A hike to Mount Parker yields clues to a smallpox outbreak

On a recent spring hike, I learned about the joys of hiking Bartlett’s Mount Parker, which offers great views of Mount Washington with far fewer people than many other White Mountain trails.

While not not an easy hike at about 8 miles round-trip, this trek offers a variety of terrain, as the trail follows an old logging road to a stretch of open forest and then climbs a series of switchbacks to the mountain’s 3,004-foot ope summit.

But what intrigued me most about the day’s adventure was the mystery at the Mount Langdon trailhead: the lonely grave of Dr. Leonard Eudy, who died far too young, at age 34, while caring for patients during a smallpox outbreak.

Dr. Eudy’s grave is located at the Mount Langdon Trailhead in Bartlett, just to the right (south) of the trail, and surrounded by protective fence. The hike to to Mount Parker begins here, with a 2.5 mile hike up the Mount Langdon trail to the junction of the Mount Parker trail.

With the Langdon Trail beckoning, I didn’t notice the gravesite when we first set out.

The Mount Langdon Trail begins as a long abandoned logging road. The gravesite is at the trailhead, to the right (or south). On this spring day, we encountered soft snow about 2 miles in.

Dr. Leonard had been caring for smallpox patients at a Bartlett logging camp when he became infected with this deadly disease, which had a mortality rate of about 30%. There were many logging camps in the White Mountains, and I couldn’t find any specific information about where the outbreak was, or why Dr. Leonard was buried here, across from the Saco River. The woods below the Mount Parker summit look young, like the area was heavily logged. Was this general area the site of the logging camp?

Late April, on the Mount Parker Trail, in the woods between the junction with the Langdon Trail, and the summit of Mount Parker. The forest was open here, free of brush, with mostly beech trees.

Dr. Leonard, born in Bethlehem, NH, had left the mountains in 1862 at age 19 to enlist in Company C 15th Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteers, joined by his two older brothers, Emphraim and William. In Carrolton, Louisiana, horseplay with another young man took a tragic turn when Eudy’s gun accidentally fired, shattering the leg of his friend, who died after the leg was amputated. This accident haunted Eudy for the rest of his life. I wonder if becoming a doctor in a small mountain community was Eudy’s way of trying to compensate for the accident, or at least to live with himself. Or maybe the illness and suffering he witnessed during the war led him to medicine. Of the 71 men in Company C, only 40 returned home. Disease killed all but four of these young men.

Eudy Leonard is pictured here with his brother, Ephraim, in their Civil War uniforms (BartlettNHHistory.com).

After the War, Eudy Leonard enrolled at Harvard Medical School, and then returned to the White Mountains, moving to Bartlett in 1871.

Smallpox vaccination had been invented by Edward Jenner in 1796. During the first part of the 19th century, smallpox outbreaks were greatly reduced with the combined tools of vaccination and isolation. Memories of smallpox faded. By the 1840s, vaccination efforts had waned. When the time the Civil War erupted, smallpox had again became prevalent in the United States.

Both the Union and Confederate Armies required all soldiers to be vaccinated, so it is possible that Eudy Leonard had a smallpox vaccine, though its effectiveness may have diminished by 1877 (during this period, smallpox vaccines were considered effective for about seven years). But it’s equally likely that Company C was never vaccinated, as often the vaccine requirement was ignored in the rush to get troops to the front lines.

By 1877, smallpox vaccine was a small industry, with vaccine “grown” on calves’ hides at “vaccine farms.” After harvesting, the vaccine was stored in a glycerine solution, or ground into a powder that was applied to the arm through a scraping process (i.e. making a wound and rubbing in the vaccine). There was no regulation of vaccine, and quality varied greatly, but the vaccine was transportable. However, it wasn’t free. I’m guessing that by 1877, most locals in the White Mountains were not vaccinated because in the absence of disease, they felt no need for a vaccine that was probably expensive by local standards.

Irregular vaccination and variable vaccine quality was fairly typical until 1902, when the last major smallpox epidemic killed 270 people in Boston. In Boston, vaccination efforts immediately ramped up, along with resistance to the vaccination and to the city’s mandate to vaccinate all people in a specific area impacted by smallpox (no one was forcibly vaccinated, but they faced a $5 fine or 15 days in jail if they refused).

The Boston epidemic changed the game for vaccination, with new federal laws passed to regulate vaccines and the first efforts to use mass vaccination campaigns as a public health tool to prevent disease. By 1932, smallpox was a rare disease in the United States. By the early 1950s, it was eradicated in the United States.

If Dr. Leonard had survived smallpox, he might have lived long enough to witness the first stage of this public health victory. Like many doctors today working with COVID-19 patients, Dr. Leonard understood the dangers of smallpox and likely tried to protect himself, but the risks didn’t stop him from doing his job of trying to save the sick from dying. I hope that in his six-year tenure in Bartlett, he took a walk or two to the summit of Mount Parker, and enjoyed the view of Mount Washington from its ledgy summit.

Sources and resources

“Cemeteries.” Bartlett, NH History. https://www.bartletthistory.org/bartletthistory/cemeteries.html

History of Smallpox“, Centers for Disease Control.

Albert, Michael, R., M.D., Kristen G. Ostheimer, M.A., Joel G. Breman, M.D., D.T.P.H. “The Last Smallpox Epidemic in Boston and the Vaccination Controversy, 1901–1903“. The New England Journal of Medicine. February 4, 2001.

McGregor, Charles. History of the Fifteenth Regiment, New Hampshire Volunteers, pg 214  1862-1863 (cited in the Bartlett, NH History information).

Priest, Conn Granville. History of the New Hampshire Surgeons in the War of the Rebellion.(cited in the Bartlett, NH History information)

Reimer, Terry. “Smallpox and Vaccination in the Civil War.” National Museum of Civil War Medicine. November 9, 2004.

A visit to Arches National Park as it all fell down

On Friday, March 6, Logan Airport was packed with travelers heading out on winter escapes. People crowded together, waiting to board with ski bags and backpacks. But in the bathroom, everyone was washing their hands with a furor I’d never seen before.  The virus was around, but everyone was still traveling. Why not? We’d heard about a few cases, popping up here and there, but the virus was a distant annoyance, not a threat.

Still, I wondered: was the virus closer than we thought?  The news about the virus in Italy was especially ominous, but Italy was an ocean away. At the ski resort of Park City, Utah, in the lift lines and in the crowded mountain cafeteria-style restaurants, people jostled against one another, conversing in many languages: French, German, Spanish — and Italian.

Although I enjoyed our reunion with old friends in Park City, I was ready to get away from the crowds, and head south and east to Moab, Utah, to explore Arches National Park before heading home to Maine and my students.

The Courthouse Towers greet visitors shortly after entering Arches National Park. We visited in early March, in the first days of “prime season.”  The park was busy but not mobbed, reminding me “off-peak” is the best time to many National Parks. It closed shortly after our visit because of COVID-19.

Arches is a relatively small national park of about 120 square miles. You could tuck it into a corner of Rhode Island, which is about 10 times larger. But the park terrain is rugged and often dangerously hot, which deterred exploration of its many nooks and crannies. When established as a National Monument in 1929, its 90 arches were cited as national treasures, and until 1970, Arches National Park still had 90 arches. But thanks to an ambitious documenting effort carried out by a handful of people over a thirty-year period, we know now that  the park has more than 2,000 arches.

