path before you plunges to shade immediately and is to give you little
more than a dapple of sunlight for five miles. Yet it is a wide and
easy way for most of the distance, for which the chance traveller
may thank the lumbermen, whose road it follows, and the Appalachian
Mountain Club. The lumbermen opened it. The Appalachians have kept
it up since the tote road was abandoned. They even have mowed its
grassy stretches each spring, lest some fair Appalachian pilgrim set
her foot upon a garter snake, inadvertently and without malice, and
henceforward abjure mountaineering. A half-dozen brooks splash down
the mountain-side and cross this trail, all for the slaking of your
thirst, and if you do not find the garter snake to step on you may have
a porcupine. Indeed, to judge from my own experience, the porcupine is
the more likely footstool. Just before you round the low shoulder of
Wildcat Mountain to enter the Notch is a burnt region full of gaunt
dead trees, and this neighborhood grows porcupines in quantity, also in
bulk. One of them looms as big as a bear at the first glimpse of him
in the trail ahead, and if he happens to start from almost beneath your
foot as you step over a rock, giving that queer little half squeal,
half grunt of his, you are momentarily sure that you have kicked up
Ursus Major himself.
But though the porcupine may squeal and move for a few shambling steps
with some degree of quickness, he is by no means afraid of you. He just
moves off a few feet, turns his back, shakes out his quills till they
all point true, then waits for you to rush at him and bite him from
behind--waits with a wicked grin in his little eye as he leers over his
shoulder at you. Then if nothing happens he shambles awkwardly away
into the shadows of the forest. If something does happen it is the
aggressor that shambles away with a mouthful of barbed, needle-pointed
quills. But then, why should anyone bite a porcupine? They do not even
look edible, and judging by the numbers of them that strayed casually
out of the path round the shoulder of Wildcat that day nothing has
eaten any of them for a long time, else there had not been so many. In
this burnt district you get a glimpse of Carter Mountain on the other
side of the notch you are about to enter and then you plunge again into
deeper woods on the west side, under the cliffs of Wildcat, whose very
frown is hidden from you by the high trees.
The cool, shadowy depths here will always be marked in my mind as
the place of great gray toads. I saw several of these right by the
path, six-inch long chaps, looking very wise and old and having more
markings of white than I ever before saw on a toad, besides a white
streak all the way down the backbone. The place is as beautiful as
these bright-eyed, curious creatures, and as uncanny. Mossy boles of
great trees rise through its gloom and through the perfumed air comes
the cool drip of waters. Moss is deep, and over it and the rough,
lichen-clad rocks grows the Linnæa, holding up its pink blooms, fairy
pipes for the pukwudgies to smoke. Here out of high cliffs have fallen
great rocks which lie about the patch in mighty confusion. Here are
caves, little and big, that might shelter all the hedgehogs roaming
the fire-swept mountain-side below, and as many bears. Yet neither
porcupines nor bears appeared, or any other living things except the
great white-mottled toads, that would not hop aside for my foot, but
sat and gazed at me with the calm patience of woodland deities.
Then the path swung sharp down the hill through lesser trees that
gave a glimpse of the high frown of Carter cliffs, swimming in the
sky above, and then--I wonder if every pilgrim does not at this point
laugh with pure joy and caper a bit on road-weary legs, for here in
the gruesome depths of the great Notch, at the climax point of its
wildness, is a little clear mountain lake where surely no lake could
be, set in thousand-ton fragments of mighty broken ledges. To look
north is to see a little barrier of wooded ridge stretching across from
side to side of the place, and between the eye and this a low barrier
of wood growth among great rocks, behind which is the air of empty
space. I pushed through this, expecting a crater, and behold! Here is
another little round lake with lily pads floating on its surface, and
beyond this an open space in the woods and the A. M. C. camp.
