CHAPTER XII
Down Tuckerman’s Ravine
But while it is comparatively easy to go to sleep on the floor, it is not so easy to stay asleep on it. Both Art and Peanut awoke more than once during the night, and shifted to the other shoulder. Finally, toward morning, Art got up and tiptoed to the window, to look out. He came back and shook Peanut.
“Whaz-a-matter?” said Peanut, sleepily.
“Get up, and I’ll show you,” Art whispered.
Peanut roused himself, and joined Art at the window.
Outside the stars were shining! But that was not all. Art pointed down the carriage road, and far below, on the black shadow of the mountain Peanut saw what looked like bobbing stars fallen to the ground. These stars were evidently drawing nearer.
“Well, what do you make of that!” he exclaimed.
“Bless me if I know. It’s evidently somebody coming up the road with lanterns.”
The two boys slipped noiselessly into their shoes, and struck a match to look at their watches.
“Quarter to four,” said Art. “The sun will rise in half an hour. Gee, I’d like to get that bugle and wake ’em up!”
“The owner’s using it himself, I should say,” whispered Peanut, as the sound of a snore came from the room above. They looked about, but the man had evidently taken his bugle up-stairs with him, so they slipped out through the door to investigate the bobbing lanterns coming up the mountain.
It was cold outside, and still dark, but they could make out dimly the track of the carriage road, and walked down it. The lanterns were drawing nearer, and now they could hear voices. A moment later, and they met the lantern bearers, a party of nearly a dozen men and women.
“Hello, boys! Where did you drop from?” cried the man in the lead, suddenly spying Art and Peanut.
“Where did you come up from?” Peanut replied.
“We walked up from the Glen cottage to see the sunrise,” the other replied.
“Oh, dear, I should say we did!” sighed a woman in the party. “If you ever catch me climbing a mountain again in the middle of the night, send me to Matteawan at once.”
“Cheer up, Lizzie, we’ll have some sandwiches pretty soon,” somebody told her.
“Sandwiches for breakfast! Worse and worse!” she sighed. “I don’t believe there’s going to be any sunrise, either. I don’t see any signs of it.”
“Let’s shake this bunch,” Art whispered to Peanut. “They give me a pain.”
The boys ran back, ahead, to the coach house, entered once more, and bolted the door behind them, lest the new party try to get in.
“Golly, we’vegotto get that bugle, and have the laugh on whatever his name is—he didn’t tell us, did he? I’m going up after it,” said Peanut.
He kicked off his shoes, and started on tiptoe up the stairs. Art heard the floor creak overhead, and then he heard a smothered laugh.
A moment later the man appeared with the bugle in one hand, and Peanut’s ear in the other. Peanut was still attached to the ear, and he was trying hard not to laugh out loud.
“Caught you red-handed,” said the man. “Hello, there, Art! You up too? How’s the weather?”
“Fine,” said Art. “Come on out and wake ’em all up.”
The man looked at his watch, then at the sky through the window. The east was already light. The stars were paling. You could see out over the bare rock heaps of the mountain top.
“Come on!” he said.
The three went outdoors. The party with lanterns had already passed the coach house and climbed the steps to the summit. They could be heard up there, talking. The man and the boys went around to the south of the coach house, out of sight of the summit, and setting his bugle to his lips, tipping it upward toward the now rosy east, the man pealed out the gay, stirring notes of reveille.
“Oh, do it again!” cried Peanut. “Gee, I like it up here! I know now why you brought the bugle.”
The man smiled, and blew reveille again.
Before the last notes had died away, they heard stampings in the house behind them, and cries of “Can it!” “Say, let a feller sleep, won’t you?” “Aw, cut out the music!”
“Get up, you stiffs, and see the sun rise!” shouted Peanut. “Going to be a grand day!”
Five minutes later the Scouts and the men were all out of the coach house, on the rocks beside Art and Peanut.
“Itisa good day, that’s a fact,” said Mr. Rogers. “Where’s the best place to see the sun rise?”
“I’d suggest the top of the mountain,” said the bugler.
It was light now. The east was rosy, and as they looked down southward over the piles of bare, tumbled rock toward Tuckerman’s Ravine, they could see masses of white cloud, like cotton batting. Up the steps they all hurried, and found the lantern party eating sandwiches in the shelter of the Tip Top House, out of the wind.