The arches are constantly changing, with new ones forming over decades and centuries,  and old ones eroding, crumbling and even collapsing. In 2008, Wall Arch collapsed in the middle of the night. No one witnessed the collapse but campers at the Devils Garden Campground reported hearing thunder that night. The next day, park rangers found that the arch was gone, its tons of sandstone rubble strewn over the Devil’s Garden Trail. In September, 1991, a huge chunk of Landscape Arch, the longest known arch on the planet, broke off.

photo of Landscape Arch

Landscape Arch, on the Devil’s Garden Trail.  Prior to 1991, hikers could walk up to the arch, but after a huge chunk fell to the ground, the park built fences to keep hikers at a distance.  Several park visitors witnessed this event, including a man who videotaped it (see link to video at the end of this post).

Although Arches has plenty of backcountry terrain that can be explored with all-terrain vehicles, most visitors experience the park via the 18-mile scenic drive, with many trailheads for day hikes located off this road.

We began our visit by setting out for the end of the road, to the Devil’s Garden Trailhead, which would take us to Landscape Arch, and then to the Double O Arches.

As we hiked past Landscape Arch, the hikers thinned out, but plenty of people remained on the trail. On one side of the trail loomed the  hoodoos of the Devil’s Garden. Although the Devil’s Garden isn’t a massive area, it is easy to get disoriented among the sandstone formations, so hiking is allowed there only by guided ranger tour.

On the trail to Double O Arch, hikers scramble up and onto a sandstone fin that may some day become an arch. Hiking along the narrow fin, we weren’t really thinking of social distance, but of courteously maneuvering so that all hikers could pass back and forth safely.

 

The lower half of Double O Arch, with a a much larger second arch directly above it.

Back in Moab, news of the virus was circling, even if the virus not yet circulating. At dinner at the bustling Vietnamese-inspired 98 Central Restaurant, the owners provided  wipes to sanitize phones. At the Park Service Visitor Center, staff had tape had placed tape over the water bubblers, but we could still draw water for our bottles  from the hand-cranked pump outside. Posted signs reminded visitors to wash their hands.

image of north window arch

Exploring North Window Arch (and then its twin, South Window), located off a short side road from the main Park road.

Among the Arches, the idea of the virus seemed unreal. But then, everything started tumbling down. My daughter received an email from her college, telling her not to return. Who had ever heard of colleges closing down? In Boston and New York, the virus was exploding at exponential rates. For better or worse, it was easy to get phone service in the park, and I had to restrain myself from constantly checking on virus-related news.

On our second day, we decided to hike out to Delicate Arch, probably the most famous arch in the park, and well-visited, even though visiting requires a moderately strenuous 3-mile round-trip hike. The hike sets out from Wolfe Ranch, where 69-year-old Civil War veteran John Wesley Wolfe settled with his son Fred in 1898.  Wolfe, who hailed from Ohio, had suffered since the War from a nagging leg injury, and hoped that the drier climate might help his leg. Here, they grazed 1,000 head of cattle on 100 acres for about 10 years.

For several years, John Wesley Wolfe lived in this one-room cabin along with his son Fred, daughter Flora, her husband and their two children. This cabin, built in 1906 when Flora arrived, replaced a previous structure where John and Fred had lived for about 8 years, and which Flora deemed inhabitable (National Park Service photo).

The hike to Delicate Arch took us up along open sandstone slabs, easy on legs used to the steep trails of eastern mountains (but probably hot as hell on a summer day). In the distance, thunder rumbled, and we kept a close eye on a dark cloud to see where it was heading.

The arch and the surrounding landscape were dramatic, especially as dark clouds swept across the sky. But oddly, the experience was underwhelming. Partly because lots of people were there, and partly because my mind was cluttered up with news about the virus. Would I be returning to my classroom when I got home? Should I be concerned about my mom flying on an airplane on her return trip from Florida?

photo of delicate arch

Delicate Arch, one of the iconic sites at Arches National Park.

On Friday, we drove back to Salt Lake City to catch a midnight red-eye back to Boston.  At the airport, the crowds had thinned. I had purchased window seats for the three of us, so that we could doze against the cabin wall. Now, the middle seats were empty.

In the aisle seat of my row, an older gentleman from Wyoming, dressed in full cowboy regalia, was heading to Ireland for a long-planned trip of a lifetime. He seemed unaware of the virus, or that it might impact his plans. I wondered what would happen to him and continued to wonder, when, a few days later, flights from Europe were suspended (although I know Ireland andGreat Britain, were the last European countries for which flights were shut down).

After the Arches came the virus days. Many hours of sitting at the computer, working with students and administering at a distance. Lots of checking on the news. Later, I learned that Park City — along with Sun Valley, Idaho — had infection rates (but not case numbers) equivalent to New York City, mostly because travelers from hard-hit urban and international locations had unknowingly delivered the virus to the further reaches of the country. Now, I feel grateful — and lucky –that I did not pick up the virus, or spread it to someone else.

Someday, I’ll get back to Moab. I want see the sunset at Dead Horse State Park, and explore bike trails suitable for a mild mountain biker. But for now, armchair travel will take the place of planes and trains. My armchair sits next to the window, which offers a view to other dramas: bluebirds building nests, a flock of congregating turkeys, a small gang of foraging deer. I’ll take it, with gratitude.

Sources and resources

On September 1, 1991, park visitor Michael Muller captured the crumbling of Landscape Arch on video, exhibited at this National Park Service site.

For more information, visit the website for Arches National Park.

Mountain spring: hike to North Doublehead

Mountains in spring, breath
clean oxygen. Listen:  in
the spruce, loving birds.

I’ve been working with my students on form poems, including haiku. Thus, I attempt to describe a recent hike with a combination of haiku, photos and text. Indulge me.

Taking a break on the trail up North Doublehead. The wide trail was built by the Saco Conservation Corps in 1934 as a backcountry ski trail, and makes for a great short hike in spring, summer and fall, about two miles to the summit.

Beckoning trails lead
to destinations but feel
like mystery paths.

The Ski Trail never gets very steep, and I’ve almost convinced myself that I could ski it next winter, in perfect conditions. But I’m sure it gets bumped up with ditches and mogul from avid backcountry skiers.

Long ago, young men
dripped sweat, hauling rocks and logs
to build a cabin.

The cabin on North Doublehead, popular with winter skiers and youth groups, is locked but can be reserved through the Forest Service. We discovered some lunch rocks with a great view of snow-covered Mount Washington.

The cabin was built by the CCC during the Depression and has been renovated several times, but still maintains many old features, like the stone foundation and chimney covered with a slab of rock. The cabin includes two small bunk rooms and a small community area with a wood stove.

On the ridge, young trees
erase old scars, wilding land
buzzing saws stripped bare.

Doublehead offers several looping options. At this junction, we had to decide whether to continue on for a longer hike to South Doublehead, and then double-back (or descend from South D. on another trail that exited about a half-mile from the car).  We opted to wait on South Doublehead for another day. This turned out to a good decision as the route down the Old Path was steep and icy, and required care and our full attention, even with micro spikes.

Mountains in spring: two
worlds, the barren forest plus
forgotten winter.

