The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery

Making my way to the rocks above the cataract, I saw the torrent swiftly descending in two long, arching billows, flecked with foam, and tossing myriad diamonds to the sun. Two large masses of rock, loosened from the cliffs that hang over it, have dropped into the stream, turning it a little from its ancient course, but only to make it more picturesque and more tumultuous. On the left of the gorge the rocks are richly striped with black, yellow, and purple. The water is crystal clear, and cold as ice, having come, in less time than it takes to write, from the snows of Tuckerman’s Ravine. The variegated hues of the rocks, glistening with spray, of the water itself seizing and imprisoning, like flies in amber, every shadow these rocks let fall, the roar of the cataract, make a deep and abiding impression of savage force and beauty.

But I had not yet seen the fall. Descending by slippery stairs to the pool beneath it, I saw, eighty feet above me, the whole stream force its way through a narrow cleft, and stand in one unbroken column, superbly erect, upon the level surface of the pool. The sheet was as white as marble, the pool as green as malachite. As if stunned by the fall, it turns slowly round; then, recovering, precipitates itself down the rocky gorge with greater passion than ever.

On its upper edge the curling sheet of the fall was shot with sunlight, and shone with enchanting brilliancy. All below was one white, feathery mass, gliding down with the swift and noiseless movement of an avalanche of fresh snow. No sound until the moment of contact with the submerged rocks beneath; then it finds a voice that shakes the hoary forest to its centre. How this exquisite white thing fascinates! One has almost to tear himself away from the spot. Undine seems beckoning us to descend with her into the crystal grottoes of the pool. From the tender dalliance of a sunbeam with the glittering mists constantly ascending was born a pale Iris. Exquisitely its evanescent hues decorated the virgin drapery of the fall. Within these mists two airy forms sometimes discover themselves, hand-in-hand.

The story runs that the daughter of a sagamore inhabiting the little vale, now Jackson, was secretly wooed and won by a young brave of another and neighboring tribe. But the haughty old chief destined her for a renowned warrior of his own band. Mustering his friends, the preferred lover presented himself in the village, and, according to Indian usage, laying demanded his bride. The alliance was too honorable to permit an abrupt refusal. Smothering his wrath, the father assembled his braves. The matter was debated in solemn council. It was determined that the rivals should settle their dispute by a trial of skill, the winner to carry off the beautiful prize. A mark was set up, the ground carefully measured, and the two warriors took their respective places in the midst of the assembled tribe. The heart of the Indian maiden beat with hope when her lover sent his arrow quivering in the edge of the target; but it sunk when his rival, stepping scornfully to his place, shot within the very centre. A shout of triumph rewarded the skill of the victor; but before it died away the defeated warrior strode to the spot where his mistress was seated and spoke a few hurried words, intended for her ear alone. The girl sprung to her feet and grasped her lover’s hand. In another moment they were running swiftly for the woods. They were hotly pursued. It became a matter of life and death. Perceiving escape impossible, rendered desperate by the near approach of their pursuers, the fugitives, still holding fast each other’s hand, rushed to the verge of the cataract and flung themselves headlong into its deadly embrace.

 
“ – at her father’s feet that night
His softest furs and wampum white.”
 

Over the pool the gray and gloomy wall of Wildcat Mountain seems stretching up to an incredible height. The astonishing wildness of the surroundings affects one very deeply. You look up. You see the firs surmounting those tall cliffs sway to and fro, as if growing dizzy with the sight of the abyss beneath them.

The Ellis Cascade is not so light as those mountain sylphs in the great Notch, which a zephyr lifts from their feet, and scatters far and wide; it is a vestal hotly pursued by impish goblins to the brink of the precipice, transformed into a water-fall. For an instant the iron grip of the cliff seems clutching its snowy throat, but with a mocking courtesy the fair stream eludes the grasp, and so escapes.

While returning from Glen Ellis, I saw, not more than a quarter of a mile from this fall, a beautiful cascade come streaming down a long trough of granite from a great height, and disappear behind the tree-tops that skirt the narrow gorge. I had never before seen this cascade, it being usually dry in summer. The sight of glancing water among the shaggy upper forests of the mountain – for you hear nothing – is a real pleasure to the eye. The rock down which this cascade flows is New River Cliff.

