On Trails (30 page)

A hundred miles north of where Doyi and I walked lay Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the Northeast, whose crest had been touched by each of these waves. White people have been climbing the “White Hill” almost as long as they have been on the continent. The first recorded ascent took place in 1642, a mere two decades after the landing at Plymouth Rock. The climb was led by an illiterate immigrant named Darby Field, whose intentions remain largely unknown. It can be assumed, however, that he did not climb it for sheer pleasure, for almost without exception, the colonists regarded mountains as either a nuisance or a horror.

Many indigenous people of the Northeast (unlike some tribes to the south and west) also avoided mountaintops, believing they were the abodes of powerful spirits. Within an animist cultural framework, this was a wholly sensible belief: What else but a mad spirit could reside in such otherworldly places? According to the toponymist Philippe Charland, long before Europeans dubbed the region's highest peak Mount Washington, the Abenaki called it
Kôdaakwajo
,
or “Hidden Mountain,” because its summit was so often lost in clouds. Presumably, some curious Abenakis had at some point traveled up into that misty realm and never come back down, while others had returned only to describe horrors: freak storms, shredding winds, blinding snow. (Scientists would, in fact, later record the highest wind speed on earth—excluding hurricanes or tornadoes—atop the peak.) Why would one risk going there?

The scholar Nicholas Howe has theorized that Field's true mission in climbing the peak was to show the local Abenaki Indians that white men were not subject to the same natural laws as Native Americans. The siege was, in other words, a form of psychological warfare.

With snow still on the mountaintops, Field left his home near the coast one day—accompanied by several unidentified Native guides—and followed the Saco River to the base of the White Hill. There, he discovered a village of two hundred Native Americans of an unspecified tribe. He tried to procure a mountain guide, but they refused. All but one or two of his original companions would also eventually abandon the expedition. Undaunted, Field pushed on to the summit, where, according to one account, he sat in fear for five hours, “the clouds passing under him makinge a terrible noyse against the mountains.” On those cold, clear heights, he found glittering gems in the rock, which he believed to be diamonds. He returned to the summit a month later with a group of white settlers, who brought back samples of the crystals, only to discover that they were mere quartz and mica.

For the next one hundred and fifty years, no one else recorded having climbed the White Hill. In the meantime, interest in the mountains was growing among a small cadre of scientists and theologians, who regarded mountains as a potential source of new data and knowledge. The mountain was next climbed by a team of scientists in 1784, led by a clergyman-botanist named Manasseh Cutler and a clergyman-historian named Jeremy Belknap. Soon after, the peak received its presidential moniker (possibly from Belknap), and its reputation began to grow as the most “majestic” mountain in the new nation.

By the 1790s, a rough wagon road—following, as always, an old Native trail—was opened through a notch in the White Mountain chain along the western flank of Mount Washington. As it was gradually widened and improved, the road provided the most direct route from southern New England to northwest New Hampshire and Maine—“a great artery,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “through which the life-blood of internal commerce continually throbbed.”

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a young woodsman
named Abel Crawford decided to open an inn alongside that road and began guiding curious adventurers up the mountain, where they could enjoy a sublime panorama of the surrounding mountains. To facilitate the trip to the summit, Abel and his son Ethan cut trails. The first of these, called the Crawford Path, might well be the oldest continuously used hiking trail in the country. It is a slow, circuitous path, winding slowly back and forth up across the mountain “as if reluctant to approach too directly into such an august presence,” wrote Laura and Guy Waterman in
Forest and Crag
, their authoritative history of hiking in the Northeast.
III
At first, the path was faint—one early hiker described it as “obscure, often determined only by marked trees, some of which ‘Old Crawford' alone could discover”—but over time it became clear and wide. More than a century later, the last leg of this path would become part of the Appalachian Trail.

A new curiosity and admiration for the mountains was taking hold, and Mount Washington loomed prominently. The peak was climbed by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau (twice). They all seemed to recognize some twinkling of the divine in it. Hawthorne found it “majestic, and even awful”—not horrible, but full of awe. Thoreau, writing to a friend who had recently climbed the peak, wrote, “You must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. I suppose that I feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church.”

