The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

In France they maintain that high mountains cannot be painted. Consequently, the modern French landscape is almost always a dead level; an illimitable plain, through which a placid stream quietly meanders, with a thick wood of aged trees at the left, a snug hamlet in the middle distance, some shrubbery on the right, and a clumsy ox-cart with peasants, in the foreground. All these details are sufficiently commonplace; but they appeal strongly to our human yearning for a life of perfect peace – a sanctuary the world cannot enter. Turner knew that he must paint a mountain with its head in the clouds, and its feet plunged in unfathomable abysses. Imagination would do the rest, and imagination governs the universe.

Photography cannot reproduce the true relation of distant mountains to the landscape. The highest summits look like hills. For want of color, too, it is always twilight. Even running water has a frozen look, and rocks emit a dead, sepulchral glare. But for details – every leaf of the tree, or shadow of the leaf – it is faultless; it is the thing itself. True, under the magnifying-glass the foliage looks crisped, as is noticed after a first frost. In short, the photograph of mountain scenery is like that of a friend taken in his coffin. We say with a shiver that is he, but, alas, how changed! A body without a soul. Again, photography cannot suggest movement. Perfect immobility is a condition indispensable to a successful picture. A successful picture! A petrified landscape!

“In the morning to the mountain,” says the proverb, as emblematic of high hopes. For two stations embodying the best features the vicinity of Jackson can offer, the crest of Thorn Mountain and the ledges above Fernald’s Farm are strongly commended to every sojourner. Both are easily reached. On the first, you are a child lifted above the crowd on the shoulders of a giant; the mountains have come to you. On the second, you have taken the best possible position to study the form and structure of Mount Washington. You see all the ravines, and can count all the gigantic feelers the immense mountain throws down into the gorge of the Ellis. In this way, step by step, we continue to master the topography of the region visited as we take our chocolate, one sip at a time.

I prepared to continue my journey to the Glen House by the valley of the Wildcat and the Carter Notch, which is a sort of side entrance to the Peabody Valley. Two passes thus lie on alternate sides of the same mountain chain. Before doing so, however, two words are necessary.

III.

THE CARTER NOTCH

Stranger, if thou hast learned a truth which needsNo school of long experience, that the worldIs full of guilt and misery, and hast seenEnough of all its sorrows, crimes, and cares,To tire thee of it, enter this wild woodAnd view the haunts of nature. – Bryant.

WHAT traveller can pass beyond the crest of Thorn Hill without paying his tribute of silent admiration to the splendid pageant of mountains visible from this charmed spot! Before him the great rampart, bristling with its countless towers, is breached as cleanly as if a cannon-ball had just crashed through it. It is an immense hole; it is the cavity from which, apparently, one of those great iron teeth has just been extracted. Only it does not disfigure the landscape. Far from it. It really exalts the surrounding peaks. They are enormously aggrandized by it. You look around for a mountain of proper size and shape to fill it. That gives the true idea. It is a mountainous hole.

The little river, tumbling step by step down its broken ledges into Jackson, comes direct from the Notch, and its stream is the thread which conducts through the labyrinth of thick woods. I dearly love the companionship of these mountain streams. They are the voices of the wilderness, singing high or low, softly humming a melodious refrain to your thoughts, or, joining innumerable cascades in one grand chorus, they salute the ear with a gush of sound that strips the forest of its loneliness and awe. This same madcap Wildcat runs shouting and hallooing through the woods like a stream possessed.

By half-past seven of a bright and crisp morning I was climbing the steep hill-side over which Jackson Falls pour down. Here was a genuine surprise. On arriving at the top, instead of entering a difficult and confined gorge, I found a charming and tolerably wide vale, dotted with farms, extending far up into the midst of the mountains. You hardly realize that the stream flowing so demurely along the bottom of the valley is the same making its entry into the village with such noise and tumult. Half a mile above the falls the snowy cupola of Washington showed itself over Eagle Mountain for a few moments. Then, farther on, Adams was seen, also white with snow. For five miles the road skirts the western slopes of the valley, which grows continually deeper, narrower, and higher. Spruce Mountain is now on our left, the broad flanks of Black Mountain occupy the right side of the valley. Beyond Black Mountain Carter Dome lifts its ponderous mass, and between them the dip of the Perkins Notch, dividing the two ranges, gives admittance to the Wild River Valley, and to the Androscoggin, in Shelburne. Before me the grand, downward curves of Carter Notch opened wider and wider.