After stepping down the sometimes treacherous “Old Path” trail, we stepped into spring on the lower half of the mountain. The Old Path is fine for experienced hikers but I do not recommend taking children on this piece of the journey in spring. Out and back on the Ski Trail is the easiest route.

From the back porch, spring
sunsets on distant mountains
until trees unfurl.

At the day’s end, a view through the trees to the mountains and the sunset.

Note:

As of Friday, April 24, the White Mountain National Forest closed down many popular trailheads to try to spread out hikers prevent the spread of coronavirus, but many lesser-known trails remain open. I feel grateful that I’ve been able to do some hiking this spring.  The adventure described here met the guidelines for New Hampshire’s stay-at-home order.

Sources and resources
“Doublehead Mountain, CCC Ski Trails, New Hampshire.” NewEnglandSkiHistory.com

August days in Death Valley

During the summer months at Death Valley, birds sometimes drop out of the sky, killed by the extreme heat. Would our car die as well? As the car slid down Highway 190 into Death Valley, the temperature indicator continued to climb: 105, 110, 112, 115, eventually topping out at 123 degrees F. Would the tires hold up? Can cars even drive in such heat?

We’d hardly seen another vehicle on this road on this hot August afternoon. But when we pulled into the parking lot at Father Crowley Vista Point, we felt better, as plenty of other visitors joined us there for views of Rainbow Canyon.

We had read that birds sometimes sometimes drop out of the sky, and then, on a short morning hike, we found this little bird, still warm.

Visiting Death Valley at the peak of summer is a unique experience. It’s probably  not for everyone,  but I went there in August, 2018, and had a lovely time exploring the park, the largest outside of Alaska.

Although we had a car full of camping gear, camping was not an option. As we drove by, one lonely tent sat in the campground at Emigrant, and not a single tree.  The temperature here was about 119 degrees, and probably  15 or 20 degrees higher in the  heat-absorbing tent.  But summer is “low season” at Death Valley, and we scored a last-minute air-conditioned room at the Furnace Creek Ranch, motel-style accommodations with a mediocre family-style restaurant and a fantastic pool. Across the road, the fancy Furnace Creek Inn beckoned with all of its 1920s glamour and low summer rates, but alas, the inn was full.

In the winter, I could spend a lot of time exploring the nooks and crannies of Death Valley, which features mountains and canyons galore, as well as the lowest point in the United States, Badwater Basin. There is also the weird Scotty’s Castle, one-time vacation home to Chicago businessman Albert Johnson and his wife Bessie, along with their sidekick, the con artist/cowboy Walter Scott. Unfortunately, the Castle is closed until 2020, as it sustained severe damage in a 2015 flash flood.

In the summer, signs posted everywhere remind visitors that hiking after 10 a.m. is dangerous and not recommended. Thus, we set our alarms for 4:45 a.m., intent on greeting the day at Badwater Basin. By dawn, the temperature had cooled to a reasonable 100 degrees or so — a dry heat.  By 5:30 a.m.,  we were wandering around the Basin in blissful solitude.

Soaking up 282 feet below sea level as the sun rises as Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the United States.

By the time we left the Basin around 7 a.m., three or four other people had gathered. I love national parks, but they are often very crowded. Lack of crowds is a huge benefit in visiting Death Valley  and other parks off-season.

After the sunrise, when the temperature had climbed to a reasonable 105 or so, we headed up a nearby gravel road to the trailhead for the short hike into Natural Bridge Canyon.

The hike up Natural Bridge Canyon is do-able in extreme heat, especially before 10 a.m.

The hike — about one-mile round trip, depending on how far you hike in — offers some fun rock scrambles and interesting geological features.

Scrambling up the rocks in Natural Bridge Canyon.

Then, after a drive along Artist’s Palette loop road, (which shows off its best colors closer to sunrise or sunset) we returned to the air-conditioned visitor’s center to check out the exhibits, and then to our room at the Ranch for siesta.

The pool at the Furnace Creek Ranch feels very decadent in this land of little rain, but I still enjoyed lounging around in it during the hottest part of the afternoon as well as later in the evening, when the temperatures cooled to a balmy 105 degrees or so.  An abundant natural spring supplies water to the pool through a gravity-fed system, and the water is then re-used to irrigate the landscaping, gardens and the resort’s golf-course. Learning all of this — and that the resort is a California Green Lodging Certified property — eased any remaining guilt I felt about cooling off.

That evening, after a visit to the glamorous Furnace Creek Inn for a late afternoon snack, we headed to Zabriskie Point to catch the sunrise and watch the colors of the sunrise play out across the folds of the Death Valley.

Zabriskie Point at sunset. Don’t be fooled by my solitary pose — sunset at Zabriskie always attracts a crowd, even on the hottest days of summer.

Death Valley attracts many European visitors in August, and we found ourselves surrounded by a mix of French, German, Italian, Spanish and other voices.

After sunset, the temperature cooled down.

Evidence suggests that like many places on earth, Death Valley is heating up even further. Summers have always been hot at Death Valley. But in 2018, Death Valley had it warmest ever July, breaking the record set during 2017, with an average daily temperature of 108.2, six degrees higher than usual.  At the Furnace Creek weather station, the high temperature hit at least 120 degrees on 21 days. On four days, the temperature soared to 127 degrees.  (The highest temperature ever of 131 degrees Farenheit was “reliably recorded” at Furnace Creek on June 30, 2013).

An outdoor museum at the Furnace Creek Ranch showcases wagons, tools, and other artifacts leftover from the 1883-1889 borax mining era at Harmony Borax Works, near Furnace Creek. Various mining operations continued to operate in the park for most of its history, with the last mine closing in 2005.

A  “wet bulb” temperature of 100 degrees F (35 Celsius) and 85% humidity that equals 167 degrees is the maximum heat limit for human survivability, because the body’s cooling system can’t keep pace with the heat (see Leahy source, below).  The NOAA National Weather Service Heat Index shows the combinations of heat and humidity that produce specific “wet bulb” temperatures.

But wet bulb temperatures below 167 degrees also kill people. In 2015, a heat wave that generated wet-bulb temperatures of 122 degree F killed over 3,500 people in India and Pakistan. Chicago experienced a similar heat wave in 1995, and hundreds of people died. Thanks to climate change, we can expect more Death Valley-like days everywhere in years to come.

The Timbisha Shoshone people, who still call Death Valley home, knew how to  survive in this harsh environment. But Death Valley earned its name for a reason. At Furnace Creek, the spring-fed pools and air-conditioned rooms changed our experience of the heat from a threat to a novelty that we could experience, and then retreat from to a cooler environment.  But around the world, millions of people in hot zones — along with plants and wildlife — have no access to a cooler artificial environment. I wonder how we will adapt as major cities around the world routinely experience stretches of Death Valley days.

Being an optimist, or perhaps willfully blind, I’ll end by saying that I look forward to returning to Death Valley, but probably in another season, when birds don’t drop from the sky, and I can spend the entire day outdoors exploring this amazing national resource.

Good-bye, Death Valley, until I return in my camper van (a few years down the road).

Sources and resources

This cool map of Death Valley, from the National Park Service, displays in a couple of different ways.

Death Valley posts hottest month ever recorded on Earth, for the second July in a row,” by Ian Livingston and Jason Samenow.  The Washington Post, August 1, 2018.

Parts of Asia May Be Too Hot for People by 2100,” by Stephen Leahy.  National Geographic News, August 2, 2017.