Before leaving the Ellis, which I did regretfully, it is proper to recall an incident which gave rise to one of its affluents. In 1775, says Sullivan, in his “History of Maine,” the Saco was found to swell suddenly, and in a singular manner. As there had not been rain sufficient to account for this increase of volume, people were at a loss how to explain the phenomenon, until it was finally discovered to be occasioned by a new river having broken out of the side of the White Mountains.

When this river issued from the mountains, in October, 1775, a mixture of iron-ore gave the water a deep red color, and this singular, and to them most startling, appearance led the people inhabiting the upper banks of the Saco to declare that the river ran blood – a circumstance which these simple-minded folk regarded as of evil omen for the success of their arms in the struggle then going on between the Colonies and Great Britain. Except for illustrating a marked characteristic the incident would possess little importance. Considerable doubt exists as to the precise course of this New River, by which it is conjectured that the ascents of Cutler, Boott, Bigelow, and perhaps others, early in this century, were made to the summit of Mount Washington. But this is merely conjecture.²⁰

After Glen Ellis one has had enough, for the day at least, of waterfalls and cascade. Its excitement is strangely infectious and exhilarating. At the same time, it casts a sweet and gentle spell over the spirits. If he be wise, the visitor will not exhaust in a single tour of the sun the pleasures yet in store, but, after a fall, try a ravine or a mountain ascent, thus introducing that variety which is the spice of all our pleasures.

V.
A SCRAMBLE IN TUCKERMAN’S

 
The crag leaps down, and over it the flood:
Know’st thou it, then?
‘Tis there! ‘tis there
Our way runs… Wilt thou go? – Goethe.
 

AT the mountains the first look of every one is directed to the heavens, not in silent adoration or holy meditation, but in earnest scrutiny of the weather. For here the weather governs with absolute sway; and nowhere is it more capricious. Morning and evening skies are, therefore, consulted with an interest the varied destinies of the day may be supposed to suggest. From being a merely conventional topic, the weather becomes one of the first importance, and such salutations as “A fine day,” or “A nice morning,” are in less danger of being coupled with a wet day or a scowling forenoon. To sum up the whole question, where life in the open air is the common aim of all, a rainy day is a day lost, and everybody knows that a lost day can never be recovered. Sun worship is, therefore, universal.

The prospect being duly weighed and pronounced good, or fair, or fairly good, presto! the hotel presents a scene of active preparation. Anglers, with rod and basket, betake themselves to the neighboring trout brooks, artists to the woods or the open. Mountain wagons clatter up to the door with an exhilarating spirit and dash. Amid much laughter and cracking of jokes, these strong, yet slight-looking vehicles are speedily filled with parties for the summit, the Crystal Cascade, or Glen Ellis; knots of pedestrians, picturesquely dressed, move off with elastic tread for some long-meditated climb among the hills or in the ravines; while the regular stages for Gorham or Glen Station depart amid hurried and hearty leave-takings, the flutter of handkerchiefs, and the sharp crack of the driver’s whip. Now they are off, and quiet settles once more upon the long veranda.

My own plans included a trip in and out of Tuckerman’s Ravine; in by the old Thompson path, out by the Crystal Cascade. It is necessary to depart a little from the order of time, as my first essay (during the first week of May) was frustrated by the deep snows then effectually blockading the way above Hermit Lake. The following July found me more fortunate, and it is this excursion that I shall now lay before the reader for his approval.

I chose a companion to whom I unfolded the scheme, while reconnoitring the ravine through my glass. He eagerly embraced my proposal, declaring his readiness to start on the instant. Upon a hint I let fall touching his ability to make this then fatiguing march, he observed, rather stiffly, “I went through one Wilderness with Grant; guess I can through this.”

“Pack your knapsack, then, comrade, and you shall inscribe ‘Tuckerman’s’ along with Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.”

“Bless me! is it so very tough as all that? No matter, give me five minutes to settle my affairs, and I’m with you.”

Let us improve these minutes by again directing the glass toward the ravine.

The upper section of this remarkable ravine – that portion lifted above the forest line – is finely observed from the neighborhood of the Crystal Cascade, but from the Glen House the curiously distorted rim and vertical wall of its south and west sides, the astonishing crag standing sentinel over its entrance, may be viewed at full leisure. It constitutes quite too important a feature of the landscape to escape notice. Dominated by the towering mass of the Dome, infolded by undulating slopes descending from opposite braces of Mount Washington, and resembling gigantic draperies, we see an enormous, funnel-shaped, hollow sunk in the very heart of the mountain. We see, also, that access is feasible only from the north-east, where the entrance is defended by the high crag spoken of. Behind these barriers, graven with a thousand lines and filled with a thousand shadows, the amphitheatre lifts its formidable walls into view.

