The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

When we arose in the morning, what was our astonishment to see the surrounding mountains white with snow. Like one smitten with sudden terror, they had grown gray in a night. Striking, indeed, was the transformation from yesterday’s pomp; beautiful the contrast between the dark green below and the dead white of the upper zones. Thickly incrusted with hoar-frost, the stiffened foliage of the pines and firs gave those trees the unwonted appearance of bursting into blossom. Over all a dull and brooding sky shed its cold, wan light upon the glen, forbidding all thought of attacking the high summits, at least for this day.

Dismissing this, therefore, as impracticable, we nevertheless determined on ascending Mount Willard – an easy thing to do, considering you have only to follow a good carriage-road for two miles and a half to reach the precipices overlooking the Saco Valley.

Startling, indeed, by its sublimity was the spectacle that rewarded our trouble a thousand-fold. Still, the sensations partook more of wonder than admiration – much more. The unpractised eye is so utterly confounded by the immensity of this awful chasm of the Notch, yawning in all its extent and all its grandeur far down beneath, that, powerless to grasp the fulness and the vastness thus suddenly encountered, it stupidly stares into those far-retreating depths. The scene really seems too tremendous for flesh and blood to comprehend. For an instant, while standing on the brink of the sheer precipice, which here suddenly drops seven or eight hundred feet, my head swam and my knees trembled.

First came the idea that I was looking down into the dry bed of some primeval cataract, whose mighty rush and roar the imagination summoned again from the tomb of ages, and whose echo was in the cascades, hung like two white arms on the black and hairy breast of the adjacent mountain. This idea carries us luck to the Deluge, of which science pretends to have found proofs in the basin of the Notch. What am I saying? to the Deluge! it transports us to the Beginning itself, when “Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

You see the immense walls of Mount Willey on one side, and of Webster on the other, rushing downward thousands of feet, and meeting in one magnificently imposing sweep at their bases. This vast natural inverted archway has the heavens for a roof. The eye roves from the shaggy head of one mountain to the shattered cornices of the other. One is terrible, the other forbidding. The naked precipices of Willey, furrowed by avalanches, still show where the fatal slide of 1826 crushed its way down into the valley, traversing a mile in only a few moments. Far down in the distance you see the Willey hamlet and its bright clearing. You see the Saco’s silver.

Such, imperfectly, are the more salient features of this immense cavity of the Notch, three miles long, two thousand feet deep, rounded as if by art, and as full of suggestions as a ripe melon of seeds. I recall few natural wonders so difficult to get away from, or that haunt you so perpetually.

Like ivy on storied and crumbling towers, so high up the cadaverous cliffs of Willey the hardy fir-tree feels its way, insinuating its long roots in every fissure where a little mould has crept, but mounting always like the most intrepid of climbers. Upon the other side, the massed and plumed forest advances boldly up the sharp declivity of Webster; but in mid-ascent is met and ploughed in long, thin lines by cataracts of stones, poured down upon it from the summit. Only a few straggling bushes succeed in mounting higher; and far up, upon the very edge of the crumbling parapet, one solitary cedar tottered. The thought of imminent destruction prevailed over every other. Indeed, it seemed as if one touch would precipitate the whole mass of earth, stones, and trees into the vale beneath.

Between these high, receding walls, which draw widely apart at the outlet of the pass, mountains rise, range upon range. Over the flattened Nancy summits, Chocorua lifts his crested head once more into view. We pass in review the summits massed between, which on this morning were of a deep blue-black, and stood vigorously forth from a sad and boding sky.

From the ledges of Mount Willard, Washington and the peaks between are visible in a clear day. This morning they were muffled in clouds, which a strong upper current of air began slowly to disperse. We, therefore, secured a good position, and waited patiently for the unveiling.

Little by little the clouds shook themselves free from the mountain, and began a slow, measured movement toward the Ammonoosuc Valley. As they were drawn out thinner and thinner, like fleeces, by invisible hands, we began to be conscious of some luminous object behind them, and all at once, through a rift, there burst upon the sight the grand mass of Washington, all resplendent in silvery whiteness. From moment to moment the trooping clouds, as if pausing to pay homage to the illustrious recluse, encompassed it about. Then moving on, the endless procession again and again disclosed the snowy crest, shining out in unshrouded effulgence. To look was to be wonder-struck – to be dumb.

