Friday. Walked to the Hermit Lake, some forty rods northeast.
Listera cordata abundant and in prime in the woods, with a little Platanthera obtusata, also apparently in prime. (The last also as far up as the head of the ravine sparingly.)
This was a cold, clear lake with scarcely a plant in it, of perhaps half an acre, and from a low ridge east of it was a fine view up the ravine. Hoar tried in vain for trout here.
The Vaccinium Canadense was the prevailing one here and by our camp.
Heard a bullfrog in the lake, and afterward saw a large toad part way up the ravine. Our camp was about on the limit of trees here, and may have been from twenty-five hundred to three thousand feet below the summit.
I was here surprised to discover, looking down through the fir-tops, a large, bright, downy fair-weather cloud covering the lower world far beneath us, and there it was the greater part of the time we were there, like a lake, while the snow and alpine summit were to be seen above us on the other side, at about the same angle. The pure white crescent of snow was our sky, and the dark mountainside above, our permanent cloud.
We had the Fringilla hyemalis with its usual note about our camp, and Wentworth said it was common and bred about his house. I afterward saw it in the valleys about the mountains. I had seen the white throated sparrow near his house. This also, he said, commonly bred there, on the ground.
The wood we were in was fir and spruce.
Along the brook grew the Alnus viridis, Salix Torreyana (?), canoe birch, red cherry, mountain-ash, etc., and prominent among lesser plants, Heracleum lanatum, Castilleja septentrionalis, the swamp gooseberry in flower and in green fruit, and a sort of Ribes floridum without resinous-dotted leaves! The Hedyotis coerulea was surprisingly large and fresh, in bloom, looking as much whiter than usual as late snows do. I thought they must be a variety. And on a sand-bar by the brook, Oxyria digyna, the very pretty mountain sorrel, apparently in prime.
Apparently Viola blanda, as well as wool-grass, in the meadow, and apparently Aster prenanthes and Juncus filiformis; also rhodora, fetid currant, amelanchier (variety oligocarpa), trientalis, mountain maple, tree-cranberry with green fruit, Aster acuminatus, and Aralia nudicaulis a salix humilis-like, and Polystichum aculeatum (??), and Lycopodium annotinum (variety).
I ascended the stream in the afternoon and got out of the ravine at its head, after dining on chiogenes tea, which plant I could gather without moving from my log seat. We liked it so well that Blake gathered a parcel to carry home. In most places it was scarcely practicable to get out of the ravine on either side on account of precipices. I judged it to be one thousand or fifteen hundred feet deep, but with care you could ascend by some slides. I found that we might have camped in the scrub firs above the edge of the ravine, though it would have been cold and windy and comparatively unpleasant there, for we should have been most of the time in a cloud.
The dense patches of dwarf fir and spruce scarcely rose above the rocks which they concealed, and you would often think the trees not more than a foot or two deep, — as, indeed, they might not be generally, — but, searching within, you would find hollow places six or eight feet deep between the rocks, where they filled up all level, and by clearing a space here with your hatchet you could find a shelter for your tent, and also fuel, and water was close by above the head of the ravine.
Nevertheless, at a glance, looking over, or even walking over, this dense shrubbery, you would have thought it nowhere more than a foot or two deep, and the trees at most only an inch or two in diameter; but by searching you would find deep hollow places in it, as I have said, where the firs were from six to ten inches in diameter. The strong wind and the snow are said to flatten these trees down thus. Such a shrubbery would begin with a thin and shallow but dense edge of spruce, not more than a foot thick, like moss upon a rock, on which you could walk, but in many places in the middle of it, though its surface was of a uniform slope, it would be found to be six or eight feet deep. So that these very thickets of which the traveller complains afford at the same time an indispensable shelter. I noticed that this shrubbery just above the ravine, as well as in it, was principally fir, while the yet more dwarfish and prostrate portion on the edge was spruce.
Returning, I sprained my ankle in jumping down the brook, so that I could not sleep that night, nor walk the next day.
We had commonly clouds above and below us, though it was clear where we were. These clouds commonly reached about down to the edge of the ravine.
The black flies, which pestered us till into evening, were of various sizes, the largest more than an eighth of an inch long. There were scarcely any mosquitoes here, it was so cool.
A small owl came in the evening and sat within twelve feet of us, turning its head this way and that and peering at us inquisitively. It was apparently a screech owl. [Or Acadica ?? Saw-whet?]
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 9, 1858
July 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 9
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021
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