For two miles our plain way led up the summit-road, but at this distance, where it suddenly changes direction to the right, we plunged into the forest. Our course now lay onward and upward over what had at some time been a path – now an untrodden one – encumbered at every few rods with fallen trees, soaked with rain, and grown up with moose-wood. Time and again we found the way barred by these exasperating windfalls, and their thick abatis of branches, forcing us alternately to go down on all-fours and creep underneath, or to mount and dismount, like recruits, on the wooden horse of a cavalry school.

But to any one loving the woods – and this day I loved not wisely, but too well – this walk is something to be taken, but not repeated, for fear of impairing the first and most abiding impressions. One cannot have such a revelation twice.

I recall no mountain-path that is so richly diversified with all the wildest forms of mountain beauty. At first our progress through primitive groves of pine, hemlock, and birch was impeded by nothing more remarkable than the giant trees stretching interminably, rank upon rank, tier upon tier. But these woods, these countless gray and black and white trunks, and outspread framework of branches, supported a canopy of thick foliage, filled with voices innumerable. Something stirred in the top of a lofty pine; and then, like an alguazil on a watch-tower, a crow, apparent sentinel of all the feathered colony, rose clumsily on his talons, flapped two sable wings, and thrice hoarsely challenged, “Caw! caw! caw!” What clamor, what a liliputian Babel ensued! Our ears fairly tingled with the calls, outcries, and objurgations apparently flung down at us by the multitudinous population overhead. Hark to the woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat, the partridge’s muffled drum! List to the bugle of the wood-thrush, sweet and clear! Now sounds the cat-bird’s shrill alarm, the owl’s hoot of indignant surprise. Then the squirrels, those little monkeys of our northern woods, grated their teeth sharply at us, and let fall nuts on our heads as we passed underneath. Never were visitors more unwelcome.

Before long we came to a brook, then to another. Their foaming waters shot past like a herd of wild horses. These we crossed. We now began to thread a region where the forest was more open. The moss we trampled underfoot, and which here replaces the grass of the valleys, was beating the tallest trees in the race for the mountain-top. It was the old story of the tortoise and the hare over again. But this moss: have you ever looked at it before your heel bruised the perfumed flowers springing from its velvet? Here are tufts exquisitely decorated with coral lichens; here the violet and anemone nestle lovingly together; here it creeps up the gray trunks, or hides the bare roots of old trees. Tread softly! This is the abode of elves and fairies. Step lightly! you expect to hear the crushed flowers cry out with pain.

These enchanting spots, where stones are couches and trees canopies, tempted us to sit down on a cushioned bowlder, or throw ourselves upon the thick carpet into which we sunk ankle-deep at every step. Even the bald, gray rocks were tapestried with mosses, lichens, and vines. All around, under the thick shade, hundreds of enormous trees lay rotting; yet exquisitely the prostrate trunks were overspread with robes of softest green, effectually concealing the repulsiveness, the suggestions of decay. Now and then the dead tree rose into new life through the sturdy roots of a young fir, or luxuriant, plumed ferns growing in its bark. This inexpressible fecundity, in the midst of inexpressible wastefulness, declared that for Nature there is no such thing as death. And they tell us the day of miracles has passed! Upon this dream of elf-land the cool morning light fell in oblique streams through the tree-trunks, as through grated windows, filling all the wood with a subdued twilight glimmer, leaving a portion of its own gleams on the moss-grown rocks, while the trees stretched their black shadows luxuriously along the thick-piled sward, like weary soldiers in a bivouac.

We proceeded thus from chamber to chamber, and from cloister to cloister, at times descending some spur of the mountain into a deep-shaded dell, and again climbing a swift and miry slope to better ground, until we crossed the stream coming from the high spur spoken of. From here the ground rapidly rose for half a mile more, when we suddenly came out of the low firs full upon the Lion’s Head crag, rising above Hermit Lake, and visible from the vicinity of the Glen House. To be thus unexpectedly confronted by this wall of imperishable rock stirs one very deeply. For the moment it dominates us, even as it does the little tarn so unconsciously slumbering at its feet. It is horribly mutilated and defaced. Its sides are thickly sowed with stunted trees, that bury their roots in its cracks and rents with a gripe of iron. In effect it is the barbican of the great ravine. Crouched underneath, by the shore of the lake, is a matted forest of firs and spruces, dwindled to half their usual size, grizzled with long lichens, and occupying, as if by stealth, the debatable ground between life and death. It is, in fact, more dead than alive. Deeply sunk beneath is the lake.

