![]()
FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS
āFIRST CITIZENā: THE OLD MAN IN THE MOUNTAIN
Within a small, tree-shadowed space
I can look up and see a Face,
Ice-chiseled long ago.
If I desert that favored sphere,
The noble features disappear
And only ledges show.
It all depends on where I stand
If shapeless rock or something grand
Is visible to me.
And what I choose to keep in view
Becomes a part of all I do
And all I hope to be.
So Francis Hancock wrote of āOld Stone Faceā in 1946. The recent legacy of the Old Man of the Mountain, though only a memory now, owes its existence, in very large part, to the Niels Nielson family, who, for three generations, took care of the rocky profile that had come to signify the Granite State. To Niels Nielson and his family and the caretakers of the Old Man who preceded them, the Old Man was not only a treasure to see, but also a phenomenon worth preserving with all the ingenuity that man could muster.
In 1960, Niels Nielson went to work for the State of New Hampshire as a bridge construction foreman in charge of the crew that did maintenance work on the profile. Care of the Old Man has been the charge of Niels and his son David since 1965. In 1981, Niels and David Nielson became the first pair of men to simultaneously go down over the front of the Old Man, which meant hanging in midair from three-eighths-inch cable with no safety net, over an eight-hundred-foot drop to the mountain slope twelve hundred feet above Profile Lake. Davidās initiation was a dramatic one. Something happened to his fatherās line, and he had to hang on the side of the mountain for twenty minutes while David coolly orchestrated a way to rescue him. In 1990, when Niels retired, David began to lead the Old Man maintenance crews.
David, a Belmont police sergeant, met his future wife, policewoman Debbie Goddard, at a stakeout. When Nielson asked her to have lunch with him and told her he was caretaker for the Old Man, she did not believe him. Their second date was a hike to the Old Man. In 1990, Debbie became the first woman to go over the side of Great Stone Face, the same year their son Tom, age nine, first came to the mountain.
Ever since 1805, when Luke Brooks, Franconiaās tax collector and surveyor, looked up from the edge of Profile Lake, where he had pitched camp to gaze upon a mountain profile, preservation of the Old Man essentially became the work of committed individuals rather than the government. Admirers judged the Old Man to be both safe and inaccessible until the 1870s, when members of the Appalachian Mountain Club pinpointed the location of the Old Man and reported that one forehead boulder had moved well away from the rest of the forehead. In 1906, Reverend Guy Roberts, a Methodist minister from Whitefield, hiked to the Old Man and observed the danger to the profile itself if the forehead stone should fall and strike the nose. He pointed out the danger, but no one knew what could be done.
In 1915, Reverend Roberts met Edward Geddes, a granite quarry superintendent from Quincy, Massachusetts, who said he could fix the problem in much the way he secured precarious ledges in the quarry. He would hook one rock to another with turnbucklesāmetal rods that rotate and lock. In September 1916, Geddes climbed to the Old Man amid rain and snow. It took him seven days to drill six holes by hand and install three turnbuckles. The rocks he secured did not move measurably.
Over the years, the Nielsons have removed debris, installed wire mesh and epoxy membranes, installed checkpoint pins for measuring resealed cracks, taken strain tests, painted the turnbuckles with asbestos fiber-filled paint for protection and maintained the canopy installed in 1958 to keep the forehead rock from sliding down the mountain. Geddes was a one-man crew working twelve-hour days, hiking two hours in and two hours out from the Old Man. In the recent past, maintenance crews had grown with the concern for safety and travel time had been reduced to three minutes with a helicopter.
āOld Stone Face,ā 1985. Photo Credit: E.W. Whitney III.
The major concern for Nielson was the ākeystoneā or āAdamās appleā rock under the chin that had started to split. In 1992 Nielson said, āWe are trying to find some way to seal that rock back together so that the rain doesnāt get inside, freeze, and break it apart. If that happens, the weight of the face of the Old Man, due to the increased cantilevered weight, might be enough to take the Old Man away.ā
On May 3, 2003, despite the best efforts of the Nielson family, the very same freeze-thaw cycles that carved the Old Man eventually took him off the face of Cannon Mountain.45
FASTEST WIND SPEED ON EARTH
On Mount Washington, renowned home of the āworldās worst weather,ā where sun can turn to fog, rain or snow in minutes, the wind is always a factor.
On April 12, 1934, Mount Washington Observatory meteorologist Salvatore Pagliuca recorded the world wind speed record of 231 miles per hour, a record that stills stands today. Pagliuca wrote the following journal entry: āāWill they believe it?ā was our first thought. I felt then the full responsibility of that startling measurement. Was my timing correct? Was the method OK? Was the calibration right? Was the stopwatch accurate? Slowly, I began collecting the evidence.ā A new heated anemometer developed in late 1932 measured the world record.
Beginning June 5, 1871, high winds atop Mount Washington had been consistently observed by the United States Signal Corps for more than seventeen years. The observatory journal reported that anemometer cups were being blown off and records lost as late as 1886.
By October 1932, the time of re-occupancy of the summit of Mount Washington for meteorological observations, a conventional anemometer was replaced by one specially designed to include a cup-wheel rotor with a stationary electric stove unit, connected to the 110-volt D.C. gasoline-electric unit of the observatory. This anemometer, installed eight feet above the roof ridge, soon needed improvements.