[Illustration: The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Carter Notch]
The time was early afternoon of one of the longest days of the year,
and the sun sent a cloudburst of gold a thousand feet down the
perpendicular cliffs of Wildcat Mountain and flooded the highest source
of Wildcat River with it. The north wind poured its wine over the ridge
and set the surface of the little lake to dancing with silver lights
such as had greeted me in the river far below, in the boulders along
the way, and in the spangles of the thousands of fritillary wings that
had fluttered and folded as I passed. Here is the crucible for the
making of these fairy gems, and I dare say the wise old toads from the
shadows on the side of Wildcat just above are the sorcerers whence the
tinkering trolls learned the trick of their manufacture.
I had to wait but a little while, however, to know the difference.
Stretched on the slope on the farther shore of the flashing lake, I
watched the sun swing in behind the high pinnacle of a wildcat cliff
that leaps from the water's edge almost a thousand feet in air, its
sheer sides embroidered by the green of young birch leaves. I had
left the full tide of early summer in the Jackson meadows. Here it was
early spring. There the strawberries were over ripe, here the blossoms
were but opening their white petals, and the mountain moosewood and
mountain ash, there long gone to seed, were here just in the height of
bloom. By the lake side the Labrador tea offers its felt-slipper leaves
for the refreshment of weary travellers who may thus drink from fairy
shoon; nor need one go to the trouble of steeping, for the round heads
of delicate white bloom send forth a styptic, aromatic fragrance that
is as tonic as the air on which it floats. A drone of wild bees was in
this air, and looking up the cliff toward the sun a million wings of
tiny, fluttering insects made a glittering mist.
But even then the shadow of the pinnacle of the great cliff fell on
the western margin of the pool and, as I lay and watched it, moved
majestically out across the waters. It wiped the golden glow and the
fluttering sheen of insects from the air, the glitter from the surface
of the lake, and spread a cool mystery of twilight over all things
which it touched. A chill walked the waters from the base of the cliff,
whose rough rock brows frowned where the birches but an hour before
had smiled, and all the hobgoblins of the wild Notch showed themselves
in the advancing shadows. Rock sphinxes and dead-tree dragons suddenly
appeared, and as the afternoon advanced so did the shadows of Wildcat
Mountain, sweeping across the narrow defile and bringing forth all its
weird and sinister aspects.
The way to the light of day lies down the stream southerly. But there
is no stream. The waters of the upper lake flow to the other one
beneath a great jumble of broken ledges, and then go on to form the
stream farther down under a titanic rock barrier of shattered cliff
and interspersed caverns. Gnarled and dwarfed spruces climb all over
this great barrier, and so may a man if he have patience and will step
carefully on the arctic moss which clothes the rocks and gives roothold
to the spruces, watchful lest it slip from under him and drop him into
the caverns of unknown depth below. It is a region of wild beauty of
desolation even with the sun on it, and after the shadow of Wildcat
has climbed it, its rough loneliness has something almost sinister
about it. Only when its topmost rock is surmounted and the valley below
shows down the Notch, still bathed in sunshine and peaceful in its
green beauty and its rim of blue mountains far beyond, may one forget
the weird spell which the shadows have cast on him in the very heart of
the chasm. Here is the scintillant world of the Wildcat River valley
once more, still bathed in sunshine, though the shadows of the range to
westward creep rapidly toward its centre. I had seen the heart of its
beginnings at the moment when the toiling trolls were at their work. I
had seen the weirder spirits cast their mantle over the place, and far
down the Notch I could hear the little river calling me to come down
to it again as I scrambled off this giant's causeway to the friendly
leading of the path and went on down through the region of great gray
toads to the slope of a thousand porcupines, and on to where the
footpath way enters the road. The smile of sunshine had gone from the
face of the valley and the night shadows of Wildcat and its spurs were
drawn across it, but only for a little was it sombre. With the darkness
came a million scintillations of firefly lights in all its grasses,
and out of the clear blue of the sky above twinkled back the answering
stars.
VII
UP TUCKERMAN'S RAVINE
_Day and Night Along the Short Trail to Mount Washington Summit_
The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine holds winter in its
heart all summer long. In the sweltering heat of the early July weather
it is an unborn glacier, a solid mass of compacted snow and ice, two
hundred feet in vertical diameter and spreading fan-fashion across the
whole head of the ravine. Out from under it rumbles a stream of ice
water, and it still makes danger for the mountain climber on the upper
part of the path which climbs the head wall of the ravine and goes
on, up to the summit of Mount Washington. All winter long the north
wind sweeps the snow over the round ridge between the summit cone and
Boott's Spur and drifts it down the perpendicular face of rock which
stands above the beginning of the ravine. There are summers when the
heat of the sun, beating directly upon this glacial mass, melts it
away. There are others when it lingers till the snows of autumn come to
build upon it again.
