where I had lingered so long,--a fire
reflected deep in the very heart of the mirroring waters. The roar of
the little river on its way down to Chocorua town came faintly to me,
a sleepy song, half that of the wind in pines, half an echo of droning
bees that work all day in the willow blooms by its side. Liquid, clear,
through this came the songs of wood thrushes out of the shadows. The
peace of God was tenderly wrapping all the world in night, and the
mountain loomed farther and farther away in blue mystery and dignity,
while from its pinnacle slowly faded the rosy glow of the passing,
perfect day.
[Illustration: "The shadowy coolness of evening was welling up and
blotting the gold of sunset from the treetops"]
II
BOBOLINK MEADOWS
_Early June about Jackson Falls and Thorn Mountain_
On a May morning after rain the bobolinks came to the meadows up under
the shadow of Thorn Mountain. The morning stars had sung together and
the breaking of day let tinkling fragments of their music through, or
so it seemed. Something of the sleighbell melodies that have jingled
over New Hampshire hills all winter was in this music, something of the
happy laughter of sweet-voiced children, and something more that might
be an echo of harps touched in holy heights. Surely it is good to be in
the mountains at dawn in May, when such sweet tinklings of melody fall
out of celestial spaces! The high hills were veiled in the mists of the
storm that had passed, but the nearer summit of Thorn leaned friendly
out of them, and over it from the south pitched the fragments of
heavenly music, fluttering down on short wings like those of cherubs.
The bobolinks had come to Jackson.
It is as easy to believe that the cherubs of Raphael and Rubens can
make the journey from high heaven to earth on their chubby wings as
that these short-winged, slow-fluttering birds can have come from the
marshes below the Amazon on theirs, but so they have done, finding
their music on the way. They went south in early September, brown,
inconspicuous seed-eaters with never a note save a metallic "chink."
Somewhere in the far south they found new plumage of black with plumes
of white and old gold. Somewhere in the sapphire heights of air above
the Caribbean Sea they caught the tinkling music of the spheres and
dropped upon Florida with it in the very last days of April, bringing
it thence again in joyous flight that drops them among the mountain
meadows in mid May.
Now June is making the grass long about the little brown nests where
the brown mother-bird sits so close, but the meadows are full of
tinkling echoes of celestial music still. All the mountain world is
rapturous with this same joy of something more than life which the
bobolinks brought from on high in their songs, dancing and singing with
it and tossing something of beauty skyward day and night. Round the
margins of the bobolink meadows the apple trees have completed their
adoration of bloom, the strewing of incense and purity of white petals
down the wind, and now yearn skyward with tenderness of young leaves.
The meadow violets smile bravely blue from shy nooks, and the snow that
lingered so long on the slopes is born again in the gentler white of
houstonias which frost the short grasses with star-dust bloom. All the
heat of the dandelion suns that blaze in fiery constellations round the
margins cannot melt away this lace-work of the houstonias, and it is
not till the buttercups come, too, and focus the sun rays from their
glazed petals of gold that the last frost of the season, that of the
houstonia blooms, is melted away. Dearly as the bobolink loves his
brown mate in the nest, the moist maze beneath the grass culms where
he dines, and his swaying perch on the ferns that feather the meadow's
edge, he, too, feels this upward impulse within him too strong to
resist and continually flutters skyward, quivering with the joy of June
and setting the air from hill to hill a-bubble with his song.
The bobolink meadows begin on the grassy levels between the Ellis and
Wildcat rivers, the bottom land which forms the foothold of Jackson
town, and they climb the mountains in all directions as do the summer
visitors, scattering laughter and beauty as they go, till you hear the
tinkle of the bobolink's song and find the beauty of meadow blooms in
tiny nooks well up toward the very summits. Up here the shyest meadow
birds and sweetest meadow flowers seem to love the rough rocks well and
climb them by the route that the brooks take as they prattle down from
the high springs. Up the very rivers they troop, and though they turn
aside eagerly to the safer haven of the brook sides, they climb as well
by way of the boulders that breast the roar of the bigger streams. The
Wildcat River plunges right down into Jackson village by way of Jackson
Falls, a thousand-foot slope over granite ledges worn smooth with
flood, and mighty boulders scattered in bewildering confusion. In time
of freshet this long incline is a welter of uproarious foam. This year
a long spring drought has bared the rocks in many places, and one may
climb the length of the falls as the stream comes down, from ledge to
ledge and from boulder to boulder.