Using a design modeled after one shown to Dr. C.F. Brooks by Dr. Sverre Pettersson of the Norwegian Weather Service in Bergen, Norway, in 1931, D.W. Mann of the Mann Instrument Company of Cambridge, Massachusetts, eventually built the new heated anemometer in conjunction with Sterling M. Fergusson and others at Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts, completing it in 1933. The instrument was tested in the wind tunnel at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before it was installed atop Mount Washington in March 1933. After an initial false start due to bad installation of Number 1, the Number 2 Heated Anemometer, which differed only in small detail from the first, was completely installed March 20, 1933. Just over a year later, that anemometer recorded the fastest wind on earth.
This record was called into question on December 16, 1997, when Anderson Air Force Base in Guam reported a peak wind of 236 miles per hour during Typhoon Paka. However, after extensive research into the details of that recording by a multi-agency assessment team, the National Climate Extremes Committee announced on March 11, 1998, that the wind gust report from Guam was unreliable based on site surveys, ground and air assessments.
Measurements of tornadoes in May 1997 caused some to wonder if this famous record had again been challenged when researchers in Oklahoma released wind data of 318 miles per hour occurring during a storm. According to staff meteorologist Sarah Curtis, āThose readings, and similar high wind measurements from other tornadoes, indicate winds some height above the earth. Our mountain record remains the highest surface wind yet measured.ā
Meterologist Salvatore Pagliuca and Joe Dodge setting up anemometer on railroad trestle, October 15, 1932. Photo Credit: Harold Orne. Courtesy Mount Washington Observatory Collection.
The record surface wind atop Mount Washington still stands.46
THE EARLIEST CONTINUOUS MOUNTAIN FOOTPATH IN THE UNITED STATES
It is one thing for a pioneer to carve a path in the wilderness, but something else entirely for that pioneer to be hospitable to those who come behind.
In 1771, Timothy Nash, a pioneer from Lancaster, New Hampshire, followed the trail of a moose over Cherry Mountain and found that an old Indian trail passed through a ravine. When Nash made his way through the notch in the mountains south to Portsmouth and sought out Governor John Wentworth to tell him of his discovery, Wentworth promptly commissioned Nash, saying, āBring a horse down from Lancaster through this pass and show me itās a practicable route for settlers and I shall grant you some land.ā Though Nash and Benjamin Sawyer managed to drag rather than ride a horse through the notch and, in doing so, gained 2,184 acres of land, nothing else happened with the fortuitous path through the notch until fifty years later.
Visitors to the White Mountains today owe much to the generosity of Abel Crawford. In 1791, news of this notch through the mountains enticed Abel Crawford, a powerful woodsman, to leave his life in Guildhall, Vermont, and his new wife Hannah Rosebrook, pregnant with their second child, to find his own way to this path. When he reached the Fabyans, Crawford encountered squatters most willing to sell rights to the land. He moved into one of their crude log shelters and lived there alone for many months.
Early in 1792, Crawford brought his wife and two boys, Erastus and Ethan Allen, to live beside the river Indians called the Ompompanusuc, today known as the Ammonoosuc, where Abel built his cabin on a place called āGiantās Grave,ā a three-hundred-foot-long glacial mound. When Hannahās father, Eleazar Rosebrook, came to visit them, he was so struck by this home in the wilderness that he offered to buy his son-in-law out. Abel accepted and, needing elbow room, moved twelve miles south. Rosebrook became an innkeeper, offering food and lodging for those traveling through the notch. Eventually, when Rosebrook appealed to his grandson Ethan to move back to his fatherās original home to keep him company, Ethan did so. Shortly after, Ethan married Lucy Howe, a cousin who had moved into the house to care for his grandfather.
In 1818, a party of men from Boston asked Abel Crawford to be their guide to the top of Mount Washington. At the time there was no trail, so the trees were thick, the stream crossings treacherous and the underbrush shredded the menās expensive clothingāand still, they were forced to turn back never having reached their goal. In September of that year, two men, again accompanied by Abel, reached beyond the timberline and made it to the summit, bringing with them a brass plate inscribed in Latin, which they affixed to the topmost rockāa plate stolen by vandals in 1825.
By 1819, Ethan Allen Crawford had established himself as both guide and innkeeper, just as his grandfather had done. In History of the White Mountains, published in 1845, Lucy Crawford, wife of Ethan Allen, recounts in her husbandās words the tale of how Ethan and his father Abel cut a path from the head of the notch to the summit of Mount Washington. āMy father and I made a foot path from the Notch out through the woods, and it was advertised in the newspapers, and soon we began to have a few visitors.ā
Early ātrampersā rest on their ramble through the Crawford Notch, circa 1890. Courtesy Appalachian Mountain Club.
The generosity of Ethan Allen Crawford is implied on every page of Lucyās tale. She recounts a day in May when a man and woman spent the night with the Crawfords. The next morning, when twelve inches of snow kept them from moving their wagon, Ethan Allen removed the wheels, placed his guests and their wagon on a sleigh, attached his horse