It is not very much of a walk from the Glen House up the Eastern face of
Mount Washington--less than three hours at a leisurely pace will
accomplish it; and on a fine day it would be next to impossible to lose
one's-self, if alone. Half the distance or thereabouts, your track lies
through a wood, acceptable enough as offering shelter from a July sun,
but curtailing your views annoyingly. However, all things end; and if
your range of sight be somewhat "cabined, cribbed, confined," at the
start, you have no cause for complaint on that score after once emerging
from covert, for the rocks, bleak, bare, and irregular, that are
scattered all around, though large enough to compel a careful picking of
the way between them by no means limit the vision. But the approach has
been a hundred times described, and I will only say of it, at the risk
of repetition, that he who comes up from the Glen House, and fails to
turn his eye continually over his right shoulder, to dwell lovingly upon
the near and noble outlines of Mounts Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, has
no appreciation of this sort of scenery.
The morning had been superlatively fine, and troops of mounted dames
and damsels and cavaliers made the various pathways lively with their
glee. But caprice is the rule of these high regions; and when I was
within ten minutes of the summit, clouds of misty vapour came suddenly
scudding up, whence I knew not, but shutting out a peep here and a vista
there, as they caracolled in fantastic evolutions. Presently, to these
kaleidoscopic effects succeeded a slight hailstorm--it was rain visibly
beneath us, attended with thunder and lightning--but anon all was
comparatively clear again, and from the congregated spectators went up
many a genuine burst of enthusiastic admiration, as point after point
opened out or was shut in by the scud.
The two rough stone buildings upon the small plateau that crowns the
mountain, built for the accommodation of travellers, are called
respectively the "Summit" and the "Tip-top" House. Once rivals, they now
form a single establishment--one being used as a restaurant, the other
as a dormitory. On this particular day, nearly a hundred persons must
have refreshed themselves in the former--a dozen or fifteen in the
latter; and I must own, it was not without a sense of relief that I saw
the last of the descending parties set forth about 2 P. M., being myself
of the select few about to take the chance of sunset and sunrise.
For the afternoon, then--for the interval of time was to be occupied--a
guide was summoned, to show half-a-dozen of us the wonders of
Tuckerman's Ravine, a _cul-de-sac_ between two great buttresses of
Mount Washington, that prop it up towards the South and West. The sides
of this ravine are very precipitous the head of it being formed of
layers of rock, at an angle of about ninety-five degrees, over which a
cascade precipitates itself, fed by the springs and melted snows above.
In the bed of this hollow, to which the descent is sufficiently sharp to
gratify the keenest amateur pedestrian, the accumulated snow of the
winter, blown over from the impending heights, lies packed in such
enormous masses that it seldom entirely disappears until the latter part
of August. At the period of my visit, on Friday, the 29th of July, a
huge portion thereof remained, and the famous "Snow-Arch" was not only
visible but practicable. This natural curiosity is a cave channelled out
from the vast snow bank as a passage for the descending waters, the roof
of which, gradually melting away, leaves height and space for walking
along this gallery as it were in the very bed of the torrent. You enter
perforce, be it observed, where the stream emerges. The length was
certainly not less than two hundred feet, the breadth of the tunnel
perhaps forty or fifty. Of the thickness of the roof I cannot speak, not
having essayed it; but the little knot of adventurers trusted that it
would not cave-in whilst they were groping their difficult way, one
after the other, wet-footed and in semi-obscurity, up-stream, from end
to end of the arched way. The object of the exploration it would be
difficult to define. It certainly was not scientific; it offered no
rare beauties; it might have been very well imagined, without the
trouble and subsequent risk--but it was an adventure, and it had its
charm. Day-light appeared as we neared the waterfall--luckily not very
full--which, as I have already said, comes down the head of the ravine
and is the origin of the "Arch" itself. What next? The snow had
separated bodily from the face of the rocks to the width of two or three
feet, as you see ice fields in a thaw detach themselves from the land
whereto they have been joined. We could therefore emerge, and clamber up
the abrupt face of the rocks, though the first start was not inviting,
inasmuch as we had to hoist ourselves up by unequal pressure upon soft
snow on one side and hard rock on the other. The alternative was a
return. This would have been inglorious; up we went. It was a rough
business. The guide had been over the ground once before, this
season--so he said, at least--but he "harked back" occasionally, as
though not quite certain of his way. It seemed impossible to diverge
either to the right or left, and so gain the comparatively easier slope.
We were doomed to mount, in the hope of finding successive steps,
inasmuch as a retracing of those taken was not for a moment to be
thought of; descent in such cases is always far more dangerous and
troublesome. It was fortunate that in crossing twice or thrice the
waterfall itself, we were not pumped on to any serious extent. I was
moistened only, being garnished with a Macintosh; and I have only two
scars now left on my shins, the result of scraping too close an
acquaintance with sundry rocks. The whole affair lasted between three
and four hours. I cannot recommend it, save to very enthusiastic
mountaineers, or to _ci-devant jeunes hommes_ anxious to test the
effects of Time upon their powers of walking and of endurance.