[Illustration: The Glen Ellis River at Jackson, New Hampshire, Thorn
Mountain in the distance]
The rush of the water drowns the warbling of the water-thrushes in the
alders and viburnums on the banks, it drowns the cool melodies that
the wood thrushes sing from the deep shade of the wooded slopes along
the stream, but nothing has drowned the wild flowers that climb the
falls by way of the ledges and boulders as the adventurous fisherman
does. Why the whelming rush of freshets has not wiped them out of
existence it is hard to say. There must be times each year when they
are buried deep beneath the boiling foam, but there they cling this
June and smile up in the sun and take the fresh scent of the churning
waters as a strong basis for their perfumes. They knew the tricks
of the perfumer's trade long before there were perfumers, and the
moisture of the flood itself is their ambergris. Here the cranberry
tree leans over the water and drops the white petals of the neutral
blooms from its broad, flat cymes to go over one fall after another on
their way to Ellis River and, later, the Saco. The gentle meadow-sweet
dares far more than this. It grows from slender cracks in the face
of perpendicular granite, and with but rocks and water for its roots
thrives and bathes its serrate leaves in the spray. The mountain
blueberries have set their feet in similar places and hang fascicles of
white bells over the water for the more daring of the bumblebees that
have their nests in the moss of the river banks.
Showiest and boldest of all is the rhodora which has taken possession
of a rock island in midstream well up the falls. Here in a tangle of
rock points and driftwood it grows in clumps and puts out its umbel
clusters of richest rose, a mist of petals that seems to have caught
and held one of the rainbow tints from the spray that dashes by the
blooms on either side. Nor is even this, with its showy beauty that
Emerson loved, the loveliest thing to be found growing out of granite
in the very tumult of the waters. The blue violet is there, unseen from
the bank but smiling shyly up to him who will clamber out to midstream,
finding coigns of vantage down where even at low water the splash of
spray sprinkles its pointed leaves and violet-blue flowers. Viola
cucullata is common to all moist meadows and stream margins from Canada
to the South, but nowhere does it bloom more cheerily and confidingly
than in the midst of the rush and roar of Jackson Falls in these danger
spots among the rocks. One clump I found in a square well of granite
in the very wildest uproar, holding its sprays of bloom bravely up in
a spot that at every freshet must be fairly whelmed with volumes of
whirling icy water. How it holds this place at such times only the
clinging, fibrous roots and the gray granite that they embrace can
tell, but there it is, blooming as sweetly and contentedly as in any
sheltered, grassy meadow in all the land.
Up from the bridge above Jackson Falls the road climbs by one bobolink
meadow after another along the slope of Tin Mountain till it stops at
the wide clearing on the higher shoulder of Thorn, which was once the
Gerrish farm. Farm it is no longer, for the farmers are long gone. The
jaw-post of the old well-sweep leans decrepitly over the well, which
is choked with rubbish. The weight of winter snow and the rush of
summer rain have long since broken through the roof of the old house
and are steadily carrying it down into the earth from which it sprang.
The chimney swifts have deserted the crumbled chimney, and the barn
swallows no longer nest in the barn, last signs of the passing of a
homestead, and even the phœbes have gone to newer habitations, but the
broad acres are still strong in fertility and the grass grows lush and
green on the gentle slopes. Down from Thorn summit and over from Tin
the forest advances, but hesitatingly. It is as if it still had memory
of the strokes of the pioneer's axe and did not yet dare an invasion of
the land he marked off. It sends out skirmishers, plumed young knights
of spruce and fir, scouts of white birch and yellow, of maple and
beech, to spy out the land, and where these have found no enemy it is
advancing, meaning to take peaceful possession, no doubt, for the wild
cherries and berry bushes mingle with the old apple trees, and both
hold out white blossom flags of truce.