By the 1830s, the barren mountains were being valued for the same reasons they had once been reviled: their terrific heights, their unpredictable weather, and perhaps most of all, their remoteness from the lowland clutter of civilization. Like storm clouds, slowly, and
then all at once, around the mountaintop an aesthetic appreciation had coalesced. “It became almost an obligatory mark of a vigorous public man of New England in those years that he had made the ascent of Mount Washington,” wrote the Watermans. The sentiment seems to have originated among city dwellers, for whom mountains were exotic. The people who lived at the base of the peaks—who were necessarily fixated on extracting economic and subsistence value from the land—were unlikely to ever climb them. One farmer at the base of Mount Washington told the pastor Thomas Starr King that he wished the mountains were flat.

Many urban tourists were eager to see the mountains, but were unable or unwilling to walk up them. So, in 1840, the Crawfords widened their path to make it fit for horses; Abel, then seventy-four, was the first man to ride on horseback all the way to the summit. By the 1850s, all five paths up Mount Washington had been converted into horse paths. A decade later, a carriage path had been cleared, and around the same time, another path cut by the Crawfords was used to lay out the tracks of a cog railway. It became possible to travel from the back alleys of Boston to the top of Mount Washington without taking more than a few steps. One prominent writer recommended that his readers catch a train to Gorham, take a wagon “through primeval forests” to the Glen House Hotel, and then ascend the mountain on a pony. “That is
de rigeur
,” he insisted. With newfound ease and expediency, as many as five thousand people reached the summit of Mount Washington each year.

In the early days, if one of their clients had wanted to spend the night on the mountainside, the Crawfords would have built a pole-and-bark shelter for them, and inside, they would have fashioned a bed of fragrant balsam boughs. By the 1850s, to accommodate the new flood of tourists, two stone-walled hotels—aptly named the Tip-Top House and the Summit House—were built directly on top of the peak. On mountaintops throughout the Northeast, similar
buildings—hotels, huts, concession stands, even a small newspaper office—were popping up like mushrooms. Meanwhile, vast vacation resorts sprawled across the valleys; one hotel, built in the Catskills, boasted a thousand rooms. Guests were known to spend whole summers at these “grand hotels,” taking short day trips out into the mountains to amuse themselves. Walking paths tendriled out around the hotels, many of them equipped with wooden ladders, scenic overlooks, and designated resting areas.

The Civil War brought a decades-long drought to mountain tourism. But around the turn of the century, the arrival of the automobile granted people easy access to previously unreachable mountains, and the public's interest in hiking revived. A slew of hiking clubs formed to maintain old trails and build new ones. Meanwhile, for those disinclined to walk, a series of road improvements made it possible to drive right to the crest of Mount Washington. Like anywhere cars and tourists converge, a large souvenir shop and a cafeteria opened up to cater to the crowds. To this day, atop that storied peak, drivers can be found proudly purchasing bumper stickers that read: “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.”

When I reached the summit of Mount Washington on my own thru-hike, it struck me as a kind of suburban horror. As I neared the summit, a red-and-white radio antenna rose into view, followed in time by a stone tower, a cog railroad, a cafeteria, and a crowded parking lot. It was a clear, warm Saturday in July, and the peak writhed with tourists. After four months of walking over more or less barren peaks, it felt like I had stumbled into an outdoor mall.

Almost four hundred years earlier, Darby Field had deemed Mount Washington a barren wasteland, devoid of economic value. In the intervening centuries, the peak's barrenness had served as a beacon for hikers, offering a rare island of wilderness in a sea of tamed fields. As one hiker wrote in 1882, “The climber here tastes the full enjoyment of an encounter with untamed nature.” It was a perverse
fate, then, that the mountain's untamed allure would be precisely what led to its own taming.

Little did I know that, but for a few flukes of history and a widespread shift in popular sentiment, many of the other peaks I had crossed on the Appalachian Trail could have looked the same.