[Illustration: "The snow arch at the head of Tuckerman's Ravine holds
winter in its heart all summer long"]
He who would do much mountain climbing in a comparatively short
distance will do well to go up Mount Washington by the Tuckerman
Ravine. A good motor road leads from Jackson to Gorham, and on, and the
trail leaves this nine miles above Jackson. A. M. C. signs and the feet
of thousands of mountain lovers have made the path's progress plain,
but for a further sign the wilderness sends the swish of Cutler River,
flashing over its boulders, to the ear all the way up to the snow arch,
and it serves free ice water for the refreshment of travellers. Only
in rare spots does this tiny torrent find time to make placid pools.
All the rest of the way it leaps boulders, shelters trout in clear,
bubbling depths, and makes its longest, maddest plunges at the cliffs
down which foam the Crystal Cascades. Here, at the end of your first
half-mile of ascent, you may lie in the shadow of maple and white
birch on the brink of a narrow gulf, see the white joy of the river as
it makes its swiftest plunge toward the sea, and listen to the myriad
voices in which it tells the lore of the lonely ravine which the waters
have traversed from the very summit of the head wall. No water comes
down the Crystal Cascade that is not beaten into a foam as white as
the quartz vein in which it has its very beginnings, high up the cone
of the summit. It is as if this quartz were here turned to liquid life
which spurts in a million joyous arches from the black rock which it
touches and leaves more nimbly than the feet of fleeing mountain sheep.
There are wonderfully beautiful pink flushes in this white quartz and
you may see them as you go up the path to the summit above the alpine
gardens of the plateau. But you do not have to climb that far to see
them. The same colors of dawn are in the cascade when the sun filters
through the leaves and touches those curves of beauty in which the
river laughs down to its wedding with the Ellis in the heart of the
Pinkham Notch.
In the heart of the snow arch is winter. On its steadily receding
southern margin all through July is a continual dawn of spring. As the
snow recedes the alders emerge bare and leafless. A rod down stream
they are tinged green with the beginnings of crinkly leaves and have
hung out their long staminate tassels of bloom. Another rod and they
are in full leafage and the staminate tassels have given place to the
brown seed cones. These mountain alders have a singularly crimped rich
green leaf, and they so love the snow water torrents of Tuckerman's
Ravine that they stand in them where they plunge in steepest gullies
down the cliffs, bearing their tremendous buffeting with steadfast
forgiveness. Sometimes the freshets skin them alive and leave them
rooted with their white bones yearning down stream as if to follow the
water that killed them. The torrents hurl rocks down and crush them,
and always the downpour of water and mountain-side has bent them till
in the steepest places they grow downward, their tips only struggling
to bend toward the sky. Yet still in July they put out their bright
green, corrugated leaves, array themselves in the beauty of golden
tassels flecked with dark brown, and scatter pollen gold on the waters
that now prattle so lovingly by.
In places the river-side banks are white with stars of Houstonia and
the lilac alpine violets nod from slender stems nearby. Down the high
cliffs the mountain avens climbs and sets its golden blooms in the
most inaccessible places, flowers from the low valleys and the alpine
heights thus mingling and making the deep ravine sweet with fragrance
and wild beauty. The rough cliffs loom upward to frowning heights on
three sides, but on their dizziest gray pinnacles the fearless wild
flowers root and garland their crags, clinging in crevices from summit
to base. With equal courage the alders have climbed them till they can
peer at the very summit of the high mountain across the wind-swept
alpine garden.
