Sunday on Lafayette

RD and I spent two nights at Greenleaf, visiting Ari Ofsevit, an old friend of mine from college. The fall I worked at Mizpah, Ari was finishing the AT (it made a good topic for our alumni magazine, as it turned out), and he visited me at Galehead and Zealand a number of times. Finally, he could resist applying to work in the hut no longer, and he took a job as naturalist at Madison last summer. I've been eyeing the slides on the east side of Lafayette, which extend far down into the valley shared with Owl's Head, for several years, and our plan on Sunday was to circle around via the Franconia Brook Trail and hike the slides from the bottom.

At night, the temperature dipped into the teens, making for a substantial amount of frost and rime above treeline. Given the conditions, we decided it would be better to stay in the hut and stuff ourselves with bacon for most of the morning, but we did eventually head up to the ridge once the day warmed up. Here is one of the croo members, Laura, on the upper section of the Lafayette summit cone.

Mike, the assmaster, with Cannon cliffs and Lonesome Lake in the background. Laura was off to Galehead for days off, so for the rest of the afternoon it was the four guys. We spent a long time on the summit working on our Boston accents.

Though the slides were out of reach, there is a bare spur on the east side of Truman, the satellite peak between Lafayette and Lincoln, that exerted a pull. I was intrigued by the novel perspective on the Pemigewasset, not to mention the view back toward the slides and Franconia Ridge.

The going wasn't too bad, but there were a few patches of krummholz that wouldn't give in easily.

The view back toward the ridge.

Having a rest on the spur. It was a spectacular fall day, with plenty of warm fall sunshine that felt delicious in the crisp air.

A closeup of the cliffs on Garfield from a new point of view.

A look back at the Lafayette slides.

South across the eastern ridges of Liberty and Flume.

Looking across Owl's Head to Bondcliff.

Back up on the ridge, looking across the ridge that Greenleaf straddles, into the north country.

Now headed back down to the hut to get ready for dinner.

Dusk at croo rocks.

Norcross to Greenleaf

From Norcross Pond, RD and I descended back down the Nancy Pond Trail, and from there, we drove to the base of the Old Bridle Path. We made it up to the hut just before Go Time, five o'clock, which is when hut croos start getting ready for dinner. This post is nothing more than a gratuitous display of some pictures I took along the way and outside the hut during dinner.



Nancy Cascades, unusually high in volume for this time of year.

Not too far from the Long Walk campsite.

Up on Agony Ridge, now, looking south along I-93.

Looking down at Profile Lake.

Mr. Jenkinson, snapping away. He likes the color orange.

Camel's Hump, off in Vermont.

Cannon Mountain. The buildings are the top of the tram.

Beaver at Norcross Pond

Over the Columbus Day weekend, I flew up to New Hampshire, while my old pal from the huts, RD Jenkinson, drove over from Middlebury to meet me at the Manchester airport. RD and I worked at Mizpah (the Black Pah) in the fall of 2006, when we bonded over dressing up in drag to entertain hut guests and traversing the Presidentials at night to raid Madison and Lakes.

RD’s family recently bought a house up in North Conway, so we spent our first night there rather than hike up in the dark to Greenleaf, where we were meeting another friend of mine who has appeared in these annals. As we had some time to play with on Saturday morning, we hiked up the Nancy Pond Trail to Norcross Pond, which sits on a plateau between Mounts Nancy and Anderson at the eastern edge of the Pemigewasset Wilderness.

The Nancy Pond Trail was first cleared in 1938—the year of the Hurricane of ’38. Little of the trail remained in the wake of the storm. The next year, the Lucy family built a mill about halfway up to Nancy Cascades to salvage some of the downed timber, but little else happened along the old path until the sixties, when Camp Pasquaney, thanks to an extraordinarily energetic and hard-working counselor named Dave Ryder, reopened the old trail. He still works at camp, running the wood shop. When I was a camper, he was known for demonstrating the sharpness of an ax by using it to shave his arm hair.

I attended Pasquaney for five summers as a camper and returned for another five as a counselor. During seven of those summers, I spent five days in early July on ten man expeditions doing trail maintenance along the Nancy Pond Trail. Often we would camp by Norcross Pond, which empties to the west, into the Pemigewasset watershed. The stream has scoured a series of rock ledges, which are a good place to drop one’s pack and gaze west at the Bond Range. It is an ideal place to cook and sit around with your group.