 

Hello to Manzanar

Back in 7th grade, when I read Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, the wind and sand had buried most remains of the Japanese internment camp that Houston described so eloquently in her 1973 memoir. By the early 1970s, people had pretty much forgotten that the United States detained thousands of its own citizens in internment camps during World War II.

As a 12-year-old, the book blew me away — how could this have happened to families in the United States? I don’t remember asking my parents or grandparents about the camps, and we never learned about them in school. But Jeanne’s story stayed with me. Years later, when I was designing a humanities class called “Multicultural America,” I added her short but powerful book to the reading list. Now, I talk with students about Jeanne’s story, so she’s still with me (and still alive and living in California, as of 2018).

This past summer, I visited Manzanar National Historic Site, just south of Independence, California. As with Jeanne’s book, visiting Manzanar blew me away.

A replica of the original sign for the “Manzanar War Relocation Center.”

If I had come to Manzanar as a teenager, or even in my 20s, there wouldn’t have been much to see. The government dismantled the camp after the war, and the harsh winds of the Owens Valley had blown sand over the gravesites, gardens, and other camp remnants, literally erasing Manzanar and its history.

But thanks to Houston’s book, and the work of Manzanar Committee  — spearheaded by writer/activist and former incarceree Susan Kunitomi Embrey — we won’t forget Manzanar and the nine other detention camps set up for Japanese-American citizens and their older Japanese immigrant relatives.  These older immigrants — the Issei — were not citizens because until the 1952 passage of the McCarran–Walter Act, only white immigrants could become naturalized citizens.

Incarceree Ryozo Kado, a stonemason, built this memorial at the Manzanar cemetery in 1943. The Japanese inscription says “Monument to console the souls of the dead.” During the war, 143 people died in the camp, and 15 were buried here, although only five graves remain, including those of several babies or toddlers.

The residents of Manzanar made the best of a terrible experience, which to some people may suggest that “it wasn’t all that bad.” It sounds pretty bad to me. I can’t imagine the government tell me I had a couple of weeks to get my affairs in order because I was going to be held indefinitely behind barbed wire fences. Many Japanese-Americans lost businesses, homes, and lives they had built for themselves and their families.

Replica of  a family’s assigned room in the barracks at Manzanar.  On the August day that I visited, the temperature had cooled to the high 90s after a long stretch of 100 degree-plus days, which is typical summer weather in the Owens Valley, and this room was hotter on inside than outside. In the winter, cold wind blew through cracks in the hastily-constructed structures.

Life in the camp was extremely stressful, as is always the case when people are packed together in close quarters with little control over their own lives. At one point, a riot broke out in which two people were killed. In her memoir, Jeanne describes her father’s descent into alcoholism, and how the camp impacted family dynamics in other more subtle ways. For example, kids often ate with other children instead of their families, so the feeling of family togetherness gained through eating together was lost.

Replica of the bathroom building at Manzanar. My students always comment on Jeanne’s description of the bathrooms, which lacked stalls; Jeanne’s mother and other older Japanese women found using the bathrooms especially humiliating.

The government selected Manzanar because it was an abandoned town site, with land available for lease from the City of Los Angeles. Earlier in the 20th century, Los Angeles had more or less tricked the local farmers into selling off their water rights, and then drained the once-fertile valley dry by building a series of water-delivery canals. The land was originally home to Paiute Indians, driven off by the military in the 1860s.

Eventually, the involuntary residents of Manzanar built a community here, including basketball courts, numerous Japanese-style gardens, and a shady oasis known as “Pleasure Park.” Kids went to school, mothers birthed babies in a makeshift hospital, and teams played baseball and other sports.

The marker for Pleasure Park, also known as Merritt Park.
The gardens at Pleasure Park.  The Park Service  has excavated these gardens over the past 20 years, as the relentless Owens Valley wind had buried everything with sand. This park would have been lush and green during the war because the internees maintained it as oasis.

Manzanar National Historic Site was established in 1992. Controversy surrounded memorializing the camp from the moment the state of California designated it as  a historical site in 1972, and erected a roadside marker describing Manzanar as a “concentration camp.”  In the 1990s, when the Park Service first began to excavate, develop, and preserve the site, it was flooded with letters of protest, with at least one writer suggesting the camp was a “guest house.”

I’ve come across this desire to sanitize history in my own community, and it’s hard for me to understand. Some people seem to think that we should whitewash “the bad parts,” maybe because they think it reflects poorly on the community (locally) or, in the case of Manzanar, on the United States.

Many of the protestors  were WW II veterans. Perhaps some felt that an official remembrance of the Japanese internees in some way diminished the sacrifices they had made. During the war, they were fighting for an honorable cause. Reminding the country that Americans were held against their will perhaps made the cause seem less honorable. Or perhaps the veterans also felt forgotten. I know some would argue that this push to keep history “clean” results from systemic racism — controlling the narrative helps to maintain power — and I wouldn’t entirely disagree, but it’s complex. History provokes feelings that are often deeply personal.

After the war ended, Japanese-American families left the camps to pick up the pieces of shattered lives. Anti-Japanese sentiment and prejudice remained rampant, as this Manzanar exhibit illustrates.

Visiting Manzanar was an emotional experience for me, and I noticed other visitors dabbing at their eyes as they viewed exhibits. I wanted to ask some questions but had to pull myself together.  I mentioned Farewell to Manzanar, and the ranger told me that their chief interpreter, whose name I later learned is Alisa Lynch, also  was deeply impacted by Jeanne’s story, after seeing the movie version of the book in 1976.  The ranger told me that  lots of families visit Manzanar each year, often because children ask their parents to take them there because they  learned about the camps in school.  Many have read Jeanne’s book.

Sources and resources

Bitter Feelings Still Run Deep at Camp,” by Martin Forstenzer, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1996.

Dorothea Lange Gallery, Manzanar  National Historic Site, National Park Service. Lange, famous for her Depression-era photos of migrant Dust Bowl families, also took many photographs at Manzanar during World War II.

Return to Manzanar,” by Nicolas Brulliard, National Parks Conservation Association, Fall 2016.

Whitewashing Manzanar : Various veterans groups want to (bully) the government into denying the site of its historic meaning,” by Robert A. Jones, April 10, 1996.

Rangeley Days Redux: Moose, mountains, and memories

Rangeley, Maine – Our first day at the lake was windy and mostly gray, a good one for moose hunting.  We don’t always get our moose, but with the right timing and luck, we’d bagged moose last year and the year before. Could we score the hat trick?

Moose hunting in Rangeley requires strategy and preparation. First, timing. Dawn and dusk work best. Second, location: Route 16, heading towards Stratton, locally known as Moose Alley. Third, preparedness: cameras out, at the ready, not packed away in a backpack or purse.

The Coplin Dinner House offers farm-to-table dining and pub grub, in a renovated farmhouse just south of Stratton, Maine.

To carry out our plan, we drove up Route 16 and turned south in Stratton, on to Route 27, for a 6 p.m. dinner reservation at the Coplin Dinner House, a recent addition to local dining scene. The food was excellent, especially the roasted Brussel sprouts. A good meal prepared by someone else is one of my favorite gifts. Also, it makes me happy to see a young couple making it in rural Maine by establishing a successful destination restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

On the way home, as dusk settled in, we stopped in at the Town of Stratton public works garage, checking the muddy wetlands on both sides of the road. Legend has it that moose flock to these wetlands for the runoff from the town’s salt piles. However, over 15 years of looking, I have never seen a moose here. And, once again, no moose.

