significant, though each really a mountain of considerable size, each
part of the western wall of Crawford Notch, Anderson, Bemis and Nancy,
and beyond again the sight passes between Webster and Crawford, on and
up the broad expanse of Oakes Gulf to Washington itself. Here always is
bulk, magnificence and dignity, and between it and the nubbles which
mark the line of the southern peaks rises a glimpse of the northern,
Jefferson peering over Clay, but Adams and Madison withdrawn behind
the looming bulk of the summit cone of Washington. Between Washington
and Crawford runs the long Montalban Ridge with the Giant Stairs
conspicuous as always, but dwarfed to pigmy size in the great sweep of
the whole outlook.
Easterly is a great jumble of the mountains south of Bartlett, Tremont
in the foreground and over that Bartlett-Haystack, Table with its flat
top, the peaked ridges of the Moats, and beyond them all the perfect
cone of Kearsarge on the eastern horizon. There is something of the
same feeling of supreme uplift to be felt on the summit of Kearsarge as
one gets on Carrigain, though in lesser degree. Kearsarge, too, is a
mountain that dwells somewhat apart from other mountains and gives the
climber the full benefit of this height and withdrawal. As the glance
swings to the southward again it stops in admiration on the blue wall
of the Sandwich Mountains, the great horn of Chocorua first arresting
the gaze. Here is a splendid outlook upon the full sweep of this great,
jagged range, Paugus, Passaconaway, Whiteface, Tripyramid and Sandwich
Dome, each rugged peak rising out of the blue mass of the whole, with
the green Albany intervales along the Swift River showing below their
foothills, and over it all, far to the south again, the low line which
is the smoke haze of cities, a brown brume behind the exquisite soft
blue of the uncorrupted mountain miles of air.
At the bottom of a scintillant blue transparency of this air lies the
high valley between Signal Ridge and the Sandwich Range, a mountain
valley with no hint of green fields or farm steadings in it. Its green
is that of the rich full growth of leaves in deciduous treetops,
shadowed here and there by the point of a fir or a spruce, still
strangely standing, though the lumbermen have long since swept the
valley far and wide. Almost one may determine the exact height of spur
cliffs above the valley bottom by the line of black growth where it has
escaped the axe, not because axemen could not reach it, but because
horses could not be found to drag it to the valley after being cut. The
lumbermen put their horses in upon acclivities now that were thought to
be forever inaccessible twenty years ago, but there are still heights
they do not dare, and the lines beyond which they fail are marked
along all steep slopes by that dividing line between the green of
deciduous trees and the black of spruce. Seen from the great height of
this knife-edge ridge the valley is grotesque with its lifting crags
of rough cliff, so solidly built of rock that no green thing finds
a crevice in which to grow, or so steep as to defy any wind-borne
seed to find a lodging there. These rough rock cliffs have grotesque
resemblance to the shaggy heads of prehistoric animals of more than
gigantic size that seem to have been turned into stone where they lie,
their bodies half buried and concealed by the luxuriant growth of
forest that still surges round them. A lumber company is known by its
cut. The work done here seems to have been done with a certain feeling
of fair play to the forest, a desire to give it a chance to ultimately
recover. Westward, deeper into the heart of the wilderness, one sees
another record.
To see the west one must climb beyond Signal Ridge. High as it is it
is but a spur of the main mountain that looms, spruce-clad, all along
the western sky, and the path rises steeply again through this spruce,
but not so steeply as it climbed the ridge. Midway of the half-mile
one finds the tiny log cabin of the fire warden of the mountain,
snuggled beneath the spruce behind the shoulder of the ultimate height.
Whatever this lone watcher on the mountain top is paid he earns, for
all furnishings for his tiny cabin, all supplies, even water, must be
packed on his back up the two miles of dizzy trail.
On Carrigain's very top is a little bare spot surrounded by dwarf
spruce and fir over whose tops you may look upon the world around. The
dark tree walls of this roofless refuge ward off all winds, and the
full sunshine fills it to the top and seems to ooze thence through the
black growth and flow on down the mountain sides, which are so near
that a few steps in any direction takes you to a spruce-clad precipice.