Regaining the hurricane-deck of the Tip-top House--for the roof is the
principal promenade, and often times assuredly deserves the name I give
it, how gratefully, as the sun went down, stole the sense of ineffable
grandeur over the somewhat wearied frame! It was a superb evening; and
though it would not suit me to cull a leaf from the Guide-book, and tell
all that is therein narrated, I must mention one particular wherein this
locality is notable, if not quite unique. I think I remember something
of the kind, but not so marked, at sunrise as seen from the summit of
Etna; but not thus, on the Righi and Faulhorn in Switzerland, on the Pic
du Midi de Bigorre in the Pyrenees, or on other peaks that I have
climbed in the days of long ago, to salute the coming or speed the
parting day. The nearest approach to it that I have seen, was at the
Great Pyramid of Ghizeh. I allude to the wonderful distinctness and
regularity with which the shadow of the great cone itself is traced, at
sunset, striding over heights and lowlands, mound and lake--all the
intervening surface, in fact, between the spectator and the far distant
horizon--until it contracts almost to a point where earth and sky merge
into one. The sharpness of these converging parallel lines of shadow in
that luminous atmosphere absolutely astounded me. They were as crisp, as
clearly defined, as those that you may see in antique pictures of
Jacob's Dream, leading ladder-wise from Heaven to the head of the
slumbering Patriarch. Sunrise, next morning--for I was again favoured
with clear weather and only sufficient frost to render the roof of the
restaurant slightly slippery--sunrise, I say, reserved all this. The
narrow lines, now on the Western horizon, broadened out and came upwards
and forwards, as in the evening they had elongated and gone down. It was
in truth a rare spectacle, not to be forgotten, and individualizes this
natural observatory.
As for the view itself, it has been described _ad nauseam_, and I have
only a few words to say about it. It happened, as it often does happen,
that I fell in with an untravelled admirer of the prospect spread out
before us, not charmed however with it more than I was myself. But he
would persist in drawing from me an answer to the common question--"how
does this compare with some of the famous points of view in the Swiss
Alps?" Such tests I hold to be absurd, thanking my stars that I can
unreservedly enjoy all fair things that are good of their kind. And so I
told the inquirer this simple fact. If, in a mountainous country,
varied, broken, studded with lakes, and rife with all the elements of
the picturesque, you ascend some such superior elevation as this, you
have, _looking down__wards_, a striking panoramic scene, like this in
its general features--more striking perhaps than beautiful, though this
is all matter of taste. The difference lies herein. Here, you plunge
your look downward, or sweep it over surrounding objects--and that's the
end of it. In those other Alps, you add to the four or five or six
thousand feet, below you, as much above--and it is that _upward_ glance
which takes in the marvels of glacier and snow-field and inaccessible
peaks. My new acquaintance asked for no more comparisons, but let me
enjoy myself in my own quiet way.
The walk down Mount Washington to Crawford's at the Great Notch, as I
believe it is called, is rather a long affair. It must be ten miles, and
parts of it are of the roughest. It took me four hours, in company with
two intelligent and companionable young students of Harvard College,
travelling (in the true way) a-foot, with knapsacks on their backs. But
we hurried it too much, especially as the ridge over and along Mount
Pleasant, and some of its fellows bearing Presidential names, abound in
points of view worth dwelling on. Moreover I was foot-galled; and this
reminds me that, inasmuch as I cannot to-day conclude my rambling
reminiscences, I may as well wind up with a touch of information and of
advice. The one is intended for the benefit of pedestrians who make
excursions of this sort; the other for stay-at-homes in flat countries,
who have no definite notion whatever of the ups and downs of hilly
regions.
In the first place, then, you who walk are painfully aware that a sore
foot is almost a calamity, if it befall you whilst _en route_. Remedy
there is none; be thankful that there is an infallible preventive, of
whose unfailing excellence I can speak with unreserved commendation. On
its simple merits I once averaged in Switzerland twenty-five miles a
day, for thirty successive days; and this without gall or blister. Fool
that I was, to neglect it, two or three weeks ago. Nothing is easier.
Ere you start in the morning, soap or grease the naked foot thoroughly,
and then draw the stocking over it. Wash off, with a dash of brandy in
the water, on finishing your day's work. The play of the foot is the
preservative against abrasion--a certain one, I assure you.
In the second place, if--passing your life amid prairies or
savannahs--you are sometimes puzzled to comprehend allusions to
buttresses, shoulders, ridges, peaks, cones, ravines, and the various
terms in use among enthusiastic mountaineers, I think I can put you on a
very simple explanatory track. Next time you lie in bed, with a few
spare moments for reflection upon this grave topic, just turn on to your
back and elevate one knee or both knees. The coverlid or sheet will
immediately assume--I am serious in saying--a curiously correct
semblance, I might almost term it a model in relief, of the face of any
mountainous country. Laugh not, but try it. A slight movement on your
part varies the form and outline and relative bearing of hill and vale,
raises a pinnacle here, or there sinks a gorge precipitously steep. If I
had the misfortune to be confined to bed by sickness--excluding gout,
which might render the process impossible--I could thus, with the aid of
a map and some tables of distances, design a passable fac-simile of the
leading White Mountains themselves. Why Yankee ingenuity should not long
ago have manufactured _papier-mache_ plans thereof, in relief,
altogether passes my comprehension. They would sell well as souvenirs of
travel.