OLD SHAG.
Old Shag, Toadback, or Paugus Mountain stands in the Sandwich range between Chocorua on the east and Passaconaway on the west. It is better armed against attack by mountain climbers than any of its neighbors, and this in spite of the fact that in elevation it is the lowest of the range. Its defenses consist of numerous radiating ridges covered with dense growths of spruce and crossed by belts of “harricane,” miles of cliffs so forbidding as to repel any but determined assault, and ravines choked by débris of rock and fallen forest. No path of any kind leads to its top, and when its summit is gained, none of the familiar marks indicating previous visits by egg-eating, initial-cutting tourists are discoverable.
Like most impregnable fortresses, Paugus has its weak spot. There is a way to reach its southern summit without touching a “harricane,” climbing a precipice, or struggling through more than a few rods of spruce jungle. Moreover, on this way the traveler is sung to by one of the most musical of streams, while his eyes are charmed by the ever-changing beauties of a series of as exquisite cascades as are to be found in the White Mountains. It is true that in midsummer the brook is so reduced in size that its chief charm is seriously lessened, but if the time chosen for ascent is in spring, autumn, or after a heavy summer rain, the falls will be found at their best.
PAUGUS FROM WONALANCET ROAD NEAR START OF LIBERTY TRAIL UP MOUNT CHOCORUA
On the morning of September 15, a party of four persons entered the “lost trail,” leading from Berry’s to the Swift River intervale. A heavy rain had fallen during the whole of the preceding day, and Paugus River, with all its sons and daughters, grandchildren brooks, and great-grandchildren rivulets, made the forest resound with the music of innumerable singing falls and rapids. Following the old trail for two miles, the party reached a spot where a good-sized stream appeared flowing eastward from the great hollow in the eastern flank of Paugus. Leaving the bridle-path at this point, and walking nearly due west, the explorers followed the branch towards its source. As the region was reported to be thickly set with bear-traps, the party walked in Indian file, while their leader sounded and punched every foot of moss and soft leaf mould with his stout staff. The traps used by the hunters on these mountains are murderous inventions, consisting of two huge steel jaws lined with sharp teeth. The trap, when set, is buried beneath a layer of moss. If a bear or man steps between the opened jaws, thereby pressing a pan which frees the two powerful springs below the jaws, the trap closes instantaneously, the teeth are locked in the flesh, cutting sinews and crushing bone. A man thus caught is maimed for life, if, indeed, he does not die from starvation and pain before he can be released from his horrible imprisonment. A bear usually drags the trap until its anchor catches in a tree, or his strength is exhausted. Sometimes he gnaws off his foot and crawls away bleeding and crippled. The trap weighs from twenty-five to forty pounds, and although usually marked in such a way that its owner can recognize it, no name betrays the identity of the trapper.
The places chosen by the bear hunter for setting his traps are those to which a bear is in the habit of going often. On damp and mossy spots the great footprints of the brute show plainly, and when the trapper is satisfied that Bruin walks that way habitually, he cuts out a square of moss upon which the footprint is plainly visible, places his open trap in the hole, restores the moss with great care, and goes away for a week, or even longer, visiting other traps, some of which may be many miles away. If signs of any proper kind were placed near the traps to warn the passer-by of his peril, there would be small reason to complain of bear-trapping, but unhappily no such signals are displayed, and man, if he wanders in wild places, is in as much danger as the bears. The brook bed which our party of four was ascending is one of the best grounds for bears in all the Sandwich range. No wonder, then, that we watched and sounded anxiously for hidden traps.
As we walked westward into the hollow in the side of Paugus, the ground rose rapidly and the level land on the edges of the stream soon gave way to steeply sloping banks. For beech, birch, and maple were substituted spruce, balsam fir, and hemlock; the rapids of the brook changed to falls; glimpses of sky were replaced by occasional peeps at spruce-capped gray cliffs hanging high above us, and we felt as though if we kept on we should soon enter the black interior of a vast cavern, unless some unseen avenue to light and air appeared. The barometer showed that we had climbed nearly a thousand feet, when suddenly there opened before us a view of a succession of high, steeply-sloping ledges, polished by rushing water and festooned with delicate mosses. A sheet of clear and sparkling water, stained a rich hemlock brown by the moss beds through which it had filtered, poured in quivering folds over the rock. Standing by the side of the pool at the foot of the lowest incline, we could see four of these smooth ledge faces rising one behind another above us. Climbing to their top, we saw as many more still higher, and beyond them all, twin cascades gleamed through the trees, as they fell from a ledge in the middle of which a mass of black spruces and huge gray rocks seemed to form an island poised in the air between the two halves of the torrent.
Nearly a thousand feet above this twin fall, yet so close beyond it that my companions almost despaired of further progress up the mountain, was a wall of gray rock suspended between the sky and the tree-tops. It was the last redoubt of the impregnable Paugus. Was there a rift in its apparently solid face? Yes, I knew that there must be, because years before I had come down this ravine from the summit and had found no obstacle to gradual and easy descent. While passing the falls, we used the barometer to ascertain their approximate height, and found a difference of two hundred and fifty feet between the level of the pool at their foot and that of the stream above the twin cascades. The several inclines down which the water shot in rippling sheets were each fifty or sixty feet long and about twenty-five feet in perpendicular rise. With a stream twice or three times the volume of this brook, Paugus Falls would take rank as among the most beautiful in New England. Even as they are, they deserve a place in song instead of obscurity in an almost unknown corner of a pathless mountain.