I picked up, en route, the guide of this locality, who lives on the side of the mountain near where the road is left for the woods. Our business was transacted in two words. While he was strapping on his knapsack I had leisure to observe the manner of man he was.

The guide, whose Christian name is Jonathan, is known in all the country round as “Jock” Davis. He was a medium-sized, muscular man, whiskered to his eyes, with a pair of bare arms the color of unglazed earthen-ware, and a step like a panther. As he strode silently on before, with his dog at his heels, I was reminded of the Jibenainosay and his inseparable Little Peter. He was steady as a clock, careful, and a capital forester, but a trifle taciturn. From time to time, as he drew my attention to the things noticeable or interesting by the way, his face grew animated, and his eyes sparkled. By the same token I believed I detected that dormant perception of beauty and grandeur which is inborn, and which travellers are in general too much disposed to deny any existence among the natives of these mountains. It is true, one cannot express his feelings with the vivacity of the other; but if there is such a thing as speech in silence, the honest guide’s looks spoke volumes.

He told me that he was accustomed to get his own living in the woods, like an old bear. He had trapped and gummed all through the region we were in; the slopes of the great range, and the Wild River wilderness, which he declared, with a shake of the head, to be “a horrid hole.” Now and then, without halting, he took a step to the right or left to look into his fox and sable traps, set near the foot-path. When he spoke of “gumming” on Wildcat Mountain, I was near making an awkward mistake; I understood him to say “gunning.” So I very innocently asked what he had bagged. He opened his eyes widely and replied, “Gum.”17

Seeing me ready, Davis whistled to his dog, and we entered the logging-road in Indian file. We at once took a brisk pace, which in a short time brought us to the edge of a clearing, now badly overgrown with bramble and coppice, and showing how easily nature obliterates the mark of civilization when left alone. In this clearing an old cellar told its sad story but too plainly. Those pioneers who first struck the axe into the noble pines here are all gone. They abandoned in consternation the effort to wring a scanty subsistence from this inhospitable and unfruitful region. Even the poor farms I had seen encroaching upon the skirts of this wilderness seemed fighting in retreat.

We quickly came to a second opening, where the axe of God had smote the forest still more ruthlessly than that of man. The ground was encumbered with half-burnt trees, among which the gaudy fire-weed grew rank and tall. Divining my thought, the guide explained in his quaint, sententious way, “Fire went through it; then the wind harricaned it down.” A comprehensive sweep of his staff indicated the area traversed by the whirlwind of fire and the tornado. This opening disclosed at our left the gray cliffs and yawning aperture of the Notch – by far the most satisfactory view yet obtained, and the nearest.

Burying ourselves in deeper solitudes, broken only by the hound in full cry after a fox or a rabbit, we descended to the banks of the Wildcat at a point one and a half miles from the road we had left. We then crossed the rude bridge of logs, keeping company with the gradually diminishing river, now upon one bank, now on the other, making a gradual ascent along with it, frequently pausing in mid-stream to glance up and down through the beautiful vistas it has cut through the trees. Halt at the third crossing, traveller, and take in the long course through the avenue of black, moss-draped firs! one so sombre and austere, the other gliding so bright and blithesome out of its shadow and gloom. Just above this spot a succession of tiny water-falls comes like a procession of nymphs out of an enchanted wood.

We were now in a colder region. The sparseness of the timber led me to look right and left for the stumps of felled trees, but I saw nothing of the kind. To the rigorous climate and extreme leanness of the soil they attribute the scanty, undersized growth. I did not see fifty good timber trees along the whole route. Where a large tree had been prostrated by the wind, its upturned and matted roots showed a pitiful quantity of earth adhering. Finding it impossible to grow downward more than a few poor inches, they spread themselves laterally out to a great distance. But the fir, with its flame-shaped point, is a symbol of indomitable pluck. You see it standing erect on the top of some huge bowlder, which its strong, thick roots clutch like a vulture’s talons. How came it there? Look at those rotting trunks, so beautifully covered with the lycopodium and partridge-plum! The seed of a fir has taken root in the bark. A tiny tree is already springing from the rich mould. As it grows, its roots grasp whatever offers a support; and if the decaying tree has fallen across a bowlder, they strike downward into the soil beneath it, and the rock is a prisoner during the lifetime of the tree. Its resin protects it from the icy blasts of winter, and from the alternate freezing and thawing of early spring. It is emphatically the tree of the mountains.