“They’d rather eat than see the sun rise,” sniffed Art.
“Maybe you would, if you’d spent the night walking up the carriage road,” laughed somebody.
Peanut led the way to the highest rock he could find, and they looked out upon the now fast lightening world.
Northward, far out beyond the great shoulders of the mountain, they could see glimpses of the lower hills and valleys. But all nearer the mountain was hidden by the low white cloud beneath their feet. To the northeast and east was nothing but cloud, about a thousand feet below them. The same was true to the south. Southwestward, over the long shoulders of the Crawford Bridle Path, where they had climbed the day before, lay the same great blanket of white wool.
“Say, this peak of Washington looks just like a great rock island in the sea,” cried Lou.
Now the world was almost bright as day. The east was rosy, the upper sky blue, the stars gone. The great white ocean of cloud below them heaved and eddied under the gusts of northwest wind which swept down from the summit, wherever a wave crest rose above the level. The sun, a great red ball, appeared in the east, and the bugler set his bugle to his lips and blew a long blast of welcome.
It was a wonderful, a beautiful spectacle. As they watched, the clouds below them heaved and stirred, and seemed to thin out here and there, and suddenly to the northeast a second rock island, shaped like a pyramid, appeared to rise out of the pink and white sea.
“Hello, there’s Jefferson!” cried one of the men.
Then a second island, also a peak of bare rock, rose beyond Jefferson.
“And there’s Adams,” said Mr. Rogers.
“And there’s Madison,” said the bugler, as a third peak rose up from the cloud sea, beyond Adams.
“What is between those peaks and the shoulder of Washington I see running northeast?” asked Frank.
“The Great Gulf,” one of the men replied. “There must have been a heavy dew in the Gulf last night. It’s packed full of clouds.”
“Probably got soaked with the rain yesterday, too,” somebody else said. “The clouds will get out of it before long, though. They are coming up fast.”
Even as he spoke, one rose like a long, white finger over the head wall of the Gulf, stretched out to the gray water-tanks of the railroad and almost before any one could speak, it blew cold into the faces of the party on the summit.
“Hello, cloud!” said Peanut, making a swipe with his hand at the white mist. “Does that mean bad weather again?” he added.
Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount Washington
Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount Washington
Cataract of clouds pouring over the Northern Peaks into the Great Gulf, seen from the summit of Mount Washington
“No, they’re just rising from the gulfs. They’ll blow off before we start, I fancy,” one of the trampers said. “It’s the clouds which come down, or come from the plains, which make the trouble. Come on, breakfast now! If we are going to make a side trip to the Lakes of the Clouds with you Scouts, we’ve got to get an early start, for our path down over the Giant’s Stairs is fifteen or twenty miles long, and hard to find, in the bargain.”
As they went, however, a look away from the sun showed the shadow of Washington cast over the clouds westward as far as the eye could see. Peanut waved his arm. “The shadow of that gesture was on the side of Lafayette!” he cried.
Breakfast was prepared as quickly as possible, the boys furnishing powdered eggs, the men bacon and coffee. Then, after they had paid the keeper of the coach house for their night’s lodging, the combined parties shouldered packs, went back up the steps in a thin white cloud, stocked up with sweet chocolate at the Tip Top House, and still in the cloud set off southwest down the summit cone, by the Crawford Bridle Path.
The descent was rapid. The cone is a thousand feet high, but they were soon on Bigelow Lawn, and though the white mists were still coming up over the ridge from the gulfs below, they were thin here, and the sunlight flashed in, and below them they could see the green intervale of Bretton Woods, shining in full morning light.
“Rather more cheerful than yesterday,” said Frank.
“Ra-ther,” cried Peanut.
At the junction of the Boott Spur Trail, everybody unloaded all baggage, and the packs and blankets were piled under a boulder. Then they hurried on down the Bridle Path, past the refuge hut which had been such a friend the day before, and soon reached the larger of the two Lakes of the Clouds, which lies just north of the Crawford Trail, on the very edge of the Monroe-Washington col, exactly two miles below the summit. The larger lake is perhaps half an acre in extent, the smaller hardly a third of that size.
“These lakes are the highest east of the Rocky Mountains,” said Mr. Rogers. “They are 5,053 feet above sea level.”
“And a deer has been drinking in this one,” said Art, pointing to a hoof mark in the soft, deep moss at the margin.