[Illustration: Down the Wildcat River, over the brink of Jackson Falls,
Moat Mountain in the distance]
One wonders if the pioneer did not have an eye for mountain scenery
as well as for strong, rich land, for from the very doorstone of the
old house the glance sweeps a quarter of the horizon, scores of miles
from one blue peak to another. At one's feet lies Jackson as if in a
well among the hills, Eagle Mountain and Spruce and the ridges beyond
dividing the valley of the Wildcat from the glen of Ellis River, yet
not rising high enough to hide the peak of Wildcat Mountain, up between
Carter and Pinkham notches. Iron Mountain rises on the left of Jackson,
and beyond it the unnamed peaks of Rocky Branch Ridge lead the eye on
to the snow still white in the ravines of the Presidential Range and
Mount Washington looming in serene dignity to the northwest. One may
climb thus far on Thorn Mountain by carriage if he will, or by motor
car indeed, provided he has a good hill climber. The ascent is often
made thus. But to get to the very summit, the point of the thorn, a
footpath way leads up through the bars into the pioneer's pasture,
onward and upward through the forest.
The pasture ferns climb too, and the pasture birds love the wooded
summit as well as they do the slopes far below the pioneer's farm. The
June delight which echoes in the bobolink music in the meadows so far
below sweeps up the mountain-side in scent and song and color till it
blossoms from the Puritan spruces on the very top of Thorn. There one
glimpses the rare outpouring of joy that comes from reticent natures.
They are in love, these prim black spruces, and they cannot wholly hide
it however hard they try. Instead they tremble into bloom at the twig
tips, and what were brown and sombre buds become nodding blossoms of
gold that thrill to the fondling of wind and sun and scatter incense
of yellow pollen all down the mountain-side. In the distance they
are prim and black-robed still, but to go among them is to see that
they wear this yellow pollen robe in honor of June, a shimmering
transparent silk of palest cloth of gold. More than that, their highest
plumes blush into pink shells of acceptance of joy, pistillate blooms
of translucent rose as dear and wondrous in their colors of dawn as
any shells born of crystalline tides, in tropic seas, blossoms whose
fulfilment shall be prim brown cones, but each of which is now a fairy
Venus, born of the golden foam of June joy which mantles the slender
trees. Only with the coming of June to the mountains can one believe
this of the spruces, because seeing it he knows it true.
* * * * *
The little god of love has shot his arrow to the hearts of the
trembling spruces, and he sings among their branches in many forms. The
blackburnian warbler lisps his high-pitched "zwee-zwee-zwee-se-ee-ee"
all up the slope of Thorn to the summit and shows his orange throat and
breast in vivid color among the dark leaves. The black-throated green,
moving nervously about with a black stock over his white waistcoat,
sings his six little notes, and the magnolia warbles hurriedly and
excitedly his short, rapidly uttered song. The mourning warbler
imitates the water-thrush of the misty banks of Jackson Falls, and the
Connecticut warbler echoes in some measure the "witchery, witchery"
of the Maryland yellow-throats, both birds that have elected to stay
behind with the bobolinks.
Thus carolled through cool shadows where the striped moosewood hangs
its slender racemes of green blossoms, you come rather suddenly out
on the bare ledges which face northerly from the summit. Truly to see
the mountains best one should look at the big ones from the little
ones. Here is the same view that Gerrish had from his farm, only that
you have a wider sweep of horizon. Over the Rocky Branch Ridge to the
westward rises the Montalban Range, with the sun swinging low toward
Parker and Resolution and getting ready to climb down the Giant's
Stairs and vanish behind Jackson and Webster. Everywhere peak answers
to peak, and you look over low banks of mist that float upward from
unknown glens, forming level clouds on which the summits seem to sit
enthroned like deities of a pagan world. There is little of the bleak
débris of battle with wind and cold on the summit of Thorn. It is but
2265 feet above sea level, lower than most of the mountains about it,
and the trees that climb to its top and shut off the view to the east
and south are in no wise dwarfed by the struggle to maintain themselves
there. But from it one gets a far better outlook on mountain grandeur
than from many a greater height. Washington holds the centre of the
stage which one here views from a balcony seat, seeming to rise in
splendid dignity from the glen down which the Ellis River flows, and it
is no wonder that there is a well-worn path from the Gerrish farm to
the point of the Thorn.