As the clouds unrolled more and more their snowy billows, other and lower summits rose above, as on that memorable morn after the Deluge, where they appeared like islands of crystal floating in a sea of silvery vapor. We gazed for an hour upon this unearthly display, which derived unique splendor from fitful sun-rays shot through the folds of surrounding clouds, then drawing off, and again darting unawares upon the stainless white of the summits. It was a dream of the celestial spheres to see the great dome, one moment glittering like beaten silver, another shining with the dull lustre of a gigantic opal.

I have since made several journeys through the Notch by the railway. The effect of the scenery, joined with some sense of peril in the minds of the timid, is very marked. Old travellers find a new and veritable sensation of excitement; while new ones forget fatigue, drop the novels they have been reading, maintaining a state of breathless suspense and admiration until the train vanishes out at the rocky portal, after an ascent of nearly six hundred feet in two miles.

In effect, the road is a most striking expression of the maxim, “L’audace, et toujours de l’audace,” as applied to modern engineering skill. From Bemis’s to Crawford’s its way is literally carved out of the side of the mountain. But if the engineers have stolen a march upon it, the thought, how easily the mountain could shake off this puny, clinging thing, prevailing over every other, announces that the mountain is still the master.

There are no two experiences which the traveller retains so long or so vividly as this journey through the great Notch, and this survey from the ledges of Mount Willard, which is so admirably placed to command it. To my mind, the position of this mountain suggests the doubt whether nature did not make a mistake here. Was not the splitting of the mountains an after-thought?

X.

THE ASCENT FROM CRAWFORD’S

On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds.With a diadem of snow. —Manfred.

AT five in the morning I was aroused by a loud rap at the door. In an instant I had jumped out of bed, ran to the window, and peered out. It was still dark; but the heavens were bright with stars, so bright that there was light in the room. Now or never was our opportunity. Not a moment was to be lost.

I began a vigorous reveille upon the window-pane. George half opened one sleepy eye, and asked if the house was on fire. The colonel pretended not to have heard.

“Up, sluggards!” I exclaimed; “the mountain is ours!”

“Do you know who first tempted man to go up into a high mountain?” growled George.

“Satan!” whined a smothered voice from beneath the bedclothes.

The case evidently was one which demanded heroic treatment. In an instant I whipped off the bedclothes; in another I received two violent blows full in the chest, which compelled me to give ground. The pillows were followed by the bolster, which I parried with a chair, the bolster by a sortie of the garrison in puris naturalibus. For a few seconds the mélée was furious, the air thick with flying missiles. By a common instinct we drew apart, with the intention of renewing the combat, when we heard quick blows upon the partition at the left, and scared voices from the chamber at the right demanding what was the matter. George dropped his pillow, and articulated in a broken voice, “Malediction! I am awake.”

“Come, gentlemen,” I urged, “if you are sufficiently diverted, dress yourselves, and let us be off. At the present moment you remind me of the half-armed warriors on the pediment of the Parthenon.”

“I take it you mean the frieze,” said George, with chattering teeth.

The colonel was on all-fours, picking up the different articles of his wardrobe from the four corners of the chamber. “My stocking,” said he, groping among the furniture.

“What do you call this?” inquired George, fishing the dripping article from the water-pitcher.

“Eh! where the deuce is my watch?” redemanded the colonel, still seeking.

“Perhaps this is yours?” George again suggested, drawing it, with mock dexterity, as he had seen Hermann do, from a boot-leg.

We quickly threw on our clothes, but at the moment of starting George put his hand into his breast and made a frightful grimace.

“What is it?” we both asked in one breath. “What is the matter?”

“My pocket-book is gone.”

After five minutes’ ransacking in every hole and corner of the room, and after shaking the bedclothes carefully, all to no purpose, it was discovered that George and myself had exchanged coats. We then went down-stairs into the great hall, where a solitary jet of gas burnt blue, and a sleepy watchman dozed on a settee. The morning air was more than chilly: it was “a nipping and an eager air.” There were two or three futile attempts at pleasantry, but hunger, darkness, and the cold quickly silenced them. A man is never himself when roused at five in the morning. No matter how desirable the excursion may have looked the night before, turning out of a warm bed to hurry on your clothes by candle-light, and to take the road fasting, strips it of all glamour.