“Sure enough!” one of the men said. “He must have come up from timber line, probably over from Oakes Gulf.”
“You remember, boys,” Mr. Rogers said, “that I told you I was going to show you the head waters of a river? Well, we saw one at the Crawford House—the head of the Saco. This lake is one of the head waters of the Ammonoosuc, which is the biggest northern tributary of the Connecticut.”
“It’s a bit cleaner than the Connecticut is at Hartford or Springfield,” laughed Rob. “My, it’s like pure glass! Look, you can see every stick and piece of mica on the bottom.”
“And it’s cold, too!” cried Art, as he dipped his hand in.
“Now, let’s look at the Alpine wild flowers as we go back,” said the bugler. “They are what interest me most.”
The party turned toward the path again, and they became aware that almost every crevice between the loose stones was full of rich moss of many kinds, and this moss had made bits of peaty soil in which the wild flowers grew. There were even a few dwarfed spruces, three or four feet high, all around the border of the lake.
The wild flowers were now in full bloom.
“It’s spring up here, you know, in early July,” said the bugler. “Look at all those white sandwort blossoms, like a snow-storm. What pretty little things they are, like tiny white cups.”
“What’s the yellow one?” asked Lou, who was always interested in plants.
“That’s the geum,” the man replied. “Look at the root leaves—they are just like kidneys.”
“It’s everywhere,” said Lou. “Look, it even grows in cracks half-way up the rocks.”
The man also pointed out the tiny stars of the Houstonia, which interested the boys, because their Massachusetts home was near the Housatonic River. But the botanist assured them that there was no connection between the names, the flower being named for a botanist named Houston, while the river’s name is Indian.
There were several other kinds of flowers here, too, as well as grasses, and conspicuous among them was the Indian poke, sticking up its tall stalk three feet in the boggy hollows between rocks, its roots in the wet tundra moss, with yellowish-green blossoms at the top.
“Well, who’d ever guess so many things could live way up here, on the rocks!” Lou exclaimed. “But I like the little sandwort best. That’s the one which gets nearest the top of Washington, isn’t it?”
“It’s the only one which gets there, except the grass, I believe,” the bugler answered.
Everybody picked a few sandwort cups, and stuck them in his hat band or buttonhole, and thus arrayed they reached once more the junction of the Boott Spur Trail, shouldered packs, and set off southward, down the long, rocky shoulder of the spur, which pushes out from the base of the summit cone.
The sun was now high. The clouds had stopped coming up over the head walls of the ravines. They could see for miles, even to the blue ramparts of Lafayette and Moosilauke in the west and southwest. Directly south they looked over a billowing sea of mountains and green, forest-covered valleys, a wilderness in which there was no sign of human beings. To their left was the deep hole of Tuckerman’s Ravine, gouged out of the solid rock. Only the very summit of Washington behind them still wore a hood of white vapor.
It was only three-quarters of a mile to the nose of the spur, and they were soon there. Here the two parties were to divide, the boys going down to the left into the yawning hole of Tuckerman’s Ravine, which they could now see plainly, directly below them, the other trampers turning to the southwest, for their long descent over the Davis Path and the Montalban range. At the nose of the spur was a big cairn, and out of it the bugler fished an Appalachian Mountain Club cylinder, opened it, and disclosed the register, upon which they all wrote their names. Then they all shook hands, the bugler blew a long blast on his bugle, and the Scouts watched their friends of the night go striding off down the Davis Path.
“Now, where dowego?” asked Art.
Mr. Rogers pointed down into Tuckerman’s Ravine, the wooded floor of which, sheltering the dark mirror of Hermit Lake, lay over fifteen hundred feet below them.
“Golly, where’s your parachute?” said Peanut.
“We don’t need a parachute,” Mr. Rogers laughed. “Here’s the path.”
The boys looked over into the pit. Across the ravine rose another precipitous wall, with a lump at the end called the Lion’s Head. The ravine itself was like a long, narrow horseshoe cut into the rocky side of Mount Washington—a horseshoe more than a thousand feet deep. They were on one side of the open end.
“Well, here goes!” cried Peanut, and he began to descend.
At first the trail went down over a series of levels, or steps, close to the edge of the precipice. At one point this precipice seemed actually to hang out over the gulf below, and it seemed as if they could throw a stone into Hermit Lake.