Hermit Lake – a little pool nestling underneath a precipice – demands a word. Its solitary state, its waters green and profound, and the thick shades by which it was covered, seemed strangely at variance with the intense activity of the foaming torrents we had seen, and could still hear rushing down the mountain. It was too small for a lake, or else it was dwarfed by the immense mass of overshadowing rock towering above it, whose reflected light streamed across its still and glossy surface. Here we bid farewell to the forest.

We had now gained a commanding post of observation, though there was yet rough work to do. We saw the whole magnificent sweep of the ravine, to where it terminates in a semicircle of stupendous cliffs that seem hewn perpendicularly a thousand feet down. Lying against the western wall we distinguished patches of snow; but they appeared of trifling extent. Great wooded mountain slopes stretched away from the depths of the gorge on either side, making the iron lineaments of the giant cliffs seem harder by their own softness and delicacy. Here and there these exquisite draperies were torn in long rents by land-slips. In the west arose the shattered peak of Monroe – a mass of splintered granite, conspicuous at every point for its irreclaimable deformity. It seemed as if the huge open maw of the ravine might swallow up this peak with ease. There was a Dantesque grandeur and solemnity everywhere. With our backs against the trees, we watched the bellying sails of a stray cloud which intercepted in its aerial voyage our view of the great summit; but it soon floated away, discovering the whitish-gray ledges to the very capstone of the dome itself. Looking down and over the thick woods beyond, we met again the burly Carter Mountains, pushed backward from the Pinkham Notch, and kept back by an invisible yet colossal strength.

From Hermit Lake the only practicable way was by clambering up the bed of the mountain brook that falls through the ravine. The whole expanse that stretched on either side was a chaos of shattered granite, pitched about in awful confusion. Path there was none. No matter what way we turned, “no thoroughfare” was carved in stolid stone. We tried to force a passage through the stunted cedars that are mistaken at a mile for greensward, but were beaten back, torn and bleeding, to the brook. We then turned to the great bowlders, to be equally buffeted and abused, and finally repulsed upon the brook, which seemed all the while mocking our efforts. Once, while forcing a route, inch by inch, through the scrub, I was held suspended over a deep crevice, by my belt, until extricated by my comrade. At another time he disappeared to the armpits in a hole, from which I drew him like a blade from a scabbard. At this moment we found ourselves unable either to advance or retreat. The dwarf trees squeezed us like a vise. Who would have thought there was so much life in them? At our wits’ end, we looked at our bleeding hands, then at each other. The brook was the only clew to such a labyrinth, and to it, as from Scylla to Charybdis, we turned as soon as we recovered breath. But to reach it was no easy matter; we had literally to cut our way out of the jungle.

When we were there, and had rested awhile from the previous severe exertions, my companion, alternately mopping his forehead and feeling his bruises, looked up with a quizzical expression, and ejaculated, “Faith, I am almost as glad to get out of this wilderness as the other! In any case,” he gayly added, “I have lost the most blood here; while in Virginia I did not receive a scratch.”

After this rude initiation into the mysteries of the ravine, we advanced directly up the bed of the brook. But the brook is for half a mile nothing but a succession of leaps and plunges, its course choked with bowlders. We however toiled on, from rock to rock, first boosting, then hoisting each other up; one moment splashing in a pool, the next halting in dismay under a cascade, which we must either mount like a chamois or ascend like a trout. The climber here tastes the full enjoyment of an encounter with untamed nature, which calls every thew and sinew into action. At length the stream grew narrower, suddenly divided, and we stood at the mouth of the Snow Arch, confronted by the vertical upper wall of the ravine.

We stood in an arena “more majestic than the circus of a Titus or a Vespasian.” The scene was one of awful desolation. A little way below us the gorge was heaped with the ruins of some unrecorded convulsion, by which the precipice had been cloven from base to summit, and the enormous fragments heaved into the chasm with a force the imagination is powerless to conceive. In the interstices among these blocks rose thickets of dwarf cedars, as stiff and unyielding as the livid rock itself. It was truly an arena which might have witnessed the gladiatorial combats of immortals.