Day broke disclosing a clear sky, up which the rosy tints of sunrise were streaming. The last star trembled in the zone of dusky blue above the grand old hills, like a tear-drop on the eyelids of the night. The warm color flowed over the frosted heads of the pines, mantling their ghastly white with the warm glow of reviving life. Then the eye fell upon the lower forests, still wrapped in deep shadows, the tiny lake, the boats, and, lastly, the oval plain, or vestibule of the Notch, above which ascended the shaggy sides of Mount Willard, and the retreating outline of Mount Webster. The little plain was white with hoar-frost; the frozen fountain dripped slowly into its basin, like a penitent telling its beads.

After a hasty breakfast, despatched with mountain appetites, behold us at half-past six entering the forest in Indian file! My companions again found their accustomed gayety, and soon the solemn old woods echoed with mirth. Our hopes were as high as the mountain itself.

A détour as far as Gibbs’s Falls cost a good half-hour in recovering the bridle-path; but we were at length en route, myself at the head, George behind. The colonel carried the flask, and marched in the middle. He was considered the most incorruptible of the three; but this precaution was deemed an indispensable safeguard, should he, in a moment of forgetfulness, carry the flask to his lips.

The side of Mount Clinton, which we were now climbing, is very steep. The name of bridle-path, which they give the long gully we had entered, is a snare for pedestrians, but a greater delusion for cavaliers. The rains, the melting snows, have so channelled it as to leave little besides interlaced roots of old trees and loose bowlders in its bed. Higher up it is nothing but the bare course of a mountain torrent.

The long rain had thoroughly soaked the earth, rendering it miry and slippery to the feet; the heavy air, compounded of a thousand odors, hindered, rather than assisted, the free play of the lungs. Our progress was slow, our breathing quick and labored. Every leaf trembled with rain-drops, so that the flight of a startled bird overhead sprinkled us with fine spray. Finches chattered in the tree-tops, squirrels scolded us sharply from fallen logs.

Looking up was like looking through some glorious, illuminated window – the changed foliage seemed to have fixed the gorgeous hues of the sunset. Through its crimson and gold, violet and green, patches of blue sky greeted us with fair promise for the day. Looking ahead, the path zigzagged among ascending trees, plunged into the sombre depths above our heads, and was lost. One impression that I received may be, yet I doubt, common to others. On either side of me the forest seemed all in motion; the dusky trunks striding silently and stealthily by, moving when we moved, halting when we halted. The greenwood was as full of illusions as the human heart. I can never repress a certain fear in a forest, and to-day this seemed peopled with sprites, gnomes, and fauns. Once or twice a crow rose lazily from the top of a dead pine, and flew croaking away; but we thought not of omens or auguries, and pushed gayly on up the sharp ascent.

It was a wild woodland walk, with few glimpses out of the forest. For about a mile we steered toward the sun, climbing one of the long braces of the mountain. Stopping near here, at a spring deliciously pure and cold, we soon turned toward the north. As we advanced up the mountain the sun began to gild the tree-tops, and stray beams to play at hide-and-seek among the black trunks. We saw dells of Arcadian loveliness, and we heard the noise of rivulets, trickling in their depths, that we did not see.

Wh-r-r-r! rose a startled partridge, directly in our path, bringing us to a full stop. Another and another took flight.

“Gad!” muttered the colonel, wiping his forehead, “I was dreaming of old times; I declare I thought the mountain had got our range, and was shelling us.”

“Salmis of partridge; sauce aux champignons,” said George, licking his lips, and looking wistfully after the birds. You see, one spoke from the head, the other from the stomach.