[Illustration: "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"]
By the middle of the afternoon the shadows of the heights begin to wipe
the sunshine from the upper end of the ravine and the shade of the head
wall marches grandly out, over the snow arch and on, down stream. The
long twilight begins then and moves out to Hermit Lake by six. 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. The lake is, indeed, a hermit, dwelling
always apart in its hollow among the spiring spruces, a tiny level of
water, strangely beautiful for its placidity amid all the turmoil and
grandeur about it. From its boggy margin the morning of the day that I
reached it a big buck had drank and left his hoof prints plain in the
mud among the short grasses. I waited long at evening for him to come
back, but the only signs of life about the margins were the voices
of three green frogs that cried "t-u-g-g-g" to one another by turns.
One living long here might well measure the flight of time on a clear
afternoon and evening by the changes of color in the lake. It is but a
shallow pool, but you look through the mud of its bottom and see far
below, by the inverted spires of the marginal trees, into infinite
depths of a blue that is that of the sky but clarified and intensified
by the clear waters from which it shines till it is to the eye as
perfect and inspiring as a clear musical note that leaps out of silence
to the longing ear.
* * * * *
As the day passes this color in the lake deepens and changes in
rhythmical cadences till twilight brings a deep green, through which
you see the inverted ravine below you more clearly than above. The one
clear note has swelled into a symphony of color through which floats
one entrancing tone, as sometimes lifts a clear soprano voice out of
the fine harmony of the chorus, the pink of sunset fleece of clouds a
mile above the head wall of the ravine. As the day fades, so does this
high, clear tone, and the advancing night deepens the green to a black
that is silence,--a silence that is velvety in body but scintillant
with the glint of stars.
Through all this symphony of changing color a single hermit sang till
the blackness of night welled up to the spruce top in which he sat,
and as if to keep him company one or two wood warblers piped from the
very darkness beneath where it seemed too dark for full songs, and
they sang fragments only, too brief for me to identify the singers.
From the lake itself came the voices of the three green frogs, speaking
prophetically through the night with the single, authoritative words of
true prophets. Just for a moment at dusk, from the icy waters of the
stream above the lake, came a guttural chorus which I took to be that
of tree frogs, which croak in the woodland pools of Massachusetts in
March.
In the clear waters that run from the perpetual winter of the snow arch
I had seen two of these frogs, of the regulation wood frog size and
shape but wonderfully changed in color. Instead of the usual brown,
here were frogs that were cream white throughout save for a black patch
from the muzzle across either eye extending in a faint line down the
side nearly to the hind leg. They seemed like spirit frogs with all
the dross in their epidermis washed out by the solvent purity of that
icy snow water in which they constantly dwell. In these same pools
of the icy stream were caddice-fly larvæ which had woven armor for
themselves with a warp of the usual spider-web threads and a filling of
tiny stones. But their stones were the scales of mica with which the
bottoms of the pools are paved, and as they slowly moved about they
were sheathed in rainbows of sky reflections in these tiny surfaces.
Such wonders of beauty has the heart of the high mountain for all that
dwell in the depths of its ravines.
In the blackness of full night the song of the falling waters is the
only sound that one hears in the ravine. This is an ever-varying
multitone into which he who listens may read all the day sounds he has
ever heard. The still air takes up the mingled voices of tiny cataracts
and tosses them from one wall to another, and there are places along
the path where this sound is that of a big locomotive engine with steam
up, stopping at a station, the chu-chu of the air brakes coming to the
ear with a definiteness that is startling. In other spots the echo of
trampers' voices sound till one is sure that a belated party is on the
trail and will arrive later to share the hospitality of the camp.
[Illustration: The Appalachian Mountain Club camp in Tuckerman's
Ravine]
Through it all rings the gentle lullaby of the wilderness, the drone
of all the winds of a thousand years in the spruce tops and the crisp
tinkle of clashing crystals when an ice storm has bowed the white
birches till their limbs clash together in the xylophonic music of
winter. All these and more are in the song which lulled me to slumber
on the borders of Hermit Lake,--a slumber so deep and restful that I
did not know when the porcupines came and ate thirteen holes in the
rubber blanket in which I was wrapped to keep out the cold of the
snow arch which creeps down the ravine behind the shadow of the head
wall. Thirteen is an unlucky number when it represents holes in one's
blanket, and the chill of interstellar space wells deep in Tuckerman's
Ravine toward morning of a night in early July.
