Of the spring flowers that have lingered beyond the limits of their season are the beautiful little mountain sandwort, whose clumps still bloom white in favored spots, though most of the others hold seed pods only, and the three-toothed cinquefoil with its blossoms so like those of a small running blackberry that it is easy to mistake it for a stray from the pastures far below. The mountain avens, too, has what seems a belated crop of its yellow, buttercup-like blooms in a few places, though over the most of its area brown seed heads only nod on the tall blossom stalks. Such are the flowers of the Presidential Range high plateaus in earliest August, and though the harebells are to me the most beautiful and most striking, individually, the mountain goldenrod outdoes all others in profusion of color, its golden sprays swarming up from the Great Gulf to the trail about its head and garlanding the rocks toward the summit with feathery bloom that lures the lowland butterflies to climb trails of their own as far as it goes and to soar over the very summit in search of more of it. As a background for these flowers grows the mountain spear-grass, which is so much like the June grass of our lowland fields, its feathery blooms making a soft purple mist in many places. On the very summit of Washington this is abundant, disputing the scant soil with the sandwort, the two the most Alpine of all New England plants. Rapidly indeed do all these plant dwellers in Alpine heights hasten through their love and labor of the summer season, for with October comes the winter which will put them all to sleep until the end of the following June.
The human sojourner in this region needs as well to hasten wisely with an eye on the weather. My early August trip began at the Halfway House and strolled on up the mountain in very pleasant morning sunshine. On the col between Washington and Clay the sun had hazed and the cool sea odor of the southeast wind bade me cut short my worship of harebells and mountain goldenrod. Yet so clear was the air that every detail of the bottom of the Gulf stood out to the eye, and Spaulding Lake, a quarter mile below me and a mile distant, looked so near that it seemed as if with a jump and perhaps two flops of even clumsy wings I might light in it.
"Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson"
Where the path swings round the east side of Jefferson I began to get glimpses of the mountains far to southeastward, and as I stood above Dingmaul Rock and looked straight down Jefferson Ravine I could see the haze behind the southeast wind shutting off these as well as the sun. The great hills no longer sat solidly on the earth beneath. Instead a soft blue dust of turquoise gems flowed up from the valleys and lifted them from their foundations till they floated gently zenithward through an increasing sea of this same semi-opaque blue. Always the distant mountains are ethereal. Tramp them as much as you may, get the scars of their granite ledges on yourself, as you surely will if you climb them, get to know their every crag and ravine if you can; and when it is all done and you look at the mountain only a few miles away, it takes itself gently from the realm of facts and becomes to your eye but the filmy substance of a dream, a picture painted on the sky and thence hung on the walls of memory forever. So these mountains to the southeast of Jefferson—Meader, Baldface and Eastman first, Imp and Moriah, the Carters and even Wildcat—lifted and swam in this blue sea of dreams that the southeast wind brought up with it, quivered and vanished into forgetfulness, and beyond where their summits had disappeared I saw the long blue-gray levels of stratus clouds standing out against the lesser gray of the storm bank and rising slowly and evenly toward the zenith.
Slowly, with majestic sureness a storm was marching up from the south. No unconsidered assault of the heights was this, no raid by the white cavalry of thunderstorm, but a forward march of a great army of investment, bent on complete conquest of the range. So slow was its coming and so sure its promise that no mountain climber need rush to safety. Each could proceed with the same dignity as the storm, having ample time to beat a safe retreat. By noon no animal life was visible on the high levels. The juncos have nests innumerable in tiny, sheltered caverns under overhanging rocks. The mother birds were snuggled deep in these on the brown-spotted eggs. Butterflies and bumblebees had been busy all the morning in the goldenrod, and a host of other insects, coleoptera, diptera, hymenoptera, honey seekers and pollen eaters. Now all had vanished save here and there a bumblebee that still clung, drunk with nectar, in the yellow tangle of bloom. The wind that had been so gentle blew cold on these and swished eerily through the sedges on the borders of the little pool over on the side of Sam Adams, known as Storm Lake. Very different was this swish of the wind in the sedges from its soft song in the mists of the mountain spear-grass. Very different was the feel of it as it blew out of the smooth gray arch of sky where had been those level lines of stratus clouds. It had blown these to the zenith and over, and the following mists had shut off the Carter Range entirely, and even as I watched from the Peabody spring on the southwest slope of Sam Adams they shut off the farther ridge of the Great Gulf and came over the close tangled tops of the dwarf spruces with the swish of rain. Even then as I tramped along the northerly slopes of Adams and John Quincy Adams I could see the fields of Randolph laid out in checker-board pattern and the lower slopes of the Crescent Range farther to the north, but as I came down the final pitch to the stone hut on Madison a gust growled ominously over the Parapet and a rush of rain shut the visible world within a narrow circle of which I was glad to make the cosy shelter of the hut the centre.
The Madison hut is built of stone, cemented together, and is tucked so well into the hillside that one may step from the rocks in the rear to the roof. Certainly its walls are storm proof, but for thirty hours the wind did its best to tear the roof off it while the rain filled every gully with a rushing torrent, and the caretaker and I did our best to make merry within the safe shelter of the walls. The clouds that had been so high came down with the rain and made the world an opaque mass of solid white. It was not so much like a mist as like a cheese through which the wind in some miraculous fashion blew at a tremendous rate.
Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount Washington