Half an hour’s steady tramp brought us to an abandoned camp, where travellers formerly passed the night. A long stretch of corduroy road, and we were in the region of resinous trees. Here it was like going up rickety stairs, the mossed and sodden logs affording only a treacherous foothold. Evidence that we were nearing the summit was on all sides. Patches of snow covered the ground and were lodged among the branches. From these little runlets made their way into the path, as the most convenient channel. There were many dead pines, having their curiously distorted limbs hung with the long gray lichen called “old man’s beard.” Multitudes of great trees, prostrated by the wind, lay rotting along the ground, or had lodged in falling, constituting a woful picture of wreck and ruin. Here was not only the confusion and havoc of a primitive forest, untouched by the axe, but the battle-ground of ages, where frost, fire, and flood had steadily and pitilessly beaten the forest back in every desperate effort made to scale the summit. Prone upon the earth, stripped naked, or bursting their bark, the dead trees looked like fallen giants despoiled of their armor, and left festering upon the field. But we advanced to a scene still more weird.

The last mile gives occasional glimpses into the Ammonoosuc Valley, of Fabyan’s, of the hamlet at the base of Washington, and of the mountains between Fabyan’s and Jefferson. The last half-mile is a steady planting of one foot before another up the ledges. We left the forest for a scanty growth of firs, rooted among enormous rocks, and having their branches pinned down to their sides by snow and ice. The whole forest had been seized, pinioned, and cast into a death-like stupor. Each tree seemed to keep the attitude in which it was first overtaken; each silvered head to have dropped on its breast at the moment the spell overcame it. Perpetual imprisonment rewarded the temerity of the forest for thus invading the dominion of the Ice King. There it stood, all glittering in its crystal chains!

But as we threaded our way among these trees, still as statues, the sun came valiantly to the rescue. A warm breath fanned our cheeks and traversed the ice-locked forest. Instantly a thrill ran along the mountain. Quick, snapping noises filled the air. The trees burst their fetters in a trice. Myriad crystals fluttered overhead, or fell tinkling on the rocks at our feet. Another breath, and tree after tree lifted its bowed head gracefully erect. The forest was free.

George, who began by asking every few rods how much farther it was, now repeated the question for the fiftieth time; but we paid no attention.

We now entered a sort of liliputian forest, not higher than the knee, but which must have presented an almost insuperable barrier to early explorers of the mountain. In fact, as they could neither go through it nor around it, they must have walked over it, the thick-matted foliage rendering this the only alternative. No one could tell how long these trees had been growing, when a winter of unheard-of severity destroyed them all, leaving only their skeletons bleaching in the sun and weather. Wrenched, twisted, and made to grow the wrong way by the wind, the branches resembled the cast-off antlers of some extinct race of quadrupeds which had long ago resorted to the top of the mountain. The girdle of blasted trees below was piteous, but this was truly a strange spectacle. Indeed, the pallid forehead of the mountain seemed wearing a crown of thorns.

Getting clear of the dwarf-trees, or knee-wood, as it is called in the Alps, we ran quickly up the bare summit ledge. The transition from the gloom and desolation below into clear sunshine and free air was almost as great as from darkness to light. We lost all sense of fatigue; we felt only exultation and supreme content.

Here we were, we three, more than four thousand feet above the sea, confronted by an expanse so vast that no eye but an eagle’s might grasp it, so thronged with upstarting peaks as to confound and bewilder us out of all power of expression. One feeling was uppermost – our own insignificance. We were like flies on the gigantic forehead of an elephant.

However, we had climbed and were astride the ridge-pole of New England. The rains which beat upon it descend on one side to the Atlantic, on the other to Long Island Sound. The golden sands which are the glory of the New England coast have been borne, atom by atom, grain by grain, from this grand laboratory of Nature; and if you would know the source of her great industries, her wealth, her prosperity, seek it along the rivers which are born of these skies, cradled in these ravines, and nourished amid the tangled mazes of these impenetrable forests. How, like beautiful serpents, their sources lie knotted and coiled in the heart of these mountains! How lovingly they twine about the feet of the grand old hills! Too proud to bear its burdens, they create commerce, building cities, scattering wealth as they run on. No barriers can stay, no chains fetter their free course. They laugh and run on.