We continued down Route 16, as one set of passengers scanned right and the other  scanned left into the grassy meadows and dark stands of spruce, while also keeping an eye out for pulled-over vehicles, a sure sign of moose. We drove and drove, losing hope. But then, a few miles outside of Rangeley, we hit the jackpot: a car pulled over on the  right!

Mother moose and her calf, on Route 16, aka “Moose Alley,” between Rangeley and Stratton, Maine.

Spotting one moose makes me happy.  A lengthy roadside visit with a mother moose and her calf overfilled my cup of gratitude. Our second day in Rangeley, and already the week was pretty much made. Who cares if the forecast calls for a week of wind and rain? I have books.

Just outside of Oquossoc village, the fire tower atop Bald Mountain offers views of Rangeley and Mooselookmeguntic Lakes, and endless mountains. Most hikers climb 1.3 mile trail off Bald Mountain Road, but an alternate trail from Route 4 offers a slightly longer hike (connecting with the main trail).

The rain isn’t constant, and we find a window to squeeze in a hike to Bald Mountain, just across the lake.  A dozen years ago, when we were coaxing five-year-olds up the trail, Bald Mountain seemed like a major hike.  But now, climbing Bald is a warm-up for more ambitious adventures.  Other nearby favorites include Tumbledown Mountain and Aziscohos Mountain (see link at the bottom of the post), but I am always on the lookout for a new destination.

Blueberry Mountain (2,962 feet), just outside of Weld, seemed like the right fit for our group’s mix of hiking experience: a 4.4 mile round-trip to an open summit.  On Wednesday, we enjoyed an excellent hike under gray skies, including a walk on open granite as we neared the summit. I love the feeling of freedom I experience on a mountaintop.

Atop the summit of Blueberry Mountain in Weld, and watching the clouds roll in over Jackson and Tumbledown Mountains. Blueberry Mountain is located off Route 142, about a half-hour from downtown Rangeley.

Blueberry Mountain had its fair share of blueberries, but nothing like the bonanza of blueberries at the Wilhelm Reich Museum property, where the public is welcome to pick. The blueberry crop varies from year to year; this harvest was exceptional.  My freezer is full of blueberry anti-oxidants and I am ready for Thanksgiving, and my annual contribution of Rangeley wild blueberry pie. Baking that pie the day before Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holiday rituals.

My mother, now age 83, always joins us for the blueberry picking, but she can’t climb mountains. That’s why I love Quill Hill, in Dallas Plantation, a few miles outside of Rangeley (and off Route 16). A local contractor has built an elegant four-mile dirt road to the Quill Hill summit so that everyone can enjoy the spectacular 360 degree views. Visiting Quill Hill requires a $10 admission fee, but this hill is a labor of love, not profit.  Taking my mom to this sunset view makes me happy.

Sunset at 2,848-foot Quill Hill, where visitors enjoy views of the Rangeley Lakes, Western Maine mountains, and Flagstaff Lake.

We visited Quill Hill on our last night in Rangeley, so the evening there was bittersweet.  A beautiful evening, magnificent colors — but also a reminder that our time in Rangeley –and everywhere — is fleeting.

I need to remember it all.  The baby loon with its mother in Hunter Cove.  Sunny (and windy) afternoons on the dock.  Reading on the porch. Gathering around the campfire, as kids roasted marshmallows and loon calls echoed across the lake. On Saturday morning, I packed up these memories along with dirty laundry and leftover food.  After packing the car, I took one last set of photos,  and we hit the road, filled up until next summer.

From the dock, we can see the sun sets over Bald Mountain.

Sources and resources:

For a detailed description of the trail to Blueberry Mountain, see the excellent greatly expanded 2018 edition of the Maine Mountain Guide edited by Cary Kish. (Also, note that there is another Blueberry Mountain in Maine, in Evans Notch.

For more reading on Rangeley, see my post, “Rangeley days, now far away.”

For more info on Tumbledown, Aziscohos, and other great family hikes, see my post, “Round-up: Five great family hikes in Maine” (in which I also happen to discuss the Evans Notch Blueberry Mountain).

Walking with the mothers at Vaughan Woods, South Berwick

South Berwick, Maine — On Mother’s Day this year, I went for a walk with the mothers in Vaughan Woods State Park.

Vaughan Woods is a popular local walking spot, as it includes, along with its three miles of trails, the imposing presence of the 1785 Georgian-style Hamilton House. Walking in Vaughan Woods was a wonderful Mother’s Day gift because I hadn’t been there in many years, and had forgotten the simple beauty of the woodland trail along the Salmon Falls River. After a cold April, everyone we encountered that sunny morning in May was happy to be outside, and we wished a good day to many mothers out strolling with children young and old.

Mothers have walked these 80+acres for centuries. Here are a few of pieces of their stories.

Walking along the trail beside the Salmon Falls River, we came upon the view of Hamilton House, built in 1785 by Colonel Jonathan Hamilton, an enterprising merchant and community leader. The Colonel married Mary Manning in 1771. Mary likely walked on this land with her two children, Betsey and Joseph, born a year apart. But Mary’s wealth couldn’t protect her family from the democratic afflictions common to all in the 18th century. Young Joseph died at age 15, and Betsey a few years later, at age 21, after giving birth to her first child, an infant who died a few months after her mother. When Mary Manning Hamilton died at age 50 in 1800, her obituary noted, among many other qualities, that she was “a peculiarly kind & tender Mother.”

One of the first European-American mothers to walk in this forest was Margaret Warren, mother of five, whose home was located on a high spot in the woods, and probably had a view of Cow Cove, since the site was likely soon cleared of most trees. Margaret, who hailed from Ireland and landed in Kittery, came here after marrying James Warren.

James was a Scotsman who had survived the 1650 Battle of Dunbar, where he was taken prisoner by Oliver Cromwell’s forces , then shipped out to the colonies and sold as an indentured servant.

James probably served the first part of his indenture at the Lynn Iron Works, but came with his master Richard Leader to Kittery – which then encompassed today’s town of South Berwick – around 1651 to build a saw mill at the falls of Great Works River (which enters the Salmon Falls River a short distance above Vaughan Woods). Somewhere along the way he met Margaret, and they married in 1654, by which time James had acquired his land.  They had their first child – or perhaps their first surviving child, Gilbert, by 1656.

The slight indention of a cellar hole mark the Warren homesite at Vaughan Woods.

The Warrens both had strong constitutions, with James dying in 1702, at age 81, and Margaret in 1713, who was probably in her 80s by then  (date of birth unknown).  Margaret and James lived in a time of sporadic but intense conflict between settlers and the Wabanaki. Her daughter Grizel Warren Otis, at age 24, and infant granddaughter Margaret — just a few months old — were taken as captives during the Wabanaki raid at Cocheco (Dover) in June 1689*.  I imagine that Margaret could see the smoke billowing in the distance as several houses burned across the river in New Hampshire.

As the crow flies, Cocheco was not far away — across the river and further inland. Word must have spread quickly, with Margaret soon learning of the death of her granddaughter, three-year-old Hannah, along with her daughter’s 64-year-old husband, the blacksmith Richard Otis.  She must have worried about Grizel and her fate.