An hour and a half of pretty rapid walking brought us to the bottom of a steep rise. We were at length come to close quarters with the formidable outworks of Wildcat Mountain. The brook has for some distance poured a stream of the purest water over moss of the richest green, but now it most mysteriously vanishes from sight. From this point the singular rock called the Pulpit is seen overhanging the upper crags of the Dome.18

We drank a cup of delicious water from a spring by the side of the path, and, finding direct access forbidden by the towering and misshapen mass before us, turned sharply to the left, and attacked the side of Wildcat Mountain. We had now attained an altitude of nearly three thousand feet above the sea, or two thousand two hundred and fifty above the village of Jackson; we were more than a thousand higher than the renowned Crawford Notch.

On every side the ground was loaded down with huge gray bowlders, so ponderous that it seemed as if the solid earth must give way under them. Some looked as if the merest touch would send them crashing down the mountain. Undermined by the slow action of time, these fragments have fallen one by one from the high cliffs, and accumulated at the base. Among these the path serpentined for half a mile more, bringing us at last to the summit of the spur we had been climbing, and to the broad entrance of the Notch. We passed quickly over the level ground we were upon, stopped by the side of a well-built cabin of bark, threw off our loads, and then, fascinated by the exceeding strangeness of everything around me, I advanced to the edge of the scrubby growth in front of the camp, in order to command an unobstructed view.

Shall I live long enough to forget this sublime tragedy of nature, enacted Heaven knows when or how? How still it was! I seemed to have arrived at the instant a death-like silence succeeds the catastrophe. I saw only the bare walls of a temple, of which some Samson had just overthrown the columns – walls overgrown with a forest, ruins overspread with one struggling for existence.

Imagine the light of a mid-day sun brightening the tops of the mountains, while within a sepulchral gloom rendered all objects – rocks, trees, cliffs – all the more weird and fantastic. I was between two high mountains, whose walls enclose the pass. Overhanging it, fifteen hundred feet at least, the sunburnt crags of the Dome towered above the highest precipices of the mountain behind me. These stately barriers, at once so noble and imposing, seemed absolutely indestructible. Impossible to conceive anything more enduring than this imperishable rock. So long as the world stands, those mountains will stand. And nothing can shake this conviction. They look so strong, so confident in their strength, so incapable of change.

But what, then, is this dusky gray mass, stretching huge and irregular across the chasm from mountain to mountain, completely filling the space between, and so effectually blockading the entrance that we were compelled to pick our way up the steep side of the mountain in order to turn it?

Picture to yourself acres upon acres of naked granite, split and splintered in every conceivable form, of enormous size and weight, yet pitched, piled, and tumbled about like playthings, tilted, or so poised and balanced as to open numberless caves, which sprinkled the whole area with a thousand shadows – figure this, I repeat, to yourself – and the mind will then grasp but faintly the idea of this colossal barricade, seemingly built by the giants of old to guard their last stronghold from all intrusion. At some distance in front of me a rock of prodigious size, very closely resembling the gable of a house, thrusting itself half out, conveyed its horrible suggestion of an avalanche in the act of ingulfing a hamlet. And all this one beholds in a kind of stupefaction.

Whence came this colossal débris? I had at first the idea that the great arch, springing from peak to peak, supported on the Atlantean shoulders of the two mountains, had fallen in ruins. I even tried to imagine the terrific crash with which heaven and earth came together in the fall. Easy to realize here Schiller’s graphic description of the Jungfrau:

“One walks there between life and death. Two threatening peaks shut in the solitary way. Pass over this place of terror without noise; dread lest you awaken the sleeping avalanche.”