CHOCORUA SEEN FROM THE SIDE OF PAUGUS
Not far above the twin cascades, the brook formerly shot over a polished ledge almost steep enough to form a perfect fall. Here a very unusual and interesting change had been worked in the rock and the course of the water by the action of frost. Just at the point where the polished rock bed of the stream was steepest, a crack had opened at right angles with the current. Of course water had filled this fissure and deepened it until in some winter night a sound of rending must have startled the forest and echoed afar down the gorge. The front of the ledge, measuring twenty yards or more from side to side and nearly half that distance from top to bottom, broke from its ancient foundation and slipped forward about eighteen inches, thus forming a perpendicular crevasse sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Into this the stream plunged and vanished from sight. Standing just below the crevasse and looking up the smooth face of the ledge, I could see the eager water coming towards me, hurrying forward its amber masses, bubbles, sheets of foam, and yellow leaves dropped by the ripening trees. As it seemed about to hurl itself upon me and sweep me down its bed, it disappeared.
When the water reached the bottom of the crevasse, it turned aside and flowed at right angles to its course until a fault in the rock allowed it to steal out into the daylight. The crevasse was full of sounds, and amid the splashing, gurgling, and roaring of the water, the ear could fancy that it detected wild cries, sobs, and moans.
Above this rift and cavern of wild waters came many a rod of steep climbing. Again and again an impassable cliff seemed to bar our way, but each time the stream showed us how, by a zigzag or a long diagonal, we could avoid the abrupt face of the rock and find a way to a higher level. Finally, after nearly four hours of climbing we found ourselves in a moist and mossy hollow between two of the summits of the mountain. Northward the rocks rose abruptly to the wooded crest of the highest ridge, southward they rose to the dome-shaped ledge which forms the best height for observation, wind and fire having left it as bald as an egg. It was impossible to cross the moist hollow dry shod, for at no point was it less than a rod wide and in parts it was forty or fifty yards from ledge to ledge. The brown water stood in pools amid the sphagnum beds and between the stems of trees. Several paths led downward between the low spruces to these pools, but we shunned them. Human feet had not trodden them, unless, indeed, the bear hunter had passed that way and set his traps directly across them. In one place I saw where a bear had recently walked across the sphagnum, leaving the imprint of his huge foot clearly stamped upon the moss.
The view from the dome of Paugus was autumnal in tone. Great masses of cold clouds were sweeping across the blue sky, urged forward by a blustering northwest wind. Wherever the spruce growth upon the mountains was interrupted by deciduous trees, delicate shades of red, yellow, or russet lay in patches between the sombre tones of the evergreens. In spots brilliant scarlet maples stood out boldly, but as a rule the new colors were not pronounced but merely suggestive of the gorgeous transformation soon to be perfected. In the hollows, especially those in which “harricanes” had been overgrown by mountain ash, sumac, and similar perishable wood, the autumnal tints were more prevalent and stronger. The only flowers upon the mountain-top were a few small asters with highly scented leaves, and a goldenrod (macrophylla) with large blossoms and coarse leaves.
Old Shag is not high enough to rival Chocorua or Passaconaway with its views, but it affords the only really satisfactory chance of studying those two mountains from a point between them. Chocorua varies strangely in its outlines from different points of view. From the south it looks like a huge lion couchant; from the Albany intervale it is an irregular ridge resembling a breaking wave; from Paugus it seems more like a giant fortress, with battered ramparts lifted high against the sky. A slide, invisible from other points, is seen to extend from the western foot of the peak far down into the forests of the Paugus valley. North of it a ridge densely grown with old spruce runs from the peak northwestward. It is one of the few parts of Chocorua not given up to deciduous trees. Beyond it rises the Champney Falls brook which flows northward into Swift River.
Passaconaway from the Bearcamp valley is one of the most perfect of pyramids; from Paugus it is a rough hump of sinister outline and color. The spruces upon it grow so thickly that it is hard to force a way through them, yet they spring from sides so steep that it seems a marvel that any soil or vegetation can cling to the rocks. A slide of great length shows its scar upon the eastern face, and serves to emphasize the fact that this side of Passaconaway is really less of a slope than of a continuous precipice nearly three thousand feet from summit to plain. In these almost inaccessible forests several birds from the Canadian fauna are occasionally found. I have seen there in summer both kinds of the three-toed woodpeckers; Canada grouse or spruce partridges have been shot there this autumn, and the moose-bird, or Canada jay, is occasionally seen near the lumber camps.
WHITEFACE AND PASSACONAWAY FROM PAUGUS
In descending a mountain in the afternoon which has been climbed in the morning, many new effects of light and shade, color, and even of outline, are observable. This may be puzzling to the guide who does not thoroughly know his path, but it is the one redeeming feature in a homeward scramble to those who are weary enough to regard their second view of a mountain-side as an anti-climax to the triumphant ascent of a new peak. Paugus Falls were more beautiful with the pallor of the afternoon around them, than they were with the southeastern sun shining into their rushing bubbles. They were whiter and the water consequently looked greater in volume. Again we wondered how such rare beauty could have been hidden so long in an untrodden forest, and, wondering, we blazed the trees so that those who might come after us could follow without perplexity the easy and beautiful way which we had been fortunate enough to find.
When we reached the old trail, about five o’clock, the woods seemed dark and the penetrating coolness of an autumn night was in the air. Twenty minutes later we emerged in the blackberry tangle by the abandoned saw-mill, and found wagons and warm wraps waiting for us. As we looked back towards the golden sunset, the dark dome of Old Shag stood boldly out against the sky. Fire and wind had left scars upon its face, and nature originally made it so rough in outline that “Toadback” is tellingly descriptive of its shape. Toads have their jewels, and so has Paugus, hidden in the shadows of its eastern flank.