Old Shag, Toadback, or Paugus Mountain stands in the Sandwich range
between Chocorua on the east and Passaconaway on the west. It is better
armed against attack by mountain climbers than any of its neighbors, and
this in spite of the fact that in elevation it is the lowest of the
range. Its defenses consist of numerous radiating ridges covered with
dense growths of spruce and crossed by belts of “harricane,” miles of
cliffs so forbidding as to repel any but determined assault, and ravines
choked by débris of rock and fallen forest. No path of any kind leads to
its top, and when its summit is gained, none of the familiar marks
indicating previous visits by egg-eating, initial-cutting tourists are
discoverable.
Like most impregnable fortresses, Paugus has its weak spot. There is a
way to reach its southern summit without touching a “harricane,”
climbing a precipice, or struggling through more than a few rods of
spruce jungle. Moreover, on this way the traveler is sung to by one of
the most musical of streams, while his eyes are charmed by the
ever-changing beauties of a series of as exquisite cascades as are to be
found in the White Mountains. It is true that in midsummer the brook is
so reduced in size that its chief charm is seriously lessened, but if
the time chosen for ascent is in spring, autumn, or after a heavy summer
rain, the falls will be found at their best.
[Illustration: PAUGUS FROM WONALANCET ROAD NEAR START OF LIBERTY
TRAIL UP MOUNT CHOCORUA]
On the morning of September 15, a party of four persons entered the
“lost trail,” leading from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale. A heavy
rain had fallen during the whole of the preceding day, and Paugus River,
with all its sons and daughters, grandchildren brooks, and
great-grandchildren rivulets, made the forest resound with the music of
innumerable singing falls and rapids. Following the old trail for two
miles, the party reached a spot where a good-sized stream appeared
flowing eastward from the great hollow in the eastern flank of Paugus.
Leaving the bridle-path at this point, and walking nearly due west, the
explorers followed the branch towards its source. As the region was
reported to be thickly set with bear-traps, the party walked in Indian
file, while their leader sounded and punched every foot of moss and soft
leaf mould with his stout staff. The traps used by the hunters on these
mountains are murderous inventions, consisting of two huge steel jaws
lined with sharp teeth. The trap, when set, is buried beneath a layer of
moss. If a bear or man steps between the opened jaws, thereby pressing a
pan which frees the two powerful springs below the jaws, the trap closes
instantaneously, the teeth are locked in the flesh, cutting sinews and
crushing bone. A man thus caught is maimed for life, if, indeed, he does
not die from starvation and pain before he can be released from his
horrible imprisonment. A bear usually drags the trap until its anchor
catches in a tree, or his strength is exhausted. Sometimes he gnaws off
his foot and crawls away bleeding and crippled. The trap weighs from
twenty-five to forty pounds, and although usually marked in such a way
that its owner can recognize it, no name betrays the identity of the
trapper.
The places chosen by the bear hunter for setting his traps are those to
which a bear is in the habit of going often. On damp and mossy spots the
great footprints of the brute show plainly, and when the trapper is
satisfied that Bruin walks that way habitually, he cuts out a square of
moss upon which the footprint is plainly visible, places his open trap
in the hole, restores the moss with great care, and goes away for a
week, or even longer, visiting other traps, some of which may be many
miles away. If signs of any proper kind were placed near the traps to
warn the passer-by of his peril, there would be small reason to complain
of bear-trapping, but unhappily no such signals are displayed, and man,
if he wanders in wild places, is in as much danger as the bears. The
brook bed which our party of four was ascending is one of the best
grounds for bears in all the Sandwich range. No wonder, then, that we
watched and sounded anxiously for hidden traps.