One year, when I was leading an expedition in the region for the first time with an older counselor named Trey Winstead, one of the boys, a thirteen year old who was particularly energetic and mischievous, grabbed a grub hoe and ran off to dig in the mud holding back the pond behind us. Trey and I exchanged glances, relieved to have the boy occupied while dinner cooked. A few minutes later, however, a sheet of water washed over the ledges where we sat, and it did not abate. Luckily, the camper was able to put things back to right, but the pond had lost a couple of inches.

More recently, beavers recolonized Norcross Pond, for the first time, I believe, in camp memory. The lake now sits several feet higher than it used to, and much of the old trail that ran around the lake is now submerged. Last year, the Forest Service, assisted by Pasquaney, rerouted the trail to higher ground and installed dozens of new bog bridges. In the old days, camp might have handled all the work itself, but I am glad that we are now focusing on what we can do best (keeping the trail clear), leaving the heavy work to professionals.



Our hike was on a cool, crisp day—the best of New England fall. By the edge of the pond, the wind was swift and steady, forcing us to seek shelter in the forest while we ate lunch. In addition to the dam, the beavers have constructed a substantial lodge on the north side of the pond. Like the dam, it looks solid and well maintained.

Beavers have been on the move all over the Whites recently. I believe they have resumed activities in the Zealand Valley since I worked at the hut in 2008, causing some flooding to the trail there, too. Alex MacPhail included a photo on his blog not long ago of a metal pipe someone had stuck through a dam to improve drainage. When I was the naturalist at Zealand, I gave a program, usually to younger visitors, called “Our friend, the beaver,” for which I learned that beavers, despite their reputation, don’t actually work all that long during the day. They are incredibly energetic during those hours that they are active, however. Apparently the sound of water stimulates their dam-building acumen. That pipe won’t be effective for long.

A few summers ago, a beaver turned up in the vicinity of Lakes of the Clouds Hut, no doubt having climbed up Ammonoosuc Ravine. It must have disappointed to find no trees to fell across the outlet of either lake, and I am curious where this singularly persevering rodent waddled off to when it left.

In celebration of this resilient beast, then, nearly hunted to extinction for its pelt, I offer a song that I learned while working at the W. Alton Jones Field School:

Beaver one, beaver all,
Let’s all do the beaver crawl!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver two, beaver three,
Let’s all climb the beaver tree!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver four, beaver five,
Let’s all do the beaver jive!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver six, beaver seven,
Let’s all go to beaver heaven!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver eight, beaver nine,
Stop! It’s beaver time!

Go beaver! Go beaver! Go Beaver!

Wild and Wonderful

Last weekend, Will Kryder and I drove out to Dolly Sods, lured by a description in Backpacker Magazine that mentioned "harsh winds, bogs, stunted spruce, and snowshoe hare." In short, it sounded a bit like New England's north country, though the region is actually part of the Monongahela National Forest, which covers much of the rugged Allegheny Mountains. The drive out was long, over three hours, but it was beautiful traversing the valleys of eastern West Virginia. They are mostly too uneven for mechanized row cropping, so cattle and chicken farming are fairly common.

The hike did not disappoint. I've never walked across anything quite like this undulating, tundra-esque landscape. We spent most of the day in the open, striding through expanses of heath dotted with trees. The trail also plunged into dense thickets of conifers and a copse or two of deciduous trees in the midst of succumbing to autumn.

The evergreens peering over the grass give this picture a sinister aspect, particularly because the grasses are bending away from the trees, toward the camera. The weather was grey and windy, with a consistent speckling of raindrops, though the storms mostly held off. The landscape felt desolate and isolated, as a far corner of the Arctic might while preparing for winter.

Washington has been unbearably hot of late, but at 3,500 to 4,000 feet, the elevations at which our hike took place, the vegetation was faded and colorful. Imminent death hung over the landscape.

The region also has some notable outcrops of limestone, which have weathered into some bizarre formations. In the distance in above picture is Blackbird Knob.

In the spring, Dolly Sods must have a vastly different mood. We spent much of the day hiking along Raven Ridge but didn't catch a glimpse of the bird. I'll look for them when I'm back, hopefully after next winter.