Some mountain tops are broad and flat enough to form the foundation
for a farm, but not this one. It is a veritable peak. Signal Ridge is
a good deal of a knife edge. Here you have the edge prolonged into a
point.
A step or two west out of this sun-filled spruce well of refuge on
the summit takes one to the finest view of all from this swimming
mountain top. Underfoot lies the broad wilderness valley of the
Pemigewasset, filled with what, from this point of view, are minor
nubbles, but which really are lesser mountains. Just to the right, far
below, is a whole string of three thousand-foot eminences, yet the
sight passes over them, almost without notice, to the magnificent gap
in rock walls, which is Zealand Notch. Almost due west is Owl's Head
and half-a-dozen lesser heights, but all these sink unnoticed below
the blue wall of solid mountain range which blocks the horizon above
them, the tremendous uplifted bulk of the Franconia Mountains. Not the
grandeur and dignity of Washington, lifting the sphinx's head from the
Presidential Range, not the jagged line of the Sandwich peaks cutting
with points of distance-blued steel the smoke opalescence of the far
southern sky, not the emerald marvels of all the low-lying ranges all
about, can compare in beauty or impressiveness with that mountain
mass of solid blue that walls the west across the rugged miles of the
Pemigewasset Valley. Its great mass of unblurred, undivided color holds
the eye for long and gives it rest again and again after wandering over
the thousand varied beauties of the surrounding landscape. Lafayette,
Lincoln, Haystack, Liberty are its famous peaks, which, however they
may seem upon nearer view, from the dizzy pinnacle of Carrigain, across
the broad wilderness of the Pemigewasset Valley, hardly notch the sky
that pales above that mighty wall of deep blue, that restful mass of
immensity, that unfathomable well of richest color that once looked
into holds the eye within its shadowy coolness for long and stays
forever in the memory.
What a world of black-growth wilderness this vast Pemigewasset Valley
must once have been it is easy to see. What it will become in just a
few years more, alas! is too easy to be inferred. The modern lumberman
comes to his work equipped with all the vast resources of capital and
scientific machinery. In this region west of Carrigain, which still
holds a remnant of virgin growth of pine and spruce, where still
stand trees four or five feet in diameter at the butt, his logging
trains rumble down his railroad through the deep woods, summer as
well as winter. The sound of dynamite explosions scares bear and
deer as his road builders grade and level the roads down which his
armies of men and horses will haul the splendid timber as soon as
the snow flies. From Carrigain summit I see the long winding line of
his railroad, clear up to the western slopes of the mountains that
wall in Crawford's Notch. From the railroad to the right and the left
run the carefully graded logging roads, high up on the sides of the
surrounding mountains, branching, paralleling and giving the teams
every opportunity for careful, methodical work.
Already over square miles of mountain sides you see the brown windrows
of slash left in the wake of his choppers, who have left literally
not one green thing. The black growth cut for the lumber and pulp
mills, the clothes-pin men and the makers of ribbon shoe pegs have
been in and taken the last standing scrub of hard wood. Mountain side
after mountain side in this region looks like a hayfield, the brown
stubble marked with those long, wavering windrows of slash. These
are the newly cut spaces. One winter's work took out of this region
over thirty million feet of pine and spruce alone. There is written
on the open book of the forest below Carrigain the story of the most
ruthless, clean-sweep lumbering that I have ever seen in any wood. You
may go down the Pemigewasset and see the slopes that have been cleaned
out thus over square mile after square mile of mountain side, four,
eight, twelve years ago, and, save for blueberries, blackberries and
wild cherry trees, they are as bare and desolate to-day as when first
logged.
[Illustration: "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"]
In a hundred years those slopes will not again bear forests; indeed,
I doubt if they ever will. Nor is this to be said in any scorn of the
lumberman. Pulp and lumber we must have. He bought the woods and is
using them now for the purpose for which he spent his money. The scorn
should rather be for a people who once knew no better and who, now that
their eyes are opened, still allow this priceless heritage of ancient
forest to be swept away forever.
