Upon the highest mountain tops the winds of winter make their first assaults upon the summer, driving it southward, peak by peak. In September the skirmishes begin, and by the end of October the conquest of the high peaks is complete, but meanwhile the outcome of the contest is by no means sure, and day by day, sometimes hour by hour, the redoubts are won and lost again. Mid-September sees the approaches to the peaks fluttering gayly the banners of both chieftains, summer's blue and gold in the asters and goldenrod, winter's crimson and gold in the flare of maple and the glow of yellow birch. Thus I saw them from the summit of Lafayette on a day when the forces of the north met those of the south there and the long ridge was now in the hands of one army, now of the other. Nor was it difficult to prophesy what would be the outcome of the conflict. It seemed as if moment by moment the yellow banners of winter, planted almost on the very summit in the leaves of the dwarf birches, increased in number and crowded farther down the slope and into the forests of the outlying spurs. Now and then, too, the eye noted where a shell had exploded in a goldenrod bloom, or so it seemed, and blown its summer banner out of existence in a white puff of pappus smoke. So the wind out of the north drives the summer away, though it rallies again and again and comes stealing up the southerly valleys and along the sunny slopes to the very summits.
Near the high summits the birches show autumn tints first. These are of the round-leafed variety of Betula glandulosa, which is peculiar to the high peaks of the White Mountains. Very dwarf at best, on the highest peaks they win as near the top as do the dwarf firs, yet at humiliating expense of stature, becoming scarcely more than creeping vines at the greatest heights, sending up doubtful branches out of the protection of soft tundra moss. Up the higher slopes of Lafayette they thus grow, crowding together in dense masses that now spread a velvety golden carpet to the eye that looks upon them from the summit. Amidst the gray and brown of ledges and the green of spruce and fir, which is so deep that it is black, they glow by contrast and put the goldenrod of the lower glades to shame with their color. No other deciduous trees reach this height, and in looking at them in the early weeks in September it is easy to believe that autumn comes down from the sky and first, like jocund day, stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops. On Lafayette the color was richest near the top and paled into green as the glance slipped farther and farther down toward the Pemigewasset Valley.
Even by the middle of September the birches of the valleys show little of the marvellous yellow that seems suddenly to come upon them a little later. From the mountain-top they still hold the full green of summer to the first glance, and only by looking again and more carefully can one see that they have changed. Then, indeed, little cirrus clouds of yellow mist them in places, rounding the low hilltops a little more definitely against the more distant wood. To look again is to see here and there the undeniable flaunt of a yellow banner, but from the hilltops, that is all. To tramp the levels along the water-courses or climb the lower slopes beneath deciduous trees is to see more, and to learn that the autumn tints come by other routes than a descent upon the summits. For weeks in the cool seclusion of the forest aisles the ways have been lighted by yellow flares of birch or elm leaves and red flashes of the swamp maple. Day by day now these increase in number, and once in a mile the whole tree seems to have caught all the sunshine of the summer in itself and to begin to let it glow forth in the half-dusk of the woodland shadows.
In places it is as if autumn had set candles along these dusky cloisters to light pilgrims to some shrine, and in many a hollow glade one may think he has found the shrine itself,—an altar perhaps of gray rock covered with a wonderful altar cloth of dainty cedar moss all patterned with polypody ferns, and with a great birch candelabra stretching protecting arms above it, all alight with a thousand candles of yellow leaves. The heat of the September sun above, ray-filtered by the feathery firs, is caught in these yellow leaves that hold back the last of its fire and set the place about with a cool, holy glow, an illumination that is like a presence before which one must bow down in reverent adoration. After all it is not a defeat that has come to the fiery forces of summer that have so well held the hills; it is a conversion.
"On the way the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in through the gaps in the foliage"
In the cloistered seclusion of the woods one knows this, and that seclusion obtains for much of the four-mile climb to the summit of Lafayette. Once or twice on the way the gray brow of Mount Cannon looks in through gaps in the foliage, from its great height, seeming to lean across the Notch and peer solemnly down from directly over head, so narrow is this deep defile between two mighty mountains. A mile up and the trail leans to a brief level, where it bridges the chasm between the spur of the mountain which is Eagle Cliff and the main mass. Here at a glimpse comes an idea of what happened when the mountains were made. The whole Franconia Range, one thinks, must have come up out of the hard-pressed levels of the earth in one great rock mass, from which the foundations settled and let portions lean away and split off. Here in the Eagle Cliff Notch is a great gap of the splitting, now more than half filled with fragments of the rock which fell away in enormous chunks when the action took place. Rocks the size of a city block lie here roughly placed one upon another with caverns of unknown depth made by the openings between them. Out of these caverns wells up on the hottest days a cold that undoubtedly comes from ice that forms in depths to which no man's eye has penetrated, and that remains the year through. The clinging of gray lichens upon these rocks has made roothold for the dainty cedar moss which makes them green and holds moisture in turn for the roots of firs that grow from the very rocks and fill their gaps with forest. Here where once was titanic motion is now titanic rest, and out of summer sun from above and winter coolness from below wild flowers build tender petals and distil perfumes the brief season through, asters and goldenrod lingering still in the crannied wall, the cool airs that made them late in blooming equally delaying their passing. In this green gap in the gray granite summer's conversion is long delayed, though winter waits just below her flowers the whole season through.