Tuesday. 5.35 A. M. —Keep on through North Tamworth, and breakfast by shore of one of the Ossipee Lakes.
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| July 6, 2018 |
Travelling thus toward the White Mountains, the mountains fairly begin with Red Hill and Ossipee Mountain, but the White Mountain scenery proper on the high hillside road in Madison before entering Conway, where you see Chocorua on the left, Mote Mountain ahead, Doublehead, and some of the White Mountains proper beyond, i. e. a sharp peak.
We fished in vain in a small clear pond by the road side in Madison.
Chocorua is as interesting a peak as any to remember. You may be jogging along steadily for a day before you get round it and leave it behind, first seeing it on the north, then northwest, then west, and at last south westerly, ever stern, rugged and inaccessible, and omnipresent. It was seen from Gilmanton to Conway, and from Moultonboro was the ruling feature.
The scenery in Conway and onward to North Conway is surprisingly grand. You are steadily advancing into an amphitheatre of mountains.
I do not know exactly how long we had seen one of the highest peaks before us in the extreme northwest, with snow on its side just below the summit, but a little beyond Conway a boy called it Mt. Washington. I think it was visible just before entering Conway village. If Mt. Washington, the snow must have been in Tuckerman’s Ravine, which, methinks, is rather too low. Perhaps it was that we afterward saw on Mt. Adams. There was the regular dark pyramid of Kearsarge at first in front, then, as you proceed to North Conway, on our right, with its deserted hotel on the summit, and Mote Mountain accompanies you on the left, and high, bare rocky precipices at last on the same side.
The road, which is for the most part level, winds along the Saco through groves of maples, etc., on the level intervals, with so little of rugged New Hampshire under your feet, often soft and sandy road. The scenery is remarkable for this contrast of level interval with soft and shady groves, with mountain grandeur and ruggedness. Often from the midst of level maple groves, which remind you only of classic lowlands, you look out through a vista to the most New Hampshire generally, quite unexpected by me, and suggests a superior culture.
We at length crossed the Saco from the left to the, right side of the valley, going over or through three channels. After leaving North Conway, the higher White Mountains were less seen, if at all. They had not appeared in pinnacles, as sometimes described, but broad and massive.
Only one of the higher peaks or summits (called by the boy Mt. Washington) was conspicuous. The snow near the top was conspicuous here thirty miles off. The summit appeared dark, the rocks just beneath pale-brown (forenoon) (not flesh-colored like Chocorua), and below, green, wooded.
The road to-day from Tamworth almost to the base of Mt. Washington was better on the whole, less hilly, than through Gilmanton to Tamworth; i. e., the hills were not so long and tedious.
At Bartlett Corner we turned up the Ellis River and took our nooning on the bank of the river, by the bridge just this side of Jackson Centre, in a rock maple grove. Saw snow on Mt. Carter (?) from this road. There are but few narrow intervals on this road, — two or three only after passing Jackson, — and each is improved by a settler. We see the handsome Malva sylvestris, an introduced flower, by roadside, apparently in prime, and also in Conway, and hear the night warbler all along thus far.
Saw the bones of a bear at Wentworth’s house, and camped, rather late, on right-hand side of road just beyond, or a little more than four miles from Jackson. The wood was canoe birch and some yellow (see little of the small white birch as far as to the neighborhood of the mountains), rock maple, spruce, fir, Populus tremuliformis, and one grandidentata, etc.
In this deep vale between the mountains, the sun set very early to us, but we saw it on the mountains long after. Heard at evening the wood thrush, veery, white-throated sparrow, etc., and I found a fresh nest in a fir, made of hemlock twigs, etc., when I was getting twigs for a bed. The mosquitoes troubled us in the evening and just before dawn, but not seriously in the middle of the night. This, I find, is the way with them generally.
Wentworth said he was much troubled by the bears. They killed his sheep and calves and destroyed his corn when in the milk, close by his house. He has trapped and killed many of them and brought home and reared the young.
When we looked up in the night we saw that the stars were bright as in winter, owing to the clear cold air.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 6, 1858
When we looked up in
the night we saw the stars were
bright as in winter
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