It is good to shift the eye and the thought from these bare patches to
the still remaining black growth. Fortunately some steeps still defy
the keenest logging-gang and some spruce will remain on these after
another ten years has swept the valley clean. On the high northern
slopes, well up toward the peaks, where the deer yard in winter, the
trees are too dwarf to tempt even the pulp men, who take timber that is
scorned by the sawmill folk. On the summit of Carrigain trees a hundred
years old and rapidly passing to death through the senile decay of
usnea moss and gray-green lichens are scarcely a dozen feet tall. Yet
as these pass the youngsters crowd thickly in to take their places
and grow cones and scatter seed, often when only a few feet high. In
these one sees a faint hope for the reforestation of the valley in the
distant future. There, after the clean sweep, we may allow fifty years
for blueberries and bird-cherries, a hundred more for beech, birch and
maple to grow and supply mould of the proper consistency from their
falling leaves in which spruce and fir seedlings will take root. After
that, if all works well, another hundred will see such a forest of
black growth as is going down the Pemigewasset daily now on the flat
cars of the logging railroad.
Carrigain's peculiar birds seem to be the yellow-rumped warblers, at
least at this season of the year. They flitted continually through and
above the dwarf trees of the summits. There they had nested and brought
up their young, and now the whole families were coming together in
flocks and beginning to move about uneasily as the migration impulse
grows in them. All along the trail up Carrigain and back I found
this same spirit of movement in the birds. Two weeks ago they were
moulting and silent. Hardly a wing would be seen or a chirp heard in
the lonesome woods. Now all is motion in the bird world once more and
flashes of warbler colors light up the dark places with living light.
Among these black spruces the redstart seems to me loveliest of all.
No wonder the Cubans call him "candelita" when he comes to flit the
winter away beneath their palm trees. His black is so vivid that it
stands clearly defined in the deepest shadows and foiled upon it his
rich salmon-red flames like a wind-blown torch as he slips rapidly from
limb to limb, flaring his way through the densest and deepest wood. The
myrtle warblers were the birds of the summit, but the redstarts gave
sudden beauty to the slopes all along the lower portions of the trail.
The sun was setting the deep turquoise blue of the Franconia Range in
flaming gold bands as I left the mountain top. The peak of Lafayette
was a point of fire. Garfield, just over the shoulder of Bond, was
another, and it seemed as if the two were heliographing one to another
from golden mirrors. But along the knife edge of Signal Ridge lay the
shadow of Carrigain summit and the dwarfed growth down the two miles
of steep descent was black indeed. Hardly could the sunlight touch me
again, for the trail lies in the eastward-cast shadow of Carrigain
all the way to Sawyer's River. The evening coolness brought out all
the rich scents of the forest, for here to the east of Carrigain the
deciduous growth makes forest still. From the heights the rich aroma of
the firs descended with me, picking up more subtle scents on the way.
Not far below the crest of Signal Ridge the mountain goldenrod begins
to glow beside the trail. Scattered with it is the lanceolate-leaved,
flutter-petalled Aster radula. These two lent to the aromatic air the
subtle, delicate pungency of the compositæ, and far below, in the
swampy spots at the foot of the declivity, the lovely, violet-purple
Aster novæ-angliæ added to it. Here in open spots beside the trail this
beautiful aster starred the gloom for rods, but yet it was not more
numerous than the rosy-tipped, white, podlike blooms of the turtle-head
that in the rich dusk glowed nebulously among them. Nowhere in the
world do I remember having seen so many turtle-head blooms at one time
as in the marshy spots along the trail leading toward Livermore and
Sawyer's River from the base of Signal Ridge. Their soft, delicate
perfume began to ride the fir aroma there, mingling curiously with the
scent of asters and goldenrod. Often I looked back for a glimpse of
the lofty peak I had left, but Carrigain is indeed a hermit mountain.
It had withdrawn into the heart of the hills which are its home, and
nothing westward showed save the rose-gold of the sunset sky which
hung from the zenith down into the gloom of the woods, a marvellous
background for the tracery of its topmost leaves.
