then as I scrambled through its rough forest aisles the mountains
looked down on me through a gap in the trees, frowning so portentously
from such overhanging heights that I was minded to jump and flee from
the imminent annihilation. For, after all, the beauty of flowers and
the friendliness of birds, the architectural decorations of the firs
and spruces, even the monster semblances of the rock carvings that
overhang, are but the embroidery on the real impression of the Crawford
Notch. To get this it is well to go down the long slope of the highway,
ten miles and more, till you emerge below Sawyer's River where Hart's
Ledge frowns high above Cobb's Ferry. Thus you shall know something
of the length of this tremendous fold in the rock ribs of the earth.
Here is no work of erosion alone. The Notch was made primarily by the
bending of the granite of the mountains that rise in such tremendous
sweeps on either side to heights of thousands of feet. On most of their
swift-slanting sides some dirt and débris of rock has accumulated and
the forest has clothed them, but this clothing is thin and in many
places the slant is so swift and the surface so smooth that the rock
lies bare to the sun, and all streams have swept it clean. In August
little water comes down these, but there is the bare channel of brown
rock up which one may look from the highway, taking in the whole sweep
of a stream at a glance. At the bottom of these swift glissades the
tangled piles of smashed rocks show with what force the waters come
down when floods push them.
[Illustration: "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"]
Thus 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 is swept clear
in great spaces where now only a little water comes moistening the
upper rim of rocks, spreads, and evaporates before it has passed over
the slanting, sun-heated surface. All the way down the glen, to the
Willey House, to Bemis, and on to Sawyer's River, one looks to the
right and left up to rock heights swimming more than a thousand feet in
air, bare, immanent, cleft and caverned, and often carved to strange
semblances of man or beast. Crawford Notch is a veritable museum of
gigantic fantasies.
Most impressive of all it is to pause at the site of the Willey
House and look back toward the gateway of the Notch, through which
you have come. Here the mighty bulk of Mount Willard lifts sheer
from the tree-carpeted floor, six hundred and seventy feet in air, a
mountain that once in semi-molten form flowed into place across the
wide valley and blocked it with a solid rock, overhanging, seamed
and wrinkled, showing projecting buttresses and withdrawing caverns,
a rock so solidly knit and compact that the wear of the ages on it
has been infinitesimal. On the summit of this cliff are the hammer
marks of frost. These blows and the solvent seep of rain may take
from the mountain a sixteenth of an inch in a hundred years, but the
disintegrating power that splits ledges and hurls hundred-ton rock from
precipices seems never to have worked on this cliff, so perpendicularly
high and mighty does it stand.
* * * * *
First or last the visitor to the Notch will do well to climb Willard
and see it as a whole. An easy carriage road makes the ascent, stopping
well back from the brow of this tremendous cliff. Willard is hardly
a mountain. It is rather a spur, a projecting ledge of the Rosebrook
Range, whose peaks, Tom, Avalon and Field, tower far above it. But on
this great ledge of Willard one is swung high in air in the very middle
of the upper entrance to the Notch. Hundreds of feet of it are above
him still, but thousands are below, and he looks down the tremendous
valley as the soaring eagle might. Soothed by distance the rough valley
bottom seems as level as a floor, its forest growth but a green carpet
on which certain patterns stand out distinctly, the warp of green
deciduous growth being filled with a dainty woof of fir, spruce and
pine. To the left the bulk of Webster blocks the horizon.
[Illustration: In the heart of Crawford Notch, the summit of Jackson on
the distant horizon]
To the right the glance goes by Willey and on down to Bemis and Nancy,
and the blue peaks of other more distant mountains that peer over them.
From the head wall of the Great Gulf, looking down between Chandler
Ridge and the Northern Peaks of the Presidential Range, one gets a view
of a wonderful mountain gorge. The outlook from Mount Franklin, down
the mighty expanse of Oakes Gulf to its opening into the Crawford glen
below Frankenstein Cliff is, to me, more impressive still. But greatest
of all in its beauty of detail and its simplicity of might and grandeur
is this ever-narrowing, ten-mile chasm, this mighty, deep fold of rock
strata that begins below Sawyer's River and ends where the enormous
rock which is Mount Willard so pinches the gateway to the Notch that
the railroad burrows, the highway excavates and the tiny brook which
is the beginning of the Saco River dives out of sight between the two,
to reappear in that "dismal pool" which lies at the very bottom of the
nick of the Notch.