Peanut tried it, in fact, but the stone sailed out, descended, and disappeared, as if under the wall.
“These are the hanging cliffs,” said Mr. Rogers. “We’ll go down faster soon.”
Presently the path did swing back to the left, and began to drop right down the cliff side. The cliff wall wasn’t quite so steep as it had looked from above, and the path was perfectly possible for travel; but it was the steepest thing they had tackled yet, nonetheless, and it kept them so busy dropping down the thousand feet or more to the ravine floor that they could barely take time to glance at the great, white mass of snow packed into the semi-shadow under the head wall.
“Say, we are making some time, though!” Peanut panted, as he dropped his own length from one rock to the next.
“Faster’n you’d make coming back,” laughed Lou.
The path soon dropped them into scrub spruce, which had climbed up the ravine side to meet them, and this stiff spruce grew taller and taller as they descended, till in less than fifteen minutes they were once more—for the first time since leaving the side of Clinton—in the woods. At the bottom of the cliff the path leveled out, crossed a brook twice, and brought them suddenly into another trail, leading up into the head of the ravine. Almost opposite was a sign pointing down another path to the Appalachian Mountain Club camp.
“We’ll leave our stuff there at the camp,” said Mr. Rogers, “and go see the snow arch before lunch, eh?”
“You bet!” the boys cried.
It was only a few minutes after ten. They had started so early from the summit of Washington that they still had the better part of the day before them. A few steps brought them to the camp, which was a log and bark lean-to, with the back and sides enclosed, built facing the six or eight foot straight side of a huge boulder. This boulder side was black with the smoke of many fires. It was no more than four feet away from the front of the lean-to, so that a big fire, built against it, would throw back a lot of warmth right into the shelter. All about the hut were beautiful thick evergreens.
“That’s a fine idea!” Art exclaimed. “You not only have your fire handy, and sheltered completely from the wind, but you get the full heat of it. Say, we must build a camp just like this when we get back!”
“Somebody was here last night,” said Rob, inspecting the ashes in the stone fire pit. “Look, they are still wet. Soused their fire, all right.”
“And left a bed of boughs—for two,” added Peanut, peeping into the shelter.
“Let’s leave our stuff, so we’ll have first call on the cabin to-night,” somebody else put in. “Will it be safe, though?”
“Sure,” the Scout Master said—“safe from people, anyhow. The folks who tramp up here are honest, I guess. But I don’t trust the hedgehogs too far. The last time I slept in Tuckerman’s, five or six years ago, two of us camped out on the shore of Hermit Lake, and the hedgehogs ate holes in our rubber ponchos while we slept.”
“Say, you must have slept hard—and done some dreaming!” laughed Peanut.
“Fact,” said Mr. Rogers; “cross my heart, hope to die!”
“Well, then let’s hang our blankets over this string,” said Art, indicating a stout cord strung near the roof from the two sides of the shelter.
They hung their blankets over the cord, stacked their packs in a corner, and set off up the trail toward the head wall of the ravine, nearly a mile away.
A few steps brought them to a sight of Hermit Lake, a pretty little sheet of water which looked almost black, it was so shallow and clear, with dark leaf-mould forming the bottom. It was entirely surrounded by the dark spires of the mountain spruces, and held their reflections like a mirror, and behind them the reflections of the great rocky walls of the ravine sides, and then the blue of the sky.
The path now began to ascend the inclined floor of the ravine, and the full grandeur of the spectacle burst upon the boys. Even Peanut was silent. It was the most impressive spot they had ever been in.
To their left the cliffs shot up a thousand feet to Boott Spur, to their right they went up almost as high to the Lion’s Head. And directly in front of them, curved in a semicircle, like the wall of a stadium, and carved out of the solid rock of the mountain, was the great head wall, in the half shadow at its base a huge snow-bank glimmering white, on the tenth day of July. Above the snow-bank the rocks glistened and sparkled with hundreds of tiny water streams. All about, at the feet of the cliffs, and even down the floor of the ravine to the boys, lay piled up in wild confusion great heaps of rock masses, the debris hurled down from the precipitous walls by centuries of frost and storm.
“It looks like a gigantic natural colosseum,” said Lou. “The head wall is curved just like the pictures of the Colosseum in our Roman history.”