The plateau was once covered by a vast forest of Red Spruce, which was reported to be the largest stand of its kind in the world. Wikipedia tells me that the trees grew as tall as ninety feet, with diameters up to twelve feet! Once the railroad penetrated the region, however, the forest was doomed, and with the trees gone, the soil dried up and blew away. Sparks from steam locomotives soon ignited slash left behind by the logging, and the trees still haven't come back, though the ecology became ideal for blueberry and huckleberry bushes. Their scent was distinctly in the air on Sunday. The region gets its name from the Dahle family, who cleared the land of logging debris so that they could sheep along the new pastureland.

The local ecology now, like the alpine areas of New England, has much in common with the Canadian tundra. In short, it feels familiar, and though a bit of a push for a day hike, should make for a good overnight in the future.

Notes on the Chelsea High Line

By now, most people with an interest in urban architecture have heard of the Chelsea High Line. Designed by Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, the sleek architects who are also responsible for the subject of my fifth blog post, the ICA museum in Boston. The High Line opened a year ago to much fanfare. It remakes an abandoned elevated railway, built in the thirties to move freight to downtown Manhattan. As trucking became cheaper in the sixties, rail freight declined, and the railway closed in 1980. Subsequently, the tracks sat vacant, a slender thread of uncultivated greenery safely inoculated from overt human interference by its height. Two New Yorkers hatched an idea in the early part of this decade to convert the railway into a fully accessible park, however, and the resulting length of iron, stone, and gently waving grasses will eventually extend from Gansevoort Street all the way to 34th (the NYC City Council just approved the purchase of the last chunk). Only the first section, terminating at 20th Street, is open so far, and my brother and I walked it during our weekend in New York.

The High Line is surprisingly polarizing to critics. Nicolai Ourrossoff of the New York Times gushed over it, calling it "mesmerizing," "magical," "invaluable and transformative," and "one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York for years." Others, notably CNeal over at his superb blog The Vigorous North, have lamented the loss of wilderness inherent in its transformation to fully functioning park. CNeal also pointed out that while the idea for the High Line came from relatively ordinary New Yorkers, it became a means for the rich and powerful to mold the once gritty landscape of Chelsea into a windfall for developers (much like the ICA on the South Boston waterfront). Meanwhile, the neighborhood is fast transforming into a glittering nest of socialites. The picture above includes the Frank Gehry-designed IAC Building that sprouted in 2007.

While the High Line is certainly a creature of capitalism, my impressions were favorable. I like the juxtaposition of old water towers atop warehouses with brilliant modern creations of glass and steel. The High Line is a distinctive perch, providing a rare vantage point for gazing across at rather than up to the dense layers of urbanism in Chelsea. For me, ascending to the elevated park triggered a memory of climbing up to tree branches, from which I gained a parallel perspective into the canopy of a beech tree.

The design is playful, weaving through several buildings and including an unexpected view down into 10th Avenue that is highly reminiscent of the ICA mediatheque. While I wish there were more traces of the High Line's former industrial function, the architects did leave a few rails embedded here and there in the walkway. The High Line is very much a park, striving to divert rather than explicitly educate.

The High Line succeeds entirely in its ambition. When I visited on a Saturday in August, the park was full but not crowded, and strollers were obviously amused by the unusual point of view. As The Gates did several years ago in Central Park, the High Line is stirring excitement and curiosity about place - the best thing a park can do.

Found in the Bronx: Kweenz Destroy

On a Robert Moses pilgrimage last weekend to see exactly how the Master Builder plowed the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the neighborhood of Tremont, my brother and I came across these graffiti.

This shot and the one above, go together. Odd subject matter, I thought.

I know very little about graffiti, or street art as its finer examples are now known (how's this for the SAT - graffiti: street art; comic books: graphic art?!), nor can I claim to have listened to much rap music growing up, but these pieces display a pride in their craftsmanship. They were fresh, hardly relics of the early eighties, and as the paint spread across several blocks of vacant but tidy warehouses, their creators clearly had permission from the owner.

Following the suggested link led me to Indie184, (check out the .net cousin for a good post-modern workout), a rare female graffiti artist. She hails from Washington Heights, is a mother of three, and has several interviews on the web, in which she describes her fashion brand, Kweenz Destroy. My impression of the collection is of hipsters cross-pollinating with the world of hip-hop - American Apparel for the urban set. So much for my excitement at finding a surviving example of graffiti giving meaning to bleak concrete; commercialism has subverted even this quintessential tool of the rebellious. However, give Indie184 credit for honesty, as she responds to a question probing for Bronx hardcore nostalgia by quipping, "Rather corporate than crack any day."