XIV
UP MOUNT JACKSON
_The Climb from Crawford's Through an Enchanting Forest_
Off Mount Jackson runs a tiny brook. I do not know its name, but
because it is the very beginning of the Saco River and because it
empties into Saco Lake, I fancy it is Saco Brook. Whatever its name it
is fortunate above most White Mountain brooks in that the lumbermen
have kept away from it for half a century or so and the great growth
of an ancient forest shadows it. At the bottom of this it dances down
ledges and under prostrate trunks of trees that have stood their time
and been pushed over by the wind, and as it goes it splashes joyously
to itself in a liquid flow of language that has as many variations
of syllables and intonations as has human speech. On either side its
winding staircase in the forest old, old hemlocks rise in columnar
dignity and great yellow birches spread the climbing walls of its
passageway with a leafy tapestry of gold and green, their once crisp,
sun-imprisoning curls of yellow bark all gray with age and as shaggy as
those on a centenarian's head. Through such shady glens of cool delight
the little brook calls the path up Jackson from its beginnings at the
cellar-hole of the old Crawford homestead and the path responds gladly,
climbing within sound of this melodious monologue a pleasant part of
the way.
Even after it turns, reluctantly one thinks, to breast the slope
southward and leave the friendly brook behind, the way leads still
through this fine old forest whose moist gloaming fosters the growth of
all mosses and through them in turn makes the forest tenure secure. Nor
does it pass into the full sun until its two and three-quarters miles
to the summit of Jackson are all but completed and it climbs steeply
out of dwarf firs and spruces to surmount the bare dome. How excellent
the moist moss which deeply clothes stumps, stones and all things else,
is for the growing of firs and hemlocks may be easily seen. Here no
seedling need fail to grow for lack of moisture, even if it fall on
the very top of a high rock. Here is a fir, for instance, beside the
path up by Bugle Cliff. Its first rootlets ran from the very top of a
boulder down each side of it through this soft, moist covering of moss
till they reached the ground beneath. There as the years have passed
they sunk deep and the fir has become a fine tree, though the base of
its trunk is five feet from the ground and its two big roots straddle
the rock on which they first found frail tenure in the thin covering
of moss. Once let the sun in on this to dry out the moisture and the
seedling would have evaporated with it. Thus the trees protect the moss
and the moss protects the trees. Remove either one and the other must
go.
* * * * *
This golden gloom and persistent moisture fosters other evergreen
growth than firs and mosses. Here thrives and grows beautiful the
spinulose wood fern, which seems peculiarly the fern of the high
mountain slopes. But more conspicuous along this path to the summit of
Jackson are the polypodys. The polypody stands drought or cold equally
well. In either it shrivels and seems to wither, but let the warmth or
moisture needed come back and the seemingly blighted fronds fill out
and are vigorously alive once more. I often find polypodys in summer
on exposed rocks seemingly crisp and dead with the drought. But when
the September rains have soaked them I come by again and find them
growing as huskily as before. Yet for all their persistence throughout
weather torment these ferns are most beautiful and luxuriant in spots
where moisture persists, and they have uninterrupted growth throughout
their summer season. Such a spot is the deep wood along this trail, and
there, on such rocks as they favor, the polypodys set close fronds of
a green that seems singularly bright and rich in shade. It may be that
the diffused gold of the sunlight in such places brings out greens at
their best, but surely nowhere else have I found these little ferns at
once so luxuriant in growth and so beautiful in color.
For all that, not all rocks in this delectable woodland bear the
picturesque decoration of the polypody fronds. Up by Bugle Cliff are
two great cubical boulders. On the level top of one of these is a
splendid garden of the little ferns. They cover it with an even matted
growth that looks like a marvellously woven and decorated mat covering
a mighty footstool that might have been left behind by some recently
departing race of giants. Yet within a stone's throw of it is another
rock, quite like it in size and shape, on which one or two straggling
ferns are trying to get a foothold, but with very indifferent
success. So through this as other woodlands it seems to be with the
polypody, which is without doubt a fern of feminine nature in spite
of its sturdiness. With one rock Miss Polypody will dwell in woodland
seclusion most happily all her days; with another of similar shape and
size she will have no dallying. The cause is no doubt to be sought in
the character of the rock rather than in its figure or consistency. The
polypody has a predilection for lime, and it is probable that the rocks
which they decorate so faithfully have their characters sweetened by
this ingredient.