It is evident, however, as soon as the eye attaches itself to the side of the Dome, that one of its loftiest precipices, originally measuring an altitude as great as any yet remaining, has precipitated itself in a crushed and broken mass into the abyss. Nothing is left of the primitive edifice except these ruins. It is easily conceived that, previous to the convulsion, the interior aspect of the Notch was quite different from what is seen to-day. It was doubtless narrower, gloomier, and deeper before the cliff became dislodged. The track of the convulsion is easily traced. From top to bottom the side of the mountain is hollowed out, exposing a shallow ravine, in which nothing but dwarf spruces will grow, and in which the erratic rocks, arrested here and there in their fall, seem endeavoring to regain their ancient position on the summit. There is no trace whatever of the rubbish ordinarily accompanying a slide – only these rocks.

Seeing that all this happened long ago, I asked the guide why the larger growth we saw on both sides of the hollow had not succeeded in covering the old scar, as is the case with the Willey Slide; but he was unable to advance even a conjecture. The spruce, however, loves ruins, spreading itself out over them with avidity.

We felt our way cautiously and slowly out over the bowlders; for the moment one quits the usual track he risks falling headlong upon the sharp rocks beneath. In the midst of these grisly blocks stunted firs are born, and die for want of sustenance, making the dreary waste bristle with hard and horny skeletons. The spruce, dwarfed and deformed, has established itself solidly in the interstices; a few bushes spring up in the crannies. With this exception, the entire area is denuded of vegetation. The obstruction is heaped in two principal ridges, traversing its greatest breadth, and opening a broad way between. This is one of the most curious features I remarked. From a flat rock on the summit of the first we obtained the best idea of the general configuration of the Notch; and from this point, also, we saw the two little lakes beneath us which are the sources of the Wildcat. Beyond, and above the hollow they occupy, the two mountains meet in the low ridge constituting the true summit of Carter Notch. Far down, under the bowlders, the Wildcat gropes its way out; but, notwithstanding one or the other was continually dropping out of sight into the caverns with which they are filled, we could neither hear nor see anything to indicate its route. It is buried out of sight and sound.

No incident of the whole excursion is more curiously inexplicable than the total disappearance of the brook at the mountain’s foot. Notice that it was last seen gushing from the side we ascended, half a mile below the camp. Whence does it come? When we were on top of the bowlders, looking down on the water of the two little lakes, we wonderingly ask, “Where does it go? How does it get out?” The mystery is, however, solved by the certainty that their waters flow out underneath the barrier, so that this mammoth pile of débris, which could destroy a city, was unable to arrest the flow of a rivulet.

But all this wreck and ruin exerts a saddening influence; it seems to prefigure the Death of the Mountain. So one gladly turns to the landscape – a very noble though not extensive one – enclosing all the mountains and valleys to the south of us lying between Kearsarge and Moat.

After this tour of the rocks, we returned to the hut and ate our luncheon. Here the Pulpit Rock, which is sure to catch the eye whenever it wanders to the cliffs opposite, looks very much like the broken handle of a jug. Davis explained that, by advancing fifteen or twenty paces upon it, it would be possible to hang suspended over the thousand feet of space beneath. While thus occupied, the dog received his share of the bread and meat; nor was the little tame hawk that came and hopped so fearlessly at our feet forgotten. This bird and a cross-bill were the only living things I saw.19

Being fully rested and refreshed, we started on a second exploration of the upper part of the Notch. Thus far our examination had been confined to the lower portion only. Descending the spur upon which the hut is situated, we were, in a few moments, at the bottom of the deep cavity lying between the Giants’ Barricade and the little mountain forming the northern portal. This area is undoubtedly the original floor of the pass. We had now reached a position between the lakes. Looking backward, the barricade lifted a black and frowning wall a hundred and fifty feet above our heads. Looking down, the water of the lakes seemed “an image of the Dead Sea sleeping at the foot of Jerusalem destroyed.” While I stood looking into them, a passing cloud, pausing in astonishment at seeing itself reflected from these shadowy depths, darkened the whole interior. Deprived all at once of sunlight, the scene became one of great and magnificent solemnity. The pass assumed the appearance of a vast cavern. The ponds lay still and cold below. The air grew chill, the water black as ink. The ruddy color faded from the cliffs. They became livid. I saw the thousands upon thousands of fir-trees, rigid and sombre, ranged tier on tier like spectators in an immense circus, who are awaiting the signal for some terrible spectacle to begin. When the cloud tranquilly resumed its journey, a load seemed lifted off. It was Nature repeating to herself,

“Put out the light, and then put out the light.”