* * * * *
It may be that the pioneer who first hewed the mountain farm from the
forest also first trod this path to the very summit of the little
mountain. It may be that he got a wide enough sweep of the great hills
on the horizon to the north and west from his own doorstone. But I like
to think that once in a while, of a Sunday afternoon perhaps, he went
to the peak and dreamed dreams of greater empire and higher aspirations
even than his mountain farm held for him. There is a tonic in the air
and an inspiration in the outlook from these summits that should make
great and good men of us all. These linger long in the memory after the
climb. But longer perhaps even than the hopes the summit gives will
linger in the memory of him who climbs Thorn Mountain in early June the
recollection of two things, one at least not of the summit. The first
is the joy of June in the bobolink meadows far down toward Jackson
Falls, the celestial melodies that the bobolinks echo as they flutter
upward in the vivid sunshine and sing again to mingle their white and
gold with that of the flowers that bloom the meadow through. The other
is the bewildering beauty of the once black and sombre spruces in their
sudden draperies of golden staminate bloom, looped and crowned with
the pistillate shells which so soon will be prim brown cones. The
bobolinks will sing in the meadows for many weeks. The mountains will
blossom with one color after another till late September brings the
miracle of autumn leaves to set vast ranges aflame from glen to summit,
but only for a little time are the spruces so filled with the full tide
of happiness that they put on their veils of diaphanous gold and their
rosy ornaments of new-born cones. It is worth a trip into the hills and
a long climb to see these at their best, which is when the bobolinks
have eggs in the brown nests in the meadow grass and the blue violets
are smiling up from the rock crevices in the midst of the tumult of
Jackson Falls.
III
CLIMBING IRON MOUNTAIN
_Some Joys of an Easy Ascent Near Jackson_
The dawn lingers long in the depths of the deciduous woods that line
the eastern slope of Iron Mountain. You may hear the thrushes singing
matins in the green gloom after the sun has peered over Thorn and
lighted the grassy levels in the hollow where Jackson wakes to the
carols of field-loving birds. The veery is the bellman to this choir,
ringing and singing at the same time, unseen in the shadows, the
notes of bell and song mingling in his music till the two are one,
the very tocsin of a spirit in the high arches of the dim woodland
temple, calling all to prayer. The wood thrushes respond, serene in
the knowledge of all good, voices of pure and holy calm, rapturous
indeed, but only with the pure joy of worship and thoughts of things
most high. So it is with the hermit thrushes that sing with them, nor
shall you know the voice of the hermit from that of the wood thrush by
greater purity of tone or exaltation of spirit, though perhaps it falls
to the hermits to voice the more varied passages of the music. Of all
bird songs that of these thrushes seems to be most worshipful and to
touch the purest responsive chords in the human heart. As they lead
the wayfarer's spirit upward, so they seem to lead his feet toward the
mountain top, the cool forest shades where they sing alternating with
sunny glades as he scales the heights with the mountain road, which
climbs prodigiously.
Way up the mountain the sunny glades widen in places to mountain
farms, their pastures set on perilous slants, so that one wonders if
the cattle do not sometimes roll down till checked by the woodland
growth below, but their cultivated fields more nearly level, spots
seemingly crushed out of the slopes by the weight of giant footsteps,
descending. The wooded growth and ledges of the summit leap upward from
the southern and western edges of these clearings, but to the north
and east the glance passes into crystal mountain air and penetrates
it mile on mile to the blue summits that cut the horizon in these
directions. Far below lie the valleys, with the smaller hills that
seem so high from the grassy plains about Jackson village smudged and
flattened from crested land waves to ripples. Highest of all mountain
cots is the Hayes farm-house, its well drawing ice water from frozen
caverns deep in the heart of the height and its northern outlook such
as should breed heroes and poets through living cheek by jowl with
sublimity. Here the mighty swell of the mountain sea has sunk the
rippling hills below, but the sweep of crested land waves leaps on,
high above them. Looking eastward, one seems to be watching from the
lift and roll of an ocean liner's prow as the great ship runs down a
gale. Out from far beneath you and beyond roar toppling blue crests,
ridge piling over ridge. Thorn Mountain, Tin and Eagle are the nearer
waves, their outline rising and falling and showing beyond them Black
Mountain and the two summits of Doublehead, and beyond them Shaw and
Gemini and Sloop, great billows rising and rolling on. Down upon the
forest foam left behind in the hollows of these rides the Carter Moriah
Range, a jagged, onrushing ridge, driven by the same gale. The day may
be calm to all senses but the eye, yet there is the sea beneath you and
beyond, tossed mountain high by the tempest.