+

A few hundred miles north of Mount Washington stands its wild twin, Mount Katahdin. At the outset of the American experiment, the two were not dissimilar. Like Washington, indigenous people living near the base of Katahdin reportedly never climbed it, for fear of a winged thunder spirit named Pamola. Both mountains would one day be recognized as the tallest in their respective states: indeed, the Penobscot name for Katahdin means “the greatest mountain.” From similar beginnings, though, the two parted ways soon after colonists arrived. While the slopes of Mount Washington experienced ever-growing waves of visitors, Katahdin, walled off by miles of the gloomy North Woods, remained unclimbed. It was finally crested by an eleven-man team of government surveyors in 1804, more than a century and a half after Mount Washington.

In 1846, Thoreau made a failed bid to climb Katahdin. He and two companions made their way to its base by canoe, guided by an old Native American man named Louis Neptune, who advised Thoreau to leave a bottle of rum on top of the mountain to appease the mountain spirit. On their climb, Thoreau and his companions followed moose trails and scrambled cross-country. In one harrowing instance, while crawling over the flattened tops of the black spruce trees that had grown up between the mountain's massive boulders, Thoreau looked down to find that below him, in the crevices, lay the sleeping forms of bears. (“Certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled,” he wryly observed.)

The party became lost in fog and never made it to the summit.
But on his descent, passing through an area called the Burnt Lands, Thoreau—who had spent almost his entire life in bucolic Concord, where a surplus of farms and fences had rendered the landscape “tame and cheap”—suddenly realized he had stumbled upon a wholly wild place. He found the Burnt Lands savage, awful, and unspeakably beautiful. Here, he sensed, was the universal bedrock underlying the artifices of humankind. Recalling the experience, he wrote:

This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the
solid
earth! the
actual
world! the
common sense! Contact! Contact!

How, one must wonder, had a human being—indeed, a whole generation of human beings—become so abstracted from the land (the
solid
earth! the
actual
world!) as to warrant such an epiphany? The answer, as we've seen, stretches back through our ancestral past: through agriculture, which obviated the hunter-gatherer's need to walk, study, and interact with whole ecosystems; through writing, which replaced the landscape as an archive of communal knowledge; through monotheism, which vanquished the animist spirits and erased their earthly shrines; through urbanization, which concentrated people in built environments; and through a snug pairing of mechanical technology and animal husbandry, which allowed people to travel over the earth at blurring speeds. Euro-Americans had been working for millennia to forget what an unpeopled planet looked like. To see it afresh came as a shock.

Ever since Thoreau's revelation, a steady trickle of hikers has flowed toward Katahdin in search of the same ineffable experience
.
It gained a reputation as the antithesis to mountains like Washington, where, according to one account, “large flocks of hitherto ‘un-mountain-fähig', both male and female, streamed up the mountains like a transplanted tea party.” But despite its growing popularity, Katahdin resisted all attempts to tame it. During the height of the summit house craze of the 1850s, Maine politicians, envious of the commercial success of Mount Washington, chartered a road to be built over Katahdin. A crew was sent out to survey a path, but they returned with a route so absurdly steep that no carriage could climb it, and the project was soon abandoned. Even into the 1890s, while trail-builders on Mount Washington were rearranging boulders to construct paths so smooth they reportedly could be walked blindfolded, the paths on Katahdin remained, in the Watermans' words, “the roughest of cuts through the north woods.”

The longer Katahdin resisted attempts to tame it, the Watermans wrote, the more it attracted “pilgrims” who enjoyed its wild character—­and who, moreover, would fight to keep it that way. In 1920, an eccentric millionaire named Percival Baxter climbed Katahdin via the vertiginous Knife's Edge route. Greatly impressed, he vowed to ensure that the land would remain “forever wild.” The following year, as governor of the state, he fought to have the area recognized as a state park. When the state legislature refused, he began buying the land with his own fortune, eventually acquiring two hundred thousand acres, which was later designated as a state park. From the outset, Baxter insisted that “Everything in connection with the Park must be left simple and natural and must remain as nearly as possible as it was when only the Indians and the animals roamed at will through these areas.”