As we walked westward into the hollow in the side of Paugus, the ground
rose rapidly and the level land on the edges of the stream soon gave way
to steeply sloping banks. For beech, birch, and maple were substituted
spruce, balsam fir, and hemlock; the rapids of the brook changed to
falls; glimpses of sky were replaced by occasional peeps at
spruce-capped gray cliffs hanging high above us, and we felt as though
if we kept on we should soon enter the black interior of a vast cavern,
unless some unseen avenue to light and air appeared. The barometer
showed that we had climbed nearly a thousand feet, when suddenly there
opened before us a view of a succession of high, steeply-sloping ledges,
polished by rushing water and festooned with delicate mosses. A sheet of
clear and sparkling water, stained a rich hemlock brown by the moss beds
through which it had filtered, poured in quivering folds over the rock.
Standing by the side of the pool at the foot of the lowest incline, we
could see four of these smooth ledge faces rising one behind another
above us. Climbing to their top, we saw as many more still higher, and
beyond them all, twin cascades gleamed through the trees, as they fell
from a ledge in the middle of which a mass of black spruces and huge
gray rocks seemed to form an island poised in the air between the two
halves of the torrent.
Nearly a thousand feet above this twin fall, yet so close beyond it that
my companions almost despaired of further progress up the mountain, was
a wall of gray rock suspended between the sky and the tree-tops. It was
the last redoubt of the impregnable Paugus. Was there a rift in its
apparently solid face? Yes, I knew that there must be, because years
before I had come down this ravine from the summit and had found no
obstacle to gradual and easy descent. While passing the falls, we used
the barometer to ascertain their approximate height, and found a
difference of two hundred and fifty feet between the level of the pool
at their foot and that of the stream above the twin cascades. The
several inclines down which the water shot in rippling sheets were each
fifty or sixty feet long and about twenty-five feet in perpendicular
rise. With a stream twice or three times the volume of this brook,
Paugus Falls would take rank as among the most beautiful in New England.
Even as they are, they deserve a place in song instead of obscurity in
an almost unknown corner of a pathless mountain.
[Illustration: CHOCORUA SEEN FROM THE SIDE OF PAUGUS]
Not far above the twin cascades, the brook formerly shot over a polished
ledge almost steep enough to form a perfect fall. Here a very unusual
and interesting change had been worked in the rock and the course of the
water by the action of frost. Just at the point where the polished rock
bed of the stream was steepest, a crack had opened at right angles with
the current. Of course water had filled this fissure and deepened it
until in some winter night a sound of rending must have startled the
forest and echoed afar down the gorge. The front of the ledge, measuring
twenty yards or more from side to side and nearly half that distance
from top to bottom, broke from its ancient foundation and slipped
forward about eighteen inches, thus forming a perpendicular crevasse
sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Into this the stream plunged and
vanished from sight. Standing just below the crevasse and looking up the
smooth face of the ledge, I could see the eager water coming towards me,
hurrying forward its amber masses, bubbles, sheets of foam, and yellow
leaves dropped by the ripening trees. As it seemed about to hurl itself
upon me and sweep me down its bed, it disappeared.
When the water reached the bottom of the crevasse, it turned aside and
flowed at right angles to its course until a fault in the rock allowed
it to steal out into the daylight. The crevasse was full of sounds, and
amid the splashing, gurgling, and roaring of the water, the ear could
fancy that it detected wild cries, sobs, and moans.
Above this rift and cavern of wild waters came many a rod of steep
climbing. Again and again an impassable cliff seemed to bar our way, but
each time the stream showed us how, by a zigzag or a long diagonal, we
could avoid the abrupt face of the rock and find a way to a higher
level. Finally, after nearly four hours of climbing we found ourselves
in a moist and mossy hollow between two of the summits of the mountain.
Northward the rocks rose abruptly to the wooded crest of the highest
ridge, southward they rose to the dome-shaped ledge which forms the best
height for observation, wind and fire having left it as bald as an egg.