Was Margaret hopeful when she eventually learned that Grizel had been taken to Montreal? Grizel, however, never returned home. She became a Catholic, took the name Madeleine, married a Frenchman, Philippe Robitaille, and started a new family. I’m guessing she was happier in Montreal, where she lived until her death at age 90. Unlike her old goat first husband, Grizel’s Frenchman Philippe was the same age, and together they had five children.

Margaret did not live to see the return of her granddaughter, Margaret, a remarkable woman known as Christine Otis Baker (Hotesse), who after many adventures landed back in Dover in 1734.  Christine-Margaret had married in Canada, but after seven years and three children, she became a young widow in 1714. Eventually she married Captain Thomas Baker of Deerfield, Massachusetts, whom she had met in Montreal, first in 1701 when he was a captive and then again in 1714 when he returned to Montreal on a negotiating mission.

French authorities would not allow her to leave Montreal with her property or her children, and she left her children behind to return to New England with Baker.  Although she later returned to Montreal to try to regain custody of her children, the authorities would not allow her to see them.  Christine soldiered on, had another son, and lived out her years, until her mid-80s, in Dover, New Hampshire, where she was well-known as a tavern keeper.

Almost 200 years after these events, another mother — a stepmother — served as indirect catalyst for reviving and remembering the stories of these earlier mothers.

Emily Tyson and Sarah Orne Jewett, in the garden at Hamilton House. Elise Tyson Vaughan, an accomplished photographer, was the photographer (Historic New England photo; citation below).

In 1898, Emily Tyson, the widow of railroad magnate George Tyson, and her stepdaughter Elise (Elizabeth) Tyson purchased the house on the recommendation of their writer friend Sarah One Jewett. The mother-daughter pair wanted to spend summers in Maine, away from the heat and pollution of Boston. By then, Hamilton House had fallen into disrepair, as the Hamilton fortune evaporated in the early 1800s (probably due in large part to Jefferson’s Embargo Act).  Several generations of the Goodwin family had tried to farm the property, but could not turn the tide on the steady decline of farming in 19th century Maine.

The two women restored the house to its former grandeur. Along with their York friend Elizabeth Perkins, they were leaders in the Colonial Revival movement** that led to a renewed interest in colonial-era history and the preservation of many colonial-era dwellings.

Elise Tyson married Henry Goodman Vaughan later in life, when she was in her mid-forties, and did not have children, but she nurtured artists and writers who frequented her home, as well as her own craft of photography.

Elise also was the mother of this park, donating the Hamilton House and the surrounding land to the state of Maine upon her death in 1949.  Now, on Mother’s Day and every other day of the year, we walk in her footsteps and those who came before.

The Warren home purportedly looked down upon Cow Cove, another historic location where, in 1634, the ship the Pied Cow anchored, and offloaded livestock and supplies to build the first sawmill at the Great Works falls. James Warren and other Scottish prisoners came 17 years later to work on rebuilding and expanding that first mill.

Notes and resources

Although you don’t really need a map to walk the trails of Vaughan Woods, the trail map here provides a good sense of the different locations described in my post.

Hamilton House, owned by Historic New England, is open for tours from June through October.  On summer Sundays, visitors enjoy concerts in the garden.

Thanks to the Old Berwick Historical Society for many specific dates and pieces of information from its information-rich website.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s romance novel, The Tory Lover, features Hamilton House as its setting, and features a cast of characters drawn from Maine-NH Seacoast history.

For more on the remarkable story of Christine Otis Baker, see Christine Otis Baker, Captured by Indians, Dover Public Library, Dover, N.H.

For more on James Warren and the Scottish prisoners of Dunbar, see “James Warren, #108 on ‘The Dunbar Prisoners’ List” at the website/blog, Scottish Prisoners of War.

Other sources for this post include www.geni.com, especially for Grizel Warren Otis Robitaille, and the Warren family genealogy at archive.org, especially for Margaret/Christine Otis Baker.

*On the Cocheco Raid: This raid was essentially a revenge attack upon Cocheco, in retaliation for an event near the end of King Philip’s War in which Major Richard Waldron of Cocheco invited hundreds of native people to his trading post for a peace parley. Instead, Waldron maneuvered the situation to capture 100s of native peoples, who were then executed or sold into slavery. The Cocheco Raid was one of the first events of “King William’s War,” or what many called the “Second IndianWar.” For more details, I highly recommend Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War by Lisa Brooks, which includes a companion website, especially Captivity at Cocheco.

**On the Colonial Revival Movement: I am aware that this movement also had its origins in the anti-immigration movement of the early 20th century, a time of peak immigration.  Tracing ancestry to the colonial era was a way of establishing legitimacy and superiority to the “hordes” flocking to America. That said, Colonial Revival resulted in the preservation of many buildings that might have been lost to the wrecking ball, as well as of documents, ephemera, and other clues that historians continue to unravel today to tell ever more interesting and complex histories of early America.

Vaughan, Elizabeth R. Full-length informal portrait of Emily Davis Tyson and Sarah Orne Jewett standing in the doorway of Hamilton House, South Berwick, Maine, undated. n.d. Web. 06 Jul 2018. <https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth-oai:bz60dd41p>.

Back on the trail to Mount Belknap with Windows to the Wild

Click on the image to view the episode.

On a hot spring day in early May, I met up again with the crew from New Hampshire Public Television’s Windows to the Wild: host Willem Lange and producers Steve Giordani and Phil Vaughn. The resulting show, titled “Hiking with the Maniacal Traveler” was broadcast on NHPTV in May and now is available for online viewing here.

We had decided to do an episode focused on a hike to Guilford’s Mount Belknap, where a plane crashed in June of 1972 after vanishing shortly after take-off from Laconia Airport, in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. My 2015 post, One hike, many discoveries: A plane crash, fire tower and stone-age couches,” describes this hike, which I did with my son several years ago.

Initially, we planned the hike for mid-April, which I thought might be too ambitious, given the huge snow dumps we’d had three weeks earlier. The crash site is located on a steep rocky incline, where I knew deep pockets of snow and patches of ice would linger.   So it was good news when producers Steve Giordani told me they had to reschedule for May.

What I didn’t know then was that long-time host Willem Lange lost his wife Ida in mid-April. I never met Ida, but she sounds like she was an amazing person  — another maniacal traveler — as explained in a recent Boston Globe story, “Ida Lange, at 78; from a fraught childhood she became a community leader and her husband’s muse,”and by Willem himself, “We were inextricably engaged, truly for better or for worse.

I learned of Ida’s death when we met up on Carriage Mountain Road in Gilford on the morning of the hike. Willem expressed to me that he felt like he hadn’t fully processed his loss, and was going about his usual routines of taking Kiki for walks, and preparing for the upcoming show, which had already been scheduled for airing on May 23.

We set off on our hike on Carriage Mountain Road. The winter gate remained closed, and we had to walk a mile up the road to the trailhead.  The extra mile was our first travail; others followed.  I won’t reveal more except to say that the day reinforced all the key fundamentals of hiking: know your limits; use your map wisely; and carry more food and water than you think you will need. Also, spring days before the forest has burst into its canopy are sometimes the hottest of the season, even if the temperature is seasonable.