But in these forest shades if every stone may not bear wilful Miss
Polypody upon its breast none goes without decoration of beauty.
Without the mosses and lichens the ferns would find little chance for
life in any forest, and here they cover all things with a beauty that
is as profuse as it is delicate. No rock nor stump nor growing trunk of
forest tree but has these, so wonderfully blended in their grays and
greens, their olives and browns, that the eye accepts them as a whole
and, in such perfect harmony is their adornment, half the time fails to
note that they are there at all. Yet one has but to pick out a definite
spot and examine it for a moment to be impressed with the prodigality
of beauty of the whole. Here, for instance, not far from the point
where the trail up Mount Webster diverges from that up Jackson, is a
pathside rock of rough, micaceous granite such as mosses love. Its
surface slopes like a lean-to roof toward the north and is but a foot
or two square. It is no more beautifully, no more diversely decorated
than ten thousand other rocks which one may see along the trail. Yet
here is a harmony of blending and contrasting colors and forms such
as the cleverest human artist with all the fabrics and all the dyes of
Christendom might labor in vain to produce.
Tiny fern-like fronds of the dainty cedar moss weave across it a
tapestry of golden green, a feathery fabric such as only fairy workmen,
laboring patiently for long years, can produce. Yet it is a fabric
common to the whole wood, carpeting and upholstering its inequalities
for miles. Into this is sparingly wrought an over-pattern of deeper
green tufts of the hairy-cap moss, sending up slender stems headed with
fruitage and holding the pointed caps which are the fairy headgear. To
note these is to realize suddenly that the fairies are still at work
under the shadow of the warp and woof of the fabric, though they are
too nimble to be seen, however suddenly one may lift it. It is easy to
lift the hairy caps, but I refrain. To take even one away is to spoil
the perfect symmetry of this pattern which is so complete that every
detail, even the most minute, is needed for the harmony of the whole.
On one side an hepatic lichen spreads a rosette-like decoration of
purple-brown edged with silvery gray, a color that has its answering
glints all through the structure of the cedar moss and which joins the
brown hepatic in all its roughness to this dainty background.
In another spot is the gray mist of a clump of reindeer lichen, a
fine, soft, green-gray mist, blowing across from the other lichen's
edge and clouding with its filmy fluff a tiny portion of the picture.
It is thus that summer clouds float over the green tops of the forest
trees on some days and shadow them with a gray mist for a moment. The
reindeer lichen is growing on the stone, but it has all the effect of
being blown across it, and I know well that if I look away for a moment
it will be gone when I look back. Diagonally across the rock runs a
bar dextra of Clintonia leaves, loosely laid in shining green, and in
certain groups are the trifoliate scallops of the wood-sorrel. The
whole is like a shield of one of the great knights of Arthur's court,
heraldic emblazonry thick upon it, hung here in the greenwood while its
bearer rests upon his arms or drinks perhaps from the waters of the
Silver Cascade brook which I hear swishing coolly down the glen not far
away.
But all this decoration, so wonderfully harmonious, so minutely
complete in itself, is, on this particular rock, but a background
for a clump of pure white Indian pipe blooms, growing in its centre.
Ghostlily beautiful, their white glowing by contrast in the green gloom
of the place, these blossoms seem the plant embodiment of the cool echo
of falling waters that slips along the aisles of flickering, golden
light between the brown, straight columns of the firs and hemlocks. The
nodding, pallid flowers are as soothing to the sight as is this soft
whisper of descending streams to the ear. The forest writes the word
"hush" in letters of the Indian pipe blooms.