XVI
UP THE GIANT'S STAIRS
_The Back Stairs Route up this Curious Mountain_
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, bids you take them and worship it, which
perforce you do. Then it swings you down by a long drop curve into a
veritable forest of Arden, through which you tramp between great boles
of birch and beech for miles. Here long ago Orlando carved his initials
with those of Rosalind on the smooth bark of great beech trees and, I
doubt not, hung beside them love verses which made those pointed buds
open in spring before their time. Here came Rosalind to find and read
them, and carry them off treasured in her bodice, wherefore one finds
no traces of them at the present day.
[Illustration: "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"]
Yet the carven initials remain, as anyone who treads the road beneath
these ancient greenwood trees may see. Little underbrush is here and
no growth of spruce or fir, and one may look far down arcades of green
gloom where the flicker of sunlight through leaves may make him think
he sees glints of Rosalind's hair as she dances through the wood in
search of more poems. The long forest aisles bring snatches of joyous
song to the ear, nor may the listener say surely that this is Rosalind
and that a wood warbler, for both are in the forest, one as visible as
the other. The whole place glows with the golden glamour of romance,
and he who passes through it, bound for the Giant's Stairs, thrills
with the glow and knows that his path leads to a land of enchantments.
* * * * *
By and by the trail drops me down a sharp descent, and at the bottom I
find, close set with alders, a tiny clear stream which soon babbles out
from beneath the bushes into another of those forest aisles; and there
is a little house in the wood, so tiny and so picturesquely a part of
its surroundings that, though it purports to be a hunter's camp, I
know it at once for that little house which Peter Pan and the thrushes
built for Wendy. But the song of the brook, this Serpentine of the deep
woods, is a lonesome one, for the door of the little house is locked
and the shutters are up. If I remember rightly Wendy went away and
never came back, and Peter Pan is so rarely seen, now-a-days, that few
people really believe he is to be found at all. But at least here is
his house, on a tributary to Rocky Branch Creek, over northwest of Iron
Mountain.
Out of the illusory gloom of the brook the path leaps with joy to the
clear sunlight of open fields and seems to stop at an old doorstone
behind which the ruins of a house still strive to shelter the cellar
over which they were built. Floors and sills are gone, boarding and
shingles and upright timbers have fallen, but still the oak pins hold
plates and rafters together, and the bare bones of a roof crouch above
the spot, so sturdy was the work of the pioneers that here hewed a home
out of the heart of a forest. Between this spot and civilization is now
only a logging road for miles, and the presence of these open, sunny
fields in the deep forest, and among rough hills, seems almost as much
an illusion as the echoes of the voice of Rosalind in the deep woodland
glades and the thrush-built house of Peter Pan by the brookside. But
here they stand in this cove of the mountains, field after field, still
holding out against the sweep of the forest that for half a century
has done its best to ride over them, still loyal to the dreams of
whose fabric they were once the very warp. The old highway, too, still
loiters from farm to farm, though the wood shades it and in places even
sends scouting parties of young trees out across it. The growing maples
push the top stones from the old stone walls, brambles hide the stone
heaps and fill cellar holes with living green. Yet still the apple
trees hold red-cheeked fruit to the sun from their thickets of unpruned
growth and scatter it in mellow circles on the ground for the deer
and the porcupine. The forest will in time make them its own. It will
shade out the European grasses that still grow knee deep and fill their
places with dainty cedar moss and the shy wild flowers of the deep
wood. Yet for all that the trail of the pioneers, the boundaries that
they set and the work of their hands will never be quite disestablished
on the spot. It will remain for long years to come a sunny footprint of
civilization, dented deep in the surrounding green of the wilderness.
* * * * *
Down one gladed terrace after another, from one farm to the next,
the old road goes, and the path, which seems to linger at the first
doorstone, slips finally away and follows between the ancient ruts.