But travails make for good stories. And as my 19th century friend Henry Thoreau tells us, “I have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway.”

Our short hike to Mount Belknap took more time and patience than expected, but at the fire tower, I remembered, as Thoreau tells us, that  “On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.”

A trail’s end selfie with Phil Vaughn (in back) and Steve Giordani, all of us still smiling at the end of our long day of hiking and filming on Mount Belknap. Steve and Phil are the producers for Windows to the Wild.

Sources and resources

We were inextricably engaged, truly for better or for worse,” by Willem Lange. April 18, 2018, The Valley News. (West Lebanon, Vermont).

Ida Lange, at 78; from a fraught childhood she became a community leader and her husband’s muse,” by Bryan Marquard. The Boston Globe, May 28, 2018.

In January 2017, I visited Orris Falls in South Berwick with Windows to the Wild, available here.  My blog post, Travels on the White Rose Road to Orris Falls, and featuring 19th century guest Sarah Orne Jewett (and others) inspired this episode.

24 hours/four seasons: a spring hike on New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette

On that 95-degree Thursday afternoon in May, we headed north from Kittery, seeking cooler air and adventure. But at 4 p.m., when we pulled into the Franconia Notch parking lot for the Old Bridle Path trailhead, the car thermometer read 93 degrees.

Undaunted, and knowing that we had “only” a 2.9-mile hike to Greenleaf Hut, we hit the trail — a mom, her teenaged son, and his friend, the latter two carrying packs heavy with sleeping bags, extra layers, and clean underwear (maybe). The mom still carried most of the load, including a reward stash of 3 cans: one Baxter Paloma beer, two Brisk Ice-Teas.  The teenagers quickly charged ahead, despite the drag of ill-fitting packs.

By mid-May, the lower section of the Old Bridle Path was dry, but I knew that snow probably lingered on the upper slopes of Mount Lafayette and on the upper third of the Falling Waters Trail. I’d been to Greenleaf Hut several times in the spring, drawn by the low self-service fee, and the opportunity to feel like I am traveling in a wilderness. On spring days, at least during the week, these higher elevations in New Hampshire feel wild and remote, barren spaces where you might be the last person on earth.

On gorgeous summer and fall days, hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of people hike to Lafayette, completing a 8.9-mile loop that includes two 4,000-foot summits and almost two miles of walking on the open and exposed Franconia Ridge. Weather can change rapidly on Lafayette and along the ridge, with a bluebird sky transforming into a dense fog cloud. Thus, I knew not to take 93 degree for granted. I had consulted the Higher Summits forecast, and knew what to expect: four seasons, 24 hours.

Hiking steadily up the Old Bridle Path, which climbs 2,450 feet from the trailhead to Greenleaf Hut, a steady stream of sweat dripped into my eyes and down my back. I gulped water, but could barely keep up with the sweat, or the boys.  Occasionally they paused to wait for me, and I nagged them to drink their water.  About two miles in, we burst out of the woods into the krummholz, the twisted low-growing spruce trees shaped by the wind. Gray clouds were gathering, but the temperature remained warm. I knew thunder might break out at any moment, and encouraged the boys to hustle to the hut without me, while I hustled at my own pace.

Clouds moving in over Franconia Ridge as we break out of the forest.

I made it to the hut by 6:30, about ten minutes behind the teenagers. The beer and the iced teas went down in minutes as we lingered on the back porch of the hut and watched dark thunderclouds roll in. Dinner was simple: grilled ham and cheese, a few carrots, some chocolate chip cookies. We shared the dining room with just two other hikers, who soon headed off to their bunks.  But not us, as the show was just beginning.

As darkness fell, lightening crackled across the sky and lit up the mountain. Deep booms of thunder shook the hut. The storm was glorious and magnificent, and we were safe and snug in the hut. Henry Thoreau’s observations, recalling his 1846 hike on the “Burnt Lands” plateau of Mount Katahdin, seemed fitting:

“This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night…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!

When we went to bed around 10, sheets of rain poured from the sky, washing away the snow fields on the mountain’s upper slopes. By morning, the front had ushered in cool air, a fall day that called for sweaters and long pants.

At Greenleaf Hut, elevation 4220 feet, the intrepid hikers, undaunted by the morning chill, were ready for the morning hike to the Lafayette summit. The temperature had dropped about 50 degrees overnight (but some teens will never give up their shorts).

From the hut, we hiked steadily up the 1.1-mile section of the Greenleaf Trail that climbs up Lafayette.  This stretch is rocky and steep, but never feels too difficult because the views are unrelenting and magnificent.

Morning view of Greenleaf Hut, with Cannon Mountain behind it.

As we climbed higher, a misty cloud surrounded us, limiting visibility. My son, aka The Seal, finally pulled out his fleece shirt.

Hiking into the clouds towards the 5,261-foot summit of  Lafayette.

On top of the mountain, the wind was blowing hard, creating a windchill in the 30-degree range. Not full-on winter with a raging blizzard, but definitely winter, by almost any standards (including New England).

At the summit, the wind was strong enough to lean into. Such conditions — and even stronger winds — are common on Lafayette, and weather on the mountain often changes rapidly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playing in the wind on Mount Lafayette

 

Taking a break from the wind in the foundation of a shelter built on Lafayette around 1860. The structure is long gone, but hikers today still appreciate the protection offered by the old foundation.

The wind abated once we began to descend from the summit onto the Franconia Ridge Trail, a two-mile open ridge walk.

Franconia Ridge, viewed as we descend Lafayette and head towards 5,089-foot Mount Lincoln, with Little Haystack, Mt. Liberty and  Mt. Flume following. The temperature remained cold, but the hiking kept us warm.

At Little Haystack, we turned right (west) onto the Falling Waters Trail.  Narrow ridges of snow called monorail, formed by the steady tromping of winter hikers all season long, typically linger on the upper stretch of Falling Waters until late May.  The monorail is deceptively treacherous, especially if the surface in hard and slippery (in such cases, microspikes advised).  The heavy rains made the snow soft, but we picked our way carefully along the monorail to avoid any slips that might twist an ankle or knee.

Thanks to the rain and spring run-off, the Falling Waters Trail was a drama of roaring cascades.

Cloudland Falls, the first of three cascades on the Falling Waters Trail as you hike down from Franconia Ridge.  This photo is a pale imitation of the falls we encountered that morning, after the big storm.

At Swiftwater Falls, we crossed the brook, and a short time later came upon Stairs Falls, where a large cliff with a slight overhang rises above the trail.  Here, I hurried the boys along to the other side of the brook. I believe this spot is where a five-by-three foot boulder dislodged from the cliff and killed a young woman from China ten years ago around this time of year (I hiked the loop with a friend that spring, about a week after the accident). This kind of freak accident is very rare, but I do not like to linger by Stairs Falls.

Leaving the falls behind, we hiked the last mile to the car.  By this time and at this lower elevation, the morning was warming up: spring had arrived.  Four seasons/24 hours — what many would say is just another day of hiking to the higher summits in the White Mountains.

Sources and resources

This hike took place on May 18-19, 2017, with record-high temperatures on May 18, as reported in this Washington Post article, “New England has the nation’s hottest weather.”

To read Thoreau’s entire account of his Katahdin hike (in which he did not reach the summit), see the KTAADN chapter in The Maine Woods, published after the author’s death in 1862.