* * * * *
With eye and ear as well as muscles rested, I go on to the steeper
ascent which the path makes through a tangle of firs that diminish in
size but increase in numbers as the elevation increases. For long it
climbs within sound of Silver Cascade brook, but finally gets too high
for it and passes into a little section of silver forest, where for a
space all the firs are dead. Most of them still stand erect, the green
all gone out of them. Ghosts of the trees they once were, they stand
silvery gray in the midst of the green wood, as if a patch of moonlight
had forgotten to go when the day came. Into this sunlit place in the
surrounding shade of the forest the mountain goldenrod has come till
its flowers make all the space beneath the dead trees yellow, a very
lake of sunlight. Silver and gold the rocks of the White Mountains may
or may not have in their veins, but the White Mountain forests hold the
two precious metals in nuggets and pockets and veritable placers for
all who will seek.
Not far from this silver forest the path crowds through a dense
tangle of dwarf firs and climbs out upon the rough rock dome of Mount
Jackson, 4112 feet above the sea level, just rising above the tree
line. Here, to be sure, are a few dwarf firs, not knee high, and here
climbs plentifully the resinous perfume of their taller brothers just
below, but the eye has an uninterrupted sweep of the horizon where few
ranges obstruct. Northward, fifteen miles or so across Oakes Gulf,
looms Mount Washington, 2181 feet higher still, and the long ridge of
the southern peaks descends from this to Clinton, a mighty wall of
perpendicular rock set against the sky. The vast basin of the gulf
is always a marvel, with its precipitous walls and its expanse of
forested floor, the forest so distant and so close set that it looks
like the cedar-moss tapestry on the way up; but nowhere is it more
impressive than from the summit of Jackson, with its mighty wall of
the Presidential Range for a background. Southeast Kearsarge lifts
its clean cone over the jumble of mountains that make the northward
walls of the Crawford Notch; southwesterly stands Carrigain, with the
pinnacles of the Sandwich Range far beyond; while westerly Lafayette
rises above Guyot and the Twins, far over Zealand Notch. Under one's
feet, almost, lies the green level of the Fabyan plateau with its huge
hotels giving almost the only human touch to the view. Out of this
depth of distance swings a flock of eaves-swallows, already, like the
occupants of the hotels very likely, planning their southern trip
and discussing accommodations and gastronomic possibilities. In the
upper woods of the trail I had passed through a considerable flock of
Hudsonian chickadees, but these had fallen behind and the only birds of
the summit were the swift passing swallows. Here again were the summit
herbs of the higher hills, the mountain sandwort, mountain cranberry,
creeping snowberry, Labrador tea, all springing from mosses in scant
soil which obtains in the almost level acre of rock which is the top of
the mountain.
* * * * *
It is a place on which to make rendezvous with the winds of the world
and be sure they will meet you there, yet, strange to relate, on my day
on the summit for a long time no winds blew and gauzy-winged insects
from the regions below fluttered lazily over the great rock dome.
Here were colias, hunter's, mourning cloak and mountain fritillary
butterflies, making the place gay with their bright colors. Here were a
score of varieties of diptera and hymenoptera, some of astonishing size
and peculiarities of wing and leg, some of amazing brilliancy of color,
till I wished for a convocation of the Cambridge Entomological Society
to name and describe them for me. None of these unexpected mountain
flyers was difficult to capture. Neither was I, and I was glad when a
sudden breeze from the west sent them all careering down into the Oakes
Gulf whence I dare say they came.
Passing the silver forest on my way down I found my Hudsonian chickadee
friend in numbers in the firs once more. Much as I have been in the
woods about the Presidential Range it is only lately that I have met
these interesting birds, and now I seem to find them in increasing
numbers, at the head of the Notch, on the northerly slope of Mount
Pleasant, and here. I have sought them for long, and at last, as
Thoreau said of the wild geese, they fly over my meridian and I am
able to bag them by shooting up chimney. Perhaps a more reasonable
interpretation would be that now the nestlings are full fledged and
the increased flocks beginning to range far in search of food. August
passes and the wind out of the north has sometimes in it a zest that
collects flocks and sets the migratory instinct to throbbing in many a
bird's breast.
No tang of the north wind could touch the heart of the deep woods
down the trail, but there, too, as I descended I found the promise of
autumn written in many colored characters in the enchanting gloom.
The Clintonias spelled it in the Prussian blue ink of their ripe
berries. The creeping snowberry had done it in white and the Mitchella,
Gaultheria, and Trillium in varying shades of red. Even the Indian
pipe which writes "hush" and "peace" all along the forest floor in
late summer seems in this way to tell of the season of rough winds,
migrating birds and falling scarlet leaves that is just ahead of us.