Through gaps in the investing forest I look far down the Rocky Branch
Valley to the blue of Moat Mountain, a color so soft that it makes
the great mass but a haze of unreality to the perceiving senses. If a
wind from the west should come up and blow it away, or if some scene
shifter of the day should wind it up into the sky above, just a part of
a beautiful drop curtain, I should hardly be surprised. I do not care
to climb Moat, if indeed there be really such a mountain. All summer it
has hung thus, a soft haze of half reality, a mountain painted on some
portion of the view from whatever hill I climb, its contour changing so
little from whatever direction I view it that it seems what I prefer
always to keep it, the blue fabric of a half-wistful dream. So shall it
be more permanent and in time more real than many a higher summit, the
grind of whose granite has left its mark upon me. It is the unclimbed
peaks which are eternal.
From the last terrace of the lowest farm the trail drops suddenly to
Rocky Branch, a tributary of the Saco which has its rise in a deep
angled ravine far up on the southerly slope of Mount Washington. Here
is a choice of ways, a good tote road, a logging railroad, and a broad,
graded logging road which the lumbermen are dynamiting through to the
last spruce of the valley, up at the headwaters of the branch. From
these highways broad logging roads give me a plain trail up the steep
Stairs Brook Valley to the bottom step in those mighty stairs. He who
would know what lumbermen can do in logging precipitous spots may well
look about him here. The ground rises at tremendous angles from the
ravine bottom to the foot of Stairs Mountain, and on, yet down these
precipices the woodsmen have brought their log-laden teams safely,
the sleds chained and the whole load lowered inch by inch by snubbing
lines. To note the spots into which men have worked is to have a vivid
impression of the value of spruce and the desperate lengths to which
men will go to get it now-a-days.
* * * * *
The Giant's Stairs are more in number than the two great ones that
appear to the eye from a long distance, either east or west. Northeast
of these a half mile or less is a side stair, as big and as steep as
the ones most commonly seen, and farther on around the mountain toward
the north are others. It was these back stairs that I climbed, all
because of a yellow-headed woodpecker that flew by the ruins of the
logging camp which are not far from the base of the side stair. I got
a glimpse of the yellow crown patch and of some white on the back or
wing bars, but whether it was the Arctic three-toed woodpecker or the
American I could not make out, and I followed his sharp cries and
jerky flight up the steep slope to the right of the side stairs. Here
was an astounding tangle of windrowed slash with many trees still
standing in it, and here for a long time I got near enough to my bird
to almost make sure which variety he was, but not quite. It is hard to
distinguish markings, even black and white, when a bird is high on a
limb against the vivid light of a mountain sky. It is easy to follow
along the parallel roads through which the logs have come down out
of the slash, but it is another matter to struggle from one road to
another across those mighty tangles, and thus my woodpecker led me.
Finally at the very top of the col between Stairs Mountain and its
outlying northeasterly spur he shrieked, quite like a soul in torment,
and flew away high over my head, straight toward the summit of Mount
Resolution, leaving me somewhat in doubt as to whether he was Picoides
Arcticus or Picoides Americanus, or a goblin scout sent out by the
giants to toll strangers away from the easier path up their mountain
and lose them in the wilderness tangle all about it. Whatever he was
he had led me some miles round the mountain to a point exactly opposite
to the good path up.
The back stairs are formidable enough to dismay anyone with mere human
legs, and for some time I wandered in what the lumbermen have left of
a hackmatack swamp at their foot, looking for a way about the bottom
stair, for only Baron Munchausen's courier--he of the seven-league
boots--could have gone directly up it. It felt like being a mouse in
a mansion, and by and by I found a very mouse-like route up detached
boulders loosely held in place by spruce roots, scrambling up trunks
and clawing on with fingers and toes, in momentary fear of starting
an avalanche and becoming but a very small integral portion of it,
and I finally reached the top of the bottom back stair, which is by
all odds the highest, and sat down to get breath. At one scramble I
had left behind the woful tangle of slash and come into a country of
enchantment. Here a bear had passed the day before, leaving undeniable
signs. There was a deer path through the dense spruce showing recent
dents of their sharp, cloven hoofs, and all about and above was a
forest of black growth, in which it was easy to fancy no human foot
had ever trod, before I all-foured up into it, mouse fashion. Here
were trees not large enough to tempt the lumbermen, but old with moss
and gray-green lichens, casting so dense a shade that only mosses and
lichens could flourish beneath them.
* * * * *