Where Freedom built her battle-tower.
William Wallace.
After reaching the southern portion of the lake, a trail of a mile and a quarter leads to the Upper Ausable—the gem of the Adirondacks. This lake, over two thousand feet above the tide, is surrounded on all sides by lofty mountains. Our camp was on the eastern shore, and I can never forget the sunset view, as rosy tints lit up old Skylight, the Haystack and the Gothics; nor can I ever forget the evening songs from a camp-fire across the lake, or the "bear story" told by Phelps, a tale never really finished, but made classic and immortal by Stoddard, in his spicy and reliable handbook to the North Woods.
The next morning we rowed across the lake and took the Bartlett trail, ascending Haystack, some five thousand feet high, just to get an appetite for dinner; our guide encouraging us on the way by saying that there never had been more than twenty people before "on that air peak." In fact, there was no trail, and in some places it was so steep that we were compelled to go up on all fours; or as Scott puts it more elegantly in the "Lady of the Lake":
"The foot was fain
Assistance from the hand to gain."
The view from the summit well repaid the toil. We saw Slide Mountain, near by to the north, and Whiteface far beyond, perhaps twenty-five miles distant; northeast, the Gothics; east, Saw-teeth, Mt. Colvin, Mt. Dix, and the lakes of the Ausable. To the southeast, Skylight;[page 204] northwest, Tahawas, still foolishly styled on some of our maps, Mt. Marcy. The descent of Haystack was as easy as Virgil's famous "Descensus Averni." We went down in just twenty minutes. The one that reached the bottom first simply possessed better adaptation for rolling.
Eagles still claim the loftiest heights: from there