"Just below the nick of the Notch you may see where the Silver Cascade and the Flume Cascade hurry down from their birth on Mount Jackson, and farther down the vast slope of Webster"
Thus just below the nick of the Notch you may see where the Silver Cascade and the Flume Cascade hurry down from their birth on Mount Jackson, and farther down the vast slope of Webster is swept clear in great spaces where now only a little water comes moistening the upper rim of rocks, spreads, and evaporates before it has passed over the slanting, sun-heated surface. All the way down the glen, to the Willey House, to Bemis, and on to Sawyer's River, one looks to the right and left up to rock heights swimming more than a thousand feet in air, bare, immanent, cleft and caverned, and often carved to strange semblances of man or beast. Crawford Notch is a veritable museum of gigantic fantasies.
Most impressive of all it is to pause at the site of the Willey House and look back toward the gateway of the Notch, through which you have come. Here the mighty bulk of Mount Willard lifts sheer from the tree-carpeted floor, six hundred and seventy feet in air, a mountain that once in semi-molten form flowed into place across the wide valley and blocked it with a solid rock, overhanging, seamed and wrinkled, showing projecting buttresses and withdrawing caverns, a rock so solidly knit and compact that the wear of the ages on it has been infinitesimal. On the summit of this cliff are the hammer marks of frost. These blows and the solvent seep of rain may take from the mountain a sixteenth of an inch in a hundred years, but the disintegrating power that splits ledges and hurls hundred-ton rock from precipices seems never to have worked on this cliff, so perpendicularly high and mighty does it stand.
First or last the visitor to the Notch will do well to climb Willard and see it as a whole. An easy carriage road makes the ascent, stopping well back from the brow of this tremendous cliff. Willard is hardly a mountain. It is rather a spur, a projecting ledge of the Rosebrook Range, whose peaks, Tom, Avalon and Field, tower far above it. But on this great ledge of Willard one is swung high in air in the very middle of the upper entrance to the Notch. Hundreds of feet of it are above him still, but thousands are below, and he looks down the tremendous valley as the soaring eagle might. Soothed by distance the rough valley bottom seems as level as a floor, its forest growth but a green carpet on which certain patterns stand out distinctly, the warp of green deciduous growth being filled with a dainty woof of fir, spruce and pine. To the left the bulk of Webster blocks the horizon.
In the heart of Crawford Notch, the summit of Jackson on the distant horizon
To the right the glance goes by Willey and on down to Bemis and Nancy, and the blue peaks of other more distant mountains that peer over them. From the head wall of the Great Gulf, looking down between Chandler Ridge and the Northern Peaks of the Presidential Range, one gets a view of a wonderful mountain gorge. The outlook from Mount Franklin, down the mighty expanse of Oakes Gulf to its opening into the Crawford glen below Frankenstein Cliff is, to me, more impressive still. But greatest of all in its beauty of detail and its simplicity of might and grandeur is this ever-narrowing, ten-mile chasm, this mighty, deep fold of rock strata that begins below Sawyer's River and ends where the enormous rock which is Mount Willard so pinches the gateway to the Notch that the railroad burrows, the highway excavates and the tiny brook which is the beginning of the Saco River dives out of sight between the two, to reappear in that "dismal pool" which lies at the very bottom of the nick of the Notch.