For information on summit hotels and structures, most of them built during the 19th century, see Rick Russack’s article, “White Mountain Hotels and Summit Structures” at WhiteMountainsHistory.org.

To check current trail conditions (especially important in the spring, when ice and snow may linger many weeks after the ground is bare down below), see NewEnglandTrailConditions.com.

This Boston Globe article provides some details about the May 2008 accident that killed 28-year-old Shu Qin, a young woman visiting from China.

For a day hike, the recommended route for the Franconia Loop is counter-clockwise (up Falling Waters to the ridge and down the Old Bridle Path), to avoid hiking down some slippery sections of the Falling Waters trail. From Memorial Day through the mid-October, hikers can take a break at the hut to enjoy hot soup and cookies.

 

Jurassic time-traveling in NH: A hike to Mount Shaw

Up in the White Mountains,  winter hangs on long past its official ending date, especially this year, when most of the snow fell in March and April. Even as I write this post in mid-May, iced-covered trails and unstable snow bridges are the rule and not the exception. But this is a great time of year to hike in New Hampshire Lakes Region, when the snow is gone and the black files have yet to hatch.

For that first spring hike, I highly recommend 2,990-foot Mount Shaw, tallest of the Ossipee Mountains and part of the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area (in which Mount Roberts also offers a great hike). Last October, I hiked Mt. Shaw with my husband a few days after a massive wind storm wiped out power to much of northern New England and wreaked havoc on many hiking trails. Some quick internet consulting revealed that Mount Shaw’s trails were passable, so we packed a lunch and headed north.

The 7.7-loop trail on Mount Shaw is definitely a hike, not a walk, but because of its relatively low elevation and its Tuftonboro location south of the White Mountains, Shaw is a great three-season hike in regular boots, and, in the winter, a nice option for a snowshoeing adventure (see trail map bottom of post).

Mount Shaw’s main reward are panoramic views of Mount Washington and the Presidentials.  Other rewards include views of Lake Winnipesaukee and the Ossipee Ring Dike, along with the joy of stepping off a rocky trail on to a grassy carriage road built by shoe magnate Thomas Gustave Plant, when he developed his Lucknow Estate in the early 20th century.  Also, Mount Shaw is on the “52 With a View List”, a fine collection of New Hampshire mountains offering great vistas and fewer weekend crowds compared to the 4ooo-footers in the White Mountains.

Mt. Shaw and its neighbors  are the remnants of the largest volcanic ring dike in New Hampshire, the Ossipee Ring Dike.

This geological map shows the Ossipee Ring Dike, the result of Jurassic-era volcanic activity.

According to the website NH Geology, a ring dike forms when the ceiling of an underground magna chamber collapses beneath a circular crack in the bedrock.  The magma erupts in blobs that tend to be rounded in shape, so a bulbous  circular dike emerges. These sorts of eruptions were typical of volcanic activity  in New Hampshire 150 million years ago, when Pangea was breaking up, with Pawtuckaway State Park providing another example.

The trailhead for the Mount Shaw loop, including a small parking lot, is located on NH Route 171, and NOT at Castle in the Clouds.

After hiking .4 miles into the forest from the trailhead, picking up the Italian Trail is a little tricky as several old woods roads diverge. At .4 miles, look for this old log, marked with red blazes, that someone has carefully place on a makeshift cairn. The general direction is away from the brook, to the right, and uphill.

The Italian Trail heads up through the forest towards the flat and open perch of Mount Tate (about 1.2 miles from the fork).

Views of Dan Hole Pond and beyond, from the open flank of Mount Tate, also known as Big Ball Mountain.  The pond is approximately in the middle of the ring dike. How amazing that we can view the remnants of the Jurassic-ear breakup of Pangea right here in New Hampshire!

From Mount Tate, we could see the ridge above us that included Black Snout and the summit of Mount Shaw.  Surprisingly, we saw little evidence of the windstorm  that left us in the dark a few days earlier. We picked up a couple of stray branches, but overall, the trail was in great shape.

From Mount Tate, we followed the blue-blazed Big Ball Mountain trail up towards the ridge of Mount Shaw.  Along the trail, the roots of a big old red maple tree (I think) sprawled across the trail like the tentacles of a comic-book monster.

When the Big Ball Mountain Trail reached the ridge, we stepped on to  the soft grassy path of the old carriage road, now part of the High Ridge Trail.

Thomas Plante built these carriage roads for sightseeing pleasure of his guests. The roads lace the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area, and make for hiking that’s easy on the feet.

At the ridge, we turned left towards the Black Snout Spur Trail, because you can’t come all this way and not visit a mountain feature called Black Snout, where we took in views of Lake Winnipesaukee.

The view from Black Snout.

The top of the ridge is fairly open, suggesting either a fire or extensive logging to create a park-like environment. Although filling in with small trees, the open ridge provides  opportunity for winterberry to flourish.

Bright red winterberry, a relative of holly, stands out in the late fall after its leaves have dropped.  Birds feed on the berries but they are toxic for humans.

After backtracking from Black Snout, we continued on the easy walking of the High Ridge Trail and after a half-mile reached the summit of Mount Shaw.  The summit offers a sort of bench (as well as a literal log bench) for enjoying the panoramic view, almost like sitting in form of a big wide movie screen.

Northern views towards Mount Washington from Mount Shaw.

After enjoying the views, we backtracked on the High Ridge Trail, intending to return via the 2.5 mile Shaw Trail, a straight shoot downhill to the trailhead. At the junction, we

The Turtleback Mountain Trail follows one of the old carriage roads and eventually takes hikers back to Castle in the Clouds. 

studied the map, t0 make sure we should head right towards the Turtleback Mountain Trail. We soon found the Shaw Trail, a hard left  off the carriage road.

The Shaw Trail drops quickly from the ridge, with rough rocky footing, eventually reaching a mountain brook which the trail then follows for most of its length. On the downhill, we felt the  7.7 miles of the loop trail—i.e. “will we EVER get to the end of this trail?” (Again, this is a hike and not a walk).

Down, down, down the Shaw Trail, until we reached the brook, and hiked another 1.5 miles to the trailhead.

The Shaw Trail offers a pretty walk through the forest, but I definitely recommend going down via Shaw rather than up. Back at the car, we pulled off our boots, guzzled our water, and flipped a coin to see who got to nap first on the ride home. The best part: home, in Kittery, Maine, was only an hour and 15 minutes away, and Route 16 offered plenty of coffee opportunities.  The second best part: it will be easy to return.

Map of 7.7 mile Mount Shaw loop (New England Hiking, 4000footers.com)

Driving directions:  Get yourself to New Hampshire Route 171 in Tuftonboro.  If coming from the east, you’ll find the small parking area just before the bridge over Fields Brook.  If you pass Sodom Road on the left, you’ve gone too far.

If coming from the west, you’ll pass Sodom Road on the right, and then cross  the bridge over Fields Brook, and turn left into the small parking area.

I highly recommend buying the waterproof trail map to the Castle in the Clouds Conservation Area.

My other posts on hikes in the New Hampshire Lakes Region

Mount Roberts: The Legacy of a Bankrupt Millionaire

One hike, many discoveries: A plane crash, a fire tower, and stone-age couches

Exploring caves and climbing ladders in the New Hampshire Lakes Region

Wandering in the wilderness of Mount Paugus