We did not at first look at the Snow Arch. The eye was irresistibly fascinated by the tremendous mass of the precipice above. From top to bottom its tawny front was covered with countless little streams, that clung to its polished wall without once quitting their hold. They twined and twisted in their downward course, like a brood of young serpents escaping from their lair; nor could I banish the idea of the ghastly head of a Gorgon clothed with tresses of serpents. A poetic imagination has named this tangled knot of mountain rills, “The fall of a thousand streams.” At the foot of the cliff the scattered waters unite, before entering the Snow Arch, in a single stream. Turning now to the right, the narrowing gorge, ascending by a steep slope as high as the upper edge of the precipice, points out the only practicable way to the summit of Mount Washington in this direction. But we have had enough of such climbing, for one day, at least.

Partial recovery from the stupefaction which seizes and holds one fast is doubtless signalized in every case by an effort to account for the overwhelming disaster of which these ruins are the mute yet speaking evidence. We need go no farther in the search than the innocent-looking little rills, first dripping from the Alpine mosses, then percolating through the rocks of the high plateau, and falling over its edge in a thousand streams. Puny as they look, before their inroads the plateau line has doubtless receded, like the great wall of rock over which Niagara pours the waters of four seas. With their combined forces – how long ago cannot be guessed; and what, indeed, does it signify? – knitted together by frost into Herculean strength, they assailed the granite cliffs that were older than the sun, older than the moon or the stars, mined and countermined year by year, inch by inch, drop by drop, until – honey-combed, riddled, and pierced to its centre, and all was ready for its final overthrow – winter gave the signal. In a twinkling, yielding to the stroke, and shattered into a thousand fragments, the cliffs laid their haughty heads low in the dust. Afterward the accumulated waters tranquilly continued the process of demolition, and of removing the soil from the deep excavation they had made, until the floor of the ravine had sunk to its present level. In California a man with a hose washes away mountains to get at the gold deposits. This principle of hydraulic force is borrowed, pure and simple, from a mountain cataract.

Osgood, the experienced guide, who had visited the ravine oftener than anybody else, assured me that never within his remembrance had this forgotten forgement of winter, the Snow Arch, been seen to such advantage. We estimated its width at above two hundred feet, where it threw a solid bridge of ice over the stream, and not far from three hundred in its greatest length, where it lay along the slope of the gorge. Summer and winter met on this neutral ground. Entering the Arch was joining January and July with a step. Flowers blossomed at the threshold. We caught water, as it dripped ice-cold from the roof, and pledged Old Winter in his own cellarage. The brook foamed at our feet. Looking up, there was a pretty picture of a tiny water-fall pouring in at the upper end and out at the ragged portal of the grotto. But I think we were most charmed with the remarkable sculpture of the roof, which was a groined arch fashioned as featly as was ever done by human hands. What the stream had begun in secret the warm vapors had chiselled with a bolder hand, but not altered. As it was formed, so it remained – a veritable chapel of the hills, the brook droning its low, monotonous chant, and the dripping roof tinkling its refrain unceasingly. If the interior of the great ravine impressed us as the hidden receptacle of all waste matter, this lustrous heap of snow, so insignificant in its relation to the immensity of the chasm that we scarcely looked at it at first, now chased away the feeling of mingled terror and aversion – of having stolen unawares into the one forbidden chamber – and possessed us with a sense of the beautiful, which remained long after its glittering particles had melted into the stream that flowed beneath. So under a cold exterior is nourished the principle of undying love, which the aged mountain gives that earth may forever renew her fairest youth.

The presence of this miniature glacier is a very simple matter. The fierce winds of winter which sweep over the plateau whirl the snows before them, over its crest, into the ravine, where they are lodged at the foot of the precipice, and accumulate to a great depth. As soon as released by spring, the little streams, falling down this wall, seek their old channels, and, being warmer, succeed in forcing a passage through the ice. By the end of August the ice usually disappears, though it sometimes remains even later.

After picking up some fine specimens of quartz, sparkling with mica, and uttering a parting malediction on the black flies that tormented us, we took our way down and out of the ravine, following the general course of the stream along its steep valley, and, after an uneventful march of two hours, reached the upper waters of the Crystal Cascade.