* * * * *
To turn from the tumult to things near by is to find the forests of
the mountain coming down through the pastures to look in friendly
fashion over the walls at the clean mowing fields. On these they do
not encroach, and though they continually press in upon the pastures
and narrow their boundaries they do it gently and with such patient
urbanity that the open spaces hardly know when they cease to be and the
woodland occupies them. The flowers of the pasture sunshine grow thus
for years in the forest shadows before they realize that they are out
of place and hasten back to seek the full sunshine, and the trillium
and clintonia and a host of other shade-loving things move out into
the open and mingle with the buttercups and blue violets, sure that
the trees will follow them. Thus gently does nature repair the ravages
that have been wrought by the hand of man. Yet all through the mountain
region she moves on, and fewer farms nestle in the giants' footfall on
the high ridges than were there fifty or a hundred years ago. In many
cases the summer hotel or the summer residence has taken the place of
the one-time farm-house, but the dwellers in these encourage the wood
rather than hold it at bay. The lumbermen make sad havoc among the big
trees, but the forest acreage is greater in the mountains now than it
was a century ago, more than making up in breadth what it loses in
height.
In this low growth of the pastures about the farms high on Iron
Mountain the June sunshine seems to pass into living forms of plant and
animal life. Not only do the dandelions and buttercups blossom with
their gold in all the moist, rich soil, but out of the green of forest
leaves and the deep shadows of the wood it flutters upon quivering
wings. The yellow warblers that flit and sing vigorously among the
young birches are touched with the olive of the gentler shadows, but as
they sing their vigorous "Wee-chee, chee, chee, cher-wee" their plumage
is as full of the sunshine gold as are the dandelion blooms. The
myrtle warblers of the spiring spruces, the magnolias, Blackburnians,
mourning, Canadian and Wilson's, are flecked with it, and the forest
shadows that touch them too only seem to bring it out the more clearly.
But these are birds of the wood or its edges. In the trees that stand
clear of the forest the goldfinches sing as if they were canaries,
caged within the limits of the farm, their gold the brightest of all
that which the birds show, the black of their wings densest, the color
of night in the bottom of the glen, under evergreens. The thrushes that
sing in the deep woods far down the mountain chant prayers, even until
noon, the warblers in a thousand trees twitter simple ditties that are
the mother-goose melodies of the forest world, cosy, fireside refrains
hummed over and over again, but the goldfinches are the choristers of
the summer sunshine when it floods the open spaces. They seem to be
the familiar bird spirits of summer on the little mountain farms.
* * * * *
As the sunshine blossoms from the mountain meadows, as it flits and
sings in the forest margins and in the goldfinch-haunted trees of the
open farm, so it is born even from the twigs in the deeper wood, far
up above the highest farm on the way to the summit of Iron Mountain.
Great yellow butterflies, tiger swallowtails, flutter in the dapple of
light and shadow, their gold the sunlight that flows across them as
they sail by. A few days ago not one of these soaring beauties was in
all the woodland; then, of a day, the place was alive with them. Born
of chrysalids that have wintered under dry bark and in the shelter of
rocks and fallen leaves, passing unharmed through gales and cold that
registered forty below and six feet of hardened snow? Nonsense! Watch
the play of sunlight on young leaves of transparent green. See it
flame with shining gold, stripe them with rippling shadows of twigs,
and then see the whole quiver into free life and flutter away, a
tiger-swallowtail butterfly, and believe these spirits of the woodland
shadows are born in any other way, if you can. Papilio turnus may
come out as chrysalids in scientists' insectaries, but these woodland
sprites are born of the love of sunshine for young leaves and quiver
into June to be the first messengers of the full tide of summer, which
neither comes up to the mountains from the south nor falls to them from
the sky, but is a miracle of the same desire.