At length a broad summit rising against another one still taller, broke suddenly above the foliage where the amber colored falls of Ausable river saluted us. We were in the midst of one of the finest pieces of natural scenery in the eastern United States. We were only fifteen miles from Lake Champlain, but what a change! Here in Ausable chasm we beheld one of the many natural wonders of the Adirondack region. The Ausable river at this point flows through a tortuous channel two miles in length. A rustic walk with many bridges and stairways has been built along the chasm, passing all the wild beauty spots in the gorge. The silvery babble of water passing over rocks, mingled with the gurgling liquid notes of the woodthrush.
The sides of the canyon in places were vast streets of ferns, moss and vines, which resembled cataracts of varying shades of green or great pieces of hanging tapestry inwrought with rare designs of woodland flowers. We could stay in so romantic a spot many days, for in a short time we had seen paintings; read poems, heard the silvery tongues of running brooks, and ringing texts from the sermons in stone. We only tarried long enough to pass up the gorge and view Rainbow falls, which drop seventy feet to the rock below. To the opposite bank from this we made our way and were amply repaid by a commanding view of the tumbling waters. The rays of the sun falling upon this sheet of water produced an exquisite effect. Here from the thick-growing shrubbery as we watched the amber waters concentrate for their fall, and break into silken streamers of irised spray, we knew they had been appropriately named "Rainbow Falls."
We recalled many a cascade among the Alps, where from remote heights the small avalanches of snowy water form comet-like streamers of rarest beauty. We saw again the shimmering rainbow mist of others more remote, whose murmurs died away in the gloomy depth of some Italian forest.
Soon we were gazing at distant peaks that had such a savage aspect as to again call forth comparisons. Balsam fir, pine, hemlock, maple, birch, and beech were the principal forest trees. Lakes gleamed like silver mirrors in the lap of wild rugged hills that stretched far away. We saw huge rocks that had fallen from above as if shattered in the original upheaval of the range, presenting sharp, forcible outlines and rugged facets of shadow so striking in comparison with the flowing outlines of the Catskills or Blue Ridge. The road wound back and forth as it climbed the stony wilderness and soon unfolded to our view a picture of utter desolation. We had just emerged from a stretch of road lined as far as the eye could see on either side with ash, hemlock, birch, beech, and balsam fir. Here we rested among cool shadows, where beautifully fronded ferns rose all about. Weary pedestrians had fallen asleep beneath their cooling shadows and groups of boy scouts pitched their tents along this highway.
Our eyes fell upon a sign that read like this: "A careless smoker caused the fire that destroyed thousands of acres of these forests. You love the forests. Help keep them green by being careful about your fires." Looking forward we beheld a vast and awful scene of desolation. Miles and miles on either side of the road stretched that sea of blackened stumps and charred logs where once the evergreens rose heavenward with all their wealth of whispering leaves. Blackened stubs rose all around as if they were huge exclamation points or pointing fingers of accusation at the carelessness and thoughtlessness of one individual.
Carelessness! How that word rang in our ears as we journeyed through this lonely region, with all its grandeur and beauty gone! Here we realized the kindly and beneficent influence of streams and trees upon mountain scenery. True, mountains may be grand without forests, but it is the grandeur of death we behold in the vast untrodden fields of the show-clad Alps. Forests and streams give life, fragrance, and beauty to those rough forms as a pure soul adds beauty to the countenance of man. Only heated waves of air rose from the fiery rocks and road around us, whose shimmering lines made a fit perspective to such a scene. No mossy rock where one could sit and listen to the singing birds; no ancient trees through which the fragrant west wind could sing its songs of rest and contentment; no purifying river where it was once so pleasant for man to linger before going back to the heat and smoke of the city; all because of one man's carelessness. How much of sorrow and crime is in that word; what failures, what wrecks of humanity stranded along the steep precipice of that mountain.
Who would even want to climb those blackened summits? The elevation would only make the view more terrible. The thousands of travellers who pass this way were all affected by these unsightly monuments to one man's carelessness, proving that "Man liveth not to himself alone."
As we emerged from that scene of heat and desolation, a prayer trembled upon every lip and its only theme was, "Lord, help us to be careful."
What an awful spectacle that vast stretch of burning forest must have presented! We shall quote from Headley, who witnessed such a scene in these mountains: "One night the whole mountain was wrapped in a fiery mantle, a mighty bosom of fire from which rose waving columns and lofty turrets of flame. Trees a hundred feet high and five and six and eight feet in circumference, were on fire from the root to the top. Vast pyramids of flame, now surging in eddies of air that caught them, now bending as if about to yield the struggle, then lifting superior to the foe and dying, martyr-like, in the vast furnace. Shorn of their glory, their flashing, trembling forms stood crisping and writhing in the blaze till, weary of their long suffering, they threw themselves with a sudden and hurried sweep on the funeral pile around. From the noble pine to the bending sprout, the trees were aflame, while the crackling underbrush seemed a fiery network cast over the prostrate forms of the monarchs of the forest. When the fire caught a dry stump, it ran up the huge trunk like a serpent, and coiling around the withered branches, shot out its fiery tongue as if in mad joy over the raging element below; while ever and anon came a crash that reverberated far away in the gorges—the crash of falling trees, at the overthrow of which there went up a cloud of sparks and cinders and ashes. Sweeping along its terrible path, the tramp of that conflagration filled the air with an uproar like the bursting of billows on a rocky shore."
Across a narrow valley gigantic boulders seemed to have accumulated and formed masses that appeared to be slowly creeping downward. Farther away we beheld the serrated mountains breaking into the wildest confusion of pinnacles, which rose above the forest and relieved their masses of vivid green tints like ruined castles along the Rhine, clothing them with an atmosphere of age. Far up as the eye could reach, the broken rocks were piled in huge chaos. "Here as your eye sweeps over these fragments of a former earthquake, your imagination recalls that remote period when the mountains were split like lightning- riven oaks, and the great peaks swayed like trees in a blast and the roar of a thousand storms rolled away from the yawning gulf, into which precipices and forests went down with a deafening crash as of a falling world."