We had reached the camp at half-past ten. At half-past twelve we began the ascent of the Dome. It is not so much the height as the steepness of this mountain that wins our respect. The path goes straight up to the first summit, deflects a little to reach the Pulpit, and then, turning more northerly, ascends for a mile and a half more by a much easier rise to the highest peak. There are no open ledges on the route. The path is cut through a wood from base to summit; and, with the exception of a few trees felled to open an outlook in the direction of the main range, was covered on the summit itself with a dense growth of fir-trees from twelve to fifteen feet high. To obtain a view of the whole horizon, it was necessary, at the time of my visit, to climb one of these trees.

I will not fatigue the reader with any detailed account of the ascent. Suffice it to say that it was a slow and toilsome lifting of one heavy foot after another for three-quarters of an hour. Sometimes the slope was so near the vertical that we could ascend only a few rods at a time. I improved these halts by leaning against a tree, and panting like a doe pursued by the hunter. Davis threw himself upon the ground and watched me attentively, but without speaking. If he expected me to give out, I disappointed him by giving the signal to move on. I had already served my apprenticeship on Carrigain. It was difficult to maintain an upright position. Once, indeed, on looking up, I perceived that the guide had abandoned in disgust the idea of walking erect, and was creeping on all-fours, like his dog. This breathless scramble continued for three-quarters of an hour, at the end of which we turned into the short by-path conducting to the Pulpit.

Near the Pulpit is a cleared space large enough to afford standing room for fifteen or twenty persons. This Pulpit is a huge, rectangular rock, jutting out from the face of the cliff on which we stood, and is not at all unworthy of the name given to it by the guide. It is a fine station from which to survey the deep rent in the side of the mountain, as well as the mammoth stone-heap, which it overlooks. The black side of Mount Wildcat, ploughed from top to bottom with four deep gashes, is also seen to excellent advantage across the airy space between the mountains. The fluttering of a handkerchief at the door of the little cabin greatly enlivened the solitary scene, and drew from us the same signal in return.

“The least a death to nature,”

At first sight the ascent by the chasm seems feasible; but Davis, who has twice performed this difficult feat, declared with a shrug that nothing would tempt him to do it again. Those who have ever come to close quarters with the shrubby growth of these ruins will know how to leave it in undisputed possession of its own chosen ground. The dwarf spruce is the Cossack of the woods.

What a beautiful landscape is that from the Pulpit! The southern horizon is now widely opened. The mountains around Jackson have dwindled to hills. Especially curious are the flattened top and distorted contour-lines of Iron Mountain. Another singular feature is the way we look through the cloven summit of Doublehead to Kearsarge’s stately pyramid. Here are strips of the Ellis and Saco Valleys, and all of the Wildcat. The lakes in Ossipee are dazzling to look upon. Old Chocorua lifts his brilliant spire; then Moat his iron bulwarks. Crawford, Resolution, and the Giants’ Stairs extend on the right, behind Iron. The view is then cut off by the burly form of Wildcat. Far back in the picture are the notched walls of the Franconia and Sandwich chains, topped by pale blue peaks.

Continuing the ascent for about three-fourths of a mile, we came to a point only a rod or two distant from the head of the great slide of 1869, and from the top of a tree here was the most thrilling prospect of Washington and the great northern peaks I ever beheld. All the summits as far south as Monroe are included in the view.

Over the right shoulder of Wildcat appeared the dazzling summit of Washington, having at his left the noble cone of Jefferson, the matchless shaft of Adams, and the massive pyramid of Madison. Each gray head was profusely powdered with snow. Dark clouds, heavily charged with frost, partially intercepted the sun’s rays, and, enveloping the great mountains in their shadows, cast over them a mantle of the deepest blue; but enough light escaped to gild the arid slopes of the great ravines a rich brown gold, and to pierce through, and beautifully expose, against the dark bulk of Adams, a thin veil of slowly falling snow. Imagine an Ethiopian wrapped from head to foot in lace!