It was impossible to cross the moist hollow dry shod, for at no point
was it less than a rod wide and in parts it was forty or fifty yards
from ledge to ledge. The brown water stood in pools amid the sphagnum
beds and between the stems of trees. Several paths led downward between
the low spruces to these pools, but we shunned them. Human feet had not
trodden them, unless, indeed, the bear hunter had passed that way and
set his traps directly across them. In one place I saw where a bear had
recently walked across the sphagnum, leaving the imprint of his huge
foot clearly stamped upon the moss.
The view from the dome of Paugus was autumnal in tone. Great masses of
cold clouds were sweeping across the blue sky, urged forward by a
blustering northwest wind. Wherever the spruce growth upon the mountains
was interrupted by deciduous trees, delicate shades of red, yellow, or
russet lay in patches between the sombre tones of the evergreens. In
spots brilliant scarlet maples stood out boldly, but as a rule the new
colors were not pronounced but merely suggestive of the gorgeous
transformation soon to be perfected. In the hollows, especially those in
which “harricanes” had been overgrown by mountain ash, sumac, and
similar perishable wood, the autumnal tints were more prevalent and
stronger. The only flowers upon the mountain-top were a few small asters
with highly scented leaves, and a goldenrod (_macrophylla_) with large
blossoms and coarse leaves.
Old Shag is not high enough to rival Chocorua or Passaconaway with its
views, but it affords the only really satisfactory chance of studying
those two mountains from a point between them. Chocorua varies strangely
in its outlines from different points of view. From the south it looks
like a huge lion couchant; from the Albany intervale it is an irregular
ridge resembling a breaking wave; from Paugus it seems more like a giant
fortress, with battered ramparts lifted high against the sky. A slide,
invisible from other points, is seen to extend from the western foot of
the peak far down into the forests of the Paugus valley. North of it a
ridge densely grown with old spruce runs from the peak northwestward. It
is one of the few parts of Chocorua not given up to deciduous trees.
Beyond it rises the Champney Falls brook which flows northward into
Swift River.
Passaconaway from the Bearcamp valley is one of the most perfect of
pyramids; from Paugus it is a rough hump of sinister outline and color.
The spruces upon it grow so thickly that it is hard to force a way
through them, yet they spring from sides so steep that it seems a marvel
that any soil or vegetation can cling to the rocks. A slide of great
length shows its scar upon the eastern face, and serves to emphasize the
fact that this side of Passaconaway is really less of a slope than of a
continuous precipice nearly three thousand feet from summit to plain. In
these almost inaccessible forests several birds from the Canadian fauna
are occasionally found. I have seen there in summer both kinds of the
three-toed woodpeckers; Canada grouse or spruce partridges have been
shot there this autumn, and the moose-bird, or Canada jay, is
occasionally seen near the lumber camps.
[Illustration: WHITEFACE AND PASSACONAWAY FROM PAUGUS]
In descending a mountain in the afternoon which has been climbed in the
morning, many new effects of light and shade, color, and even of
outline, are observable. This may be puzzling to the guide who does not
thoroughly know his path, but it is the one redeeming feature in a
homeward scramble to those who are weary enough to regard their second
view of a mountain-side as an anti-climax to the triumphant ascent of a
new peak. Paugus Falls were more beautiful with the pallor of the
afternoon around them, than they were with the southeastern sun shining
into their rushing bubbles. They were whiter and the water consequently
looked greater in volume. Again we wondered how such rare beauty could
have been hidden so long in an untrodden forest, and, wondering, we
blazed the trees so that those who might come after us could follow
without perplexity the easy and beautiful way which we had been
fortunate enough to find.
When we reached the old trail, about five o’clock, the woods seemed dark
and the penetrating coolness of an autumn night was in the air. Twenty
minutes later we emerged in the blackberry tangle by the abandoned
saw-mill, and found wagons and warm wraps waiting for us. As we looked
back towards the golden sunset, the dark dome of Old Shag stood boldly
out against the sky. Fire and wind had left scars upon its face, and
nature originally made it so rough in outline that “Toadback” is
tellingly descriptive of its shape. Toads have their jewels, and so has
Paugus, hidden in the shadows of its eastern flank.