We stood facing the south. Far down beneath us, at our left, was the valley of Mount Washington River. A dark, serpentine rift in the unbroken forest indicated the course of the stream. Mechanically we turned to follow it up the long gorge through which it flows, to where it issues, in secret, from the side of Mount Washington itself. In front of us arose the great Notch Mountains; beyond, mountains were piled on mountains; higher still, like grander edifices of some imperial city, towered the pinnacles of Lafayette, Carrigain, Chocorua, Kearsarge, and the rest. Yes, there they were, pricking the keen air with their blunted spears, fretting the blue vault with the everlasting menace of a power to mount higher if it so willed, filling us with the daring aspiration to rise as high as they pointed. Here and there something flashed brightly upon the eye; but it was no easy thing to realize that those little pools we saw glistening among the mountains were some of the largest lakes in New England.

Leaving the massive Franconia group, the eye swept over the Ammonoosuc basin, over the green heights of Bethlehem and Littleton, overtopped by the distant Green Mountains; then along the range dividing the waters flowing from the western slopes of the great summits into separate streams; then Whitefield, Lancaster, Jefferson; and, lastly, rested upon the amazing apparition of Washington, rising two thousand feet above the crags on which we stood. Perched upon the cap-stone of this massive pile, like a dove-cot on the cupola of St. Peter’s, we distinctly saw the Summit House. Between us and our goal rose the brown heads of Pleasant, Franklin, and Monroe, over which our path lay. All these peaks and their connecting ridges were freely spattered with snow.

“By Jove!” ejaculated the colonel at last; “this beats Kentucky!”

It is necessary to say two words concerning a spectacle equally novel and startling to dwellers in more temperate regions, and which now held us in mingled astonishment and admiration. We could hardly believe our eyes. This bleak and desolate ridge, where only scattered tufts of coarse grass, stinted shrubs, or spongy moss gave evidence of life, which seemed never to have known the warmth of a sunbeam, was transformed into a garden of exquisite beauty by the frozen north wind.

We remarked the iced branches of dwarf firs inhabiting the upper zone of the mountain as we passed them; but here, on this summit, the surfaces of the rocks actually bristled with spikes, spear-heads, and lance-points, all of ice, all shooting in the direction of the north wind. The forms were as various as beautiful, but most commonly took that of a single spray, though sometimes they were moulded into perfect clusters of berries, branching coral, or pendulous crystals. Common shrubs were transformed to diamond aigrettes, coarse grasses into bird-of-paradise plumes, by the simple adhesion of frost-dust. The iron rocks attracted the flying particles as the loadstone attracts steel. Cellini never fashioned anything half so marvellous as this exquisite workmanship of a frozen mist. Yet, though it was all surpassingly beautiful, it was strangely suggestive of death. There was no life – no, not even the chirrup of an insect. No wonder our eyes sought the valley.

Hardly had we time to take in these unaccustomed sights, when, to our unspeakable dismay, ominous streakings of gray appeared in the southern and eastern horizons. The sun was already overclouded, and emitted only a dull glare. For a moment a premonition of defeat came over me; but another look at the summit removed all indecision, and, without mentioning my fears to my companions, we all three plunged into the bushy ravine that leads to Mount Pleasant.

Suddenly I felt the wind in my face, and the air was filled with whirling snow-flakes. We had not got over half the distance to the second mountain, before the ill-omened vapors had expanded into a storm-cloud that boded no good to any that might be abroad on the mountain. My idea was that we could gain the summit before it overtook us. I accordingly lengthened my steps, and we moved on at a pace which brought us quickly to the second mountain. But, rapidly as we had marched, the storm was before us.

Here began our first experience of the nature of the task in hand. The burly side of Mount Pleasant was safely turned, but beyond this snow had obliterated the path, which was only here and there indicated by little heaps of loose stones. It became difficult, and we frequently lost it altogether among the deep drifts. We called a halt, passed the flask, and attempted to derive some encouragement from the prospect.

The storm-cloud was now upon us in downright earnest. Already the flying scud drifted in our faces, and poured, like another Niagara, over the ridge one long, unbroken billow. The sun retreated farther and farther, until it looked like a farthing dip shining behind a blanket. Another furious blast, and it disappeared altogether. And now, to render our discomfiture complete, the gigantic dome of Washington, that had lured us on, disappeared, swallowed up in a vortex of whirling vapor; and presently we were all at once assailed by a blinding snow-squall. Henceforth there was neither luminary nor landmark to guide us. None of us had any knowledge of the route, and not one had thought of a guide. To render our situation more serious still, George now declared that he had sprained an ankle.