The prospect being duly weighed and pronounced good, or fair, or fairly good, presto! the hotel presents a scene of active preparation. Anglers, with rod and basket, betake themselves to the neighboring trout brooks, artists to the woods or the open. Mountain wagons clatter up to the door with an exhilarating spirit and dash. Amid much laughter and cracking of jokes, these strong, yet slight-looking vehicles are speedily filled with parties for the summit, the Crystal Cascade, or Glen Ellis; knots of pedestrians, picturesquely dressed, move off with elastic tread for some long-meditated climb among the hills or in the ravines; while the regular stages for Gorham or Glen Station depart amid hurried and hearty leave-takings, the flutter of handkerchiefs, and the sharp crack of the driver’s whip. Now they are off, and quiet settles once more upon the long veranda.
My own plans included a trip in and out of Tuckerman’s Ravine; in by the old Thompson path, out by the Crystal Cascade. It is necessary to depart a little from the order of time, as my first essay (during the first week of May) was frustrated by the deep snows then effectually blockading the way above Hermit Lake. The following July found me more fortunate, and it is this excursion that I shall now lay before the reader for his approval.
I chose a companion to whom I unfolded the scheme, while reconnoitring the ravine through my glass. He eagerly embraced my proposal, declaring his readiness to start on the instant. Upon a hint I let fall touching his ability to make this then fatiguing march, he observed, rather stiffly, “I went through one Wilderness with Grant; guess I can through this.”
“Pack your knapsack, then, comrade, and you shall inscribe ‘Tuckerman’s’ along with Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.”
“Bless me! is it so very tough as all that? No matter, give me five minutes to settle my affairs, and I’m with you.”
Let us improve these minutes by again directing the glass toward the ravine.
The upper section of this remarkable ravine—that portion lifted above the forest line—is finely observed from the neighborhood of the Crystal Cascade, but from the Glen House the curiously distorted rim and vertical wall of its south and west sides, the astonishing crag standing sentinel over its entrance, may be viewed at full leisure. It constitutes quite too important a feature of the landscape to escape notice. Dominated by the towering mass of the Dome, infolded by undulating slopes descending from opposite braces of Mount Washington, and resembling gigantic draperies, we see an enormous, funnel-shaped, hollow sunk in the very heart of the mountain. We see, also, that access is feasible only from the north-east, where the entrance is defended by the high crag spoken of. Behind these barriers, graven with a thousand lines and filled with a thousand shadows, the amphitheatre lifts its formidable walls into view.
For two miles our plain way led up the summit-road, but at this distance, where it suddenly changes direction to the right, we plunged into the forest. Our course now lay onward and upward over what had at some time been a path—now an untrodden one—encumbered at every few rods with fallen trees, soaked with rain, and grown up with moose-wood. Time and again we found the way barred by these exasperating windfalls, and their thick abatis of branches, forcing us alternately to go down on all-fours and creep underneath, or to mount and dismount, like recruits, on the wooden horse of a cavalry school.
But to any one loving the woods—and this day I loved not wisely, but too well—this walk is something to be taken, but not repeated, for fear of impairing the first and most abiding impressions. One cannot have such a revelation twice.