Its pallid attempt to hold the full glory of the ripened summer where
it is cannot succeed here on the high northern hills where the summer
is at best but a brief sojourner. Rather, for all its desires, it seems
but a pale flower of sleep, presaging that white forgetfulness of snow
that will presently descend through the whispering hemlock leaves and
blot out all this writing on the forest floor.
Ah, these wise old hemlocks of the deep trails of the Northern woods!
These indeed of the forest primeval,
"Bearded with moss, in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar with beards that rest on their bosoms."
These are the wise old men of the woods. Erect and tall, of mighty
compactness of muscles and shaggy headed with deep green, conical capes
shielding crown and shoulders, they seem less trees than woodland
deities, and to stand among them is to be present at an assembly of
demigods of the forest. The wisdom of centuries, blown about the world
by the west winds, finds voice in their whispering leaves, and I,
listening in the cool twilight below, hear it told in forest runes.
Some day someone who loves the woods enough shall learn to translate
this runic rhyme of the harper hemlocks as their tops chant to the west
wind and send the music down the listening forest aisles where the
Indian pipes whitely whisper "hush" and "peace"--and the translator
will be very wise thereby.
He who climbs Jackson shall see much beauty of wild gulfs and rugged
peaks, and this I saw. But more vividly in my memory of the trip
linger the sunny glade under the silver firs all yellow with its flood
of goldenrod, and the moss-clad rocks with their messages written in
white Indian pipe blooms. Most vivid of all is the personality of those
stately old-man hemlocks that stand with such dignity, making the deep
woods along the trail.
XV
CARRIGAIN THE HERMIT
_The Mountain and Its Overlook from the Very Heart of the Hills_
On no peak of the White Mountains does one have so supreme a sense of
uplift as on Carrigain. Here is a mountain for you! No nubble on top of
a huge table-land is Carrigain but a peak that springs lightly into the
unfathomable blue from deep valleys of black forest. So high is this
summit that from it you look through the quivering miles of blue air
right down upon the mountains in the heart of whose ranges it stands
and see them reproduced in faithful miniature below, a relief map on
the scale of an inch to the mile. In the very middle of the mountain
world you see the mountains as the eagle sees them, and so isolated is
the peak that like the eagle you seem to swim in air as you watch.
The black growth of spruce and fir climbs Carrigain from all
directions. Over from Hancock it swarms along the ridge from the
westward. From the Pemigewasset it sweeps upward, and from Carrigain
Notch it leaps twice, once to the round summit of Vose Spur, a clean
bound of almost two thousand feet, then on to another higher point,
and again to the mountain top. Up Signal Ridge from the east and south
it scales almost perpendicular heights for a mile, leaving only the
thin, dizzy edge of this spur bare and going on by the sides to the top
of the main mountain. The path to the summit makes its final assault
through this black growth to the knife edge of Signal Ridge by one of
the most desperately perpendicular climbs in the whole region. One or
two trails are steeper, a little, notably part of that from Crawford
Notch up Mount Willey, but none holds so grimly to its purpose of
uplifting the climber for so great a distance as does this. Four and a
half miles of pleasant journey in from the railroad station at Sawyer's
River, this mighty ascent begins a strong upward movement at the old
lumber camp known as "Camp 5." Thence for about two miles it goes up
in the air at a most prodigious angle, with no suggestion of let up
till the dismayed and gasping climber finally emerges on the knife edge
of the ridge summit and willingly forgives the mountain for all it has
done to him. If the climb had no more to give than just this outlook
from Signal Ridge it were worth all the heart failure and locomotor
ataxia it may have caused.
Right under the onlooker's feet the north side of the ridge drops away
almost sheer to the deep gash in the mountain, which is Carrigain
Notch. Across the valley rises the sheer wall of Mount Lowell, with a
great, beetling cliff of red rock half way up intersected by a slide,
the whole looking as if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure
of a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass. The summit of Lowell
is far below the observer's feet, and the whole mass is so small a
thing in the mighty outlook before him that it seems ridiculous to
call it a mountain. It is but an insignificant knob on the universe in
sight.
[Illustration: "As if giants had carved a huge, preposterous figure of
a flying bird there for a sign to all who pass"]