* * * * *
Twilight begins again by three o'clock. One may well wonder what time
the hermit thrush has to sleep, he sings so long into the night and
begins again before the dawn is much more than a dream of good to
come. As the light grows the castellated ridge of Boott's Spur shows
fantastic shapes against the sky, and the pinnacle of the Lion's Head
which looms so high above Hermit Lake glooms sternly with grotesque
rock faces which are carved like gargoyles along its ravineward margin.
Beauty wreathes the cliffs in this wildest of spots, but goblins grow
in the rock itself and peer from the wreaths to make their friendliness
more complete by gruesome contrast. One wakes shivering and longs for
the sun of midsummer to come out of the northeast over the slope of
Mount Moriah and warm him. Far below in Pinkham Notch the night mists
have collected in a white lake that heaves as if beneath its blanket
slept the giant who carved the stairs over beyond Montalban Ridge. But
the giant too is waiting for the sun, and though he stirs uneasily in
his waking he does not toss off the blanket till it shines well over
Carter Range and the day has fairly begun. The ravine gets the morning
early at Hermit Lake. The widening slopes lie open to the light, but
the Lion's Head jealously guards the snow arch and seems to withdraw
its long shadow with reluctance. By and by the sun shines full upon
the great white bank, and as at the pyramid of Memnon strikes music
from it with the increasing tinkle of falling water.
By this time the stirring of the giant's blanket has tossed off
woolly fleeces from its upper side, and these climb toward the ravine
in wraiths of diaphanous mist that now dance rapidly along the tree
tops, now linger and shiver together as if fearful of the heights
which they essay. These follow me as I toil laboriously up the almost
perpendicular slope along the snow margin toward the head wall, and by
the time I have worked around the dangerous glacial mass and surmounted
the cliffs they are massed along the cold slope and seem to mingle with
the snow into an opaque, nebulous mystery.
For a long time these do not get beyond the brow of the cliff. Now they
bed down together, as dense and as full of rainbow colors under the
sun as is mother-of-pearl, again little fluffs dare the climb toward
the summit, fluttering with fear as they proceed and fainting into
invisibility in the thin air that flows across the alpine garden. Tiny
streams from the base of the high cone slip down the rocks to them and
whisper in soft voices that they need have no fear, but whether it is
fright or the compelling power of the sun that now shouts mid morning
warmth over Carter Notch, these thin pioneers hesitate and vanish as
the main body sweeps up from the Crystal Cascade and Glen Ellis Falls
and fills all the lower ravines with that white blanket that began
to stir at daybreak so far below. The giant is awake, has tossed his
bed-clothes high in air, and is striding away along the Notch behind
their shielding fluff.
I fancy him clumping up the Gulf of Slides and over to the ravines of
Rocky Branch on his way to see if those stairs he built are still in
order in spite of the disintegrating forces so steadily at work pulling
the mountains down. Listening on the top wall of Tuckerman's I can hear
these forces at work and do not wonder that he is uneasy. The steady
flow of white water in a million tiny cascades is filing the rocks away
all day long. But the water does far more than this. It seeps down into
the cracks in the great cliffs, swells there with the winter freezing,
and presses the walls apart.
[Illustration: "The giant is awake, has tossed his bed-clothes high
in air, and is striding away along the notch behind their shielding
fluff"]
It dissolves and excavates beneath hanging rocks and cunningly
undermines them till gravity pulls them from their perch and sends them
down to swell the great masses of débris all along the bottoms of the
ravine sides. Sitting on the head wall I hear one of them go every few
minutes. Often it is only the click and patter of a pebble obeying that
ever present force as it bounds from ledge to ledge down the wall. But
sometimes a larger fragment leaps out at the mysterious command and
crashes down, splintering itself or what it strikes on the way to the
bottom. My own climbing feet dislodged many that have caught on other
fragments, and in the steeper, more crumbled portions of the path each
climber does his share in producing miniature slides. Except on rare
occasions the fall of the mountains is slight, but it is continually
going on wherever peaks rise and cliffs overhang.