“Right-o,” cried Peanut. “Say, what a place to stage a gladiator fight, eh? Sit your audience all up on the debris at the bottoms of the cliffs.”
“And have your gladiators come out from under the snow arch,” laughed Mr. Rogers.
“Sure,” said Peanut.
They now came to the snow arch, which is formed every June under the head wall, and sometimes lasts as late as August. The winter storms, from the northwest, blow the snow over Bigelow Lawn above, and pack it down into Tuckerman’s Ravine, in a huge drift two hundred feet deep. This drift gradually melts down, packs into something pretty close to ice, and the water trickling from the cliff behind joins into a brook beneath it and hollows out an arch.
The Scouts now stood before the drift. It was perhaps eight or ten feet deep at the front now, and a good deal deeper at the back. It was something like three hundred feet wide, they reckoned, and extended out from the cliff from sixty to a hundred feet. The arch was about in the centre, and the brook was flowing out from beneath it.
“Look!” cried Art, “a few rods down-stream the alders are all in leaf, nearer they are just coming out, and here by the edge they are hardly budded!”
“That’s right,” said Lou. “I suppose as the ice melts back, spring comes to ’em.”
Rob put his hand in the brook. “Gee, I don’t blame ’em,” he said; “it’s free ice water, all right.”
“Come on into the ice cave,” Peanut exclaimed, starting forward.
Mr. Rogers grabbed him. “No, you don’t!” he cried. “People used to do that, till one day some years ago it caved in, and killed a boy under it. You’ll just look in.”
Peanut poked at the edge of the roof with his staff. It looked like snow, but it was hard as ice. “Gee, that won’t cave in!” said he.
“Just the same, we’re taking no chances,” said the Scout Master.
So the Scouts tried to content themselves with peeking into the cold, crystal cave, out of which came the tinkle of dripping water from the dangling icicles on the roof, and a breath of damp, chilling air. It was like standing at the door of a huge refrigerator.
Then they climbed up the path a few steps, on the right of the drift, and made snowballs with the brittle, mushy moraine-stuff on the surface, which was quite dirty, with moss and rock dust blown over from the top of Washington.
“Snowballs in July!” cried Peanut, letting one fly at Art, who had walked out on the drift.
Art retaliated by washing Peanut’s face.
It was getting close to noon now, and the party started back to camp. Hermit Lake was first inspected as a possible swimming pool, but given up because of the boggy nature of the shores. Instead, everybody took one chill plunge in the ice water of the little river which came down from the snow arch, and then they rubbed themselves to a pink glow, and started for the camp. Before they reached camp, Art sniffed, and said, “Smoke! Somebody’s got a fire.”
A second later, they heard voices, and came upon two men, building a fire against the boulder in front of the shelter.
“Hello, boys. This your stuff?” one of the men said. He was a tall, thin man, with colored goggles and a pointed beard. The other man was short and stout.
“Sure is,” Peanut answered.
“Well, we’re going on after lunch. Won’t bother you to-night,” the men said. “Don’t mind our being here for lunch, do you?”
“Depends on what you’ve got to eat,” said Peanut, with a laugh.
“Not much,” the tall man answered. “Enough for two men, but not enough for a huge person like yourself.”
Peanut grinned, as the laugh was on him, and the boys set about getting their lunch ready, also.
The two newcomers had come up from Jackson that morning, they said, and were bound for the top of Washington via the head wall of Huntington Ravine. They spoke as if the head wall of Huntington were something not lightly to be tackled, and of course the boys were curious at once.
“Where’s Huntington?” asked Art. “Mr. Rogers, you’ve never told us about that.”
“I never was there myself,” said Mr. Rogers. “I can’t have beeneverywhere, you know.”
“Well, neither have I been there,” said the tall, thin man, “but my friend here has, once, and he alleges that it’s the best climb in the White Mountains.”
“Hooray, let us go, too!” cried Peanut.
Mr. Rogers smiled. “We’ll go along with these gentlemen, if they don’t mind, and have a look at it,” he said, “but I guess we’ll leave the climbing to them. I don’t believe I want to lug any of you boys home on a stretcher.”
“Aw, stretcher nothin’!” said Peanut. “I guess if other folks climb there, we can!”
The short, stout man’s eyes twinkled. “Maybe when you see it you won’t be so keen,” he said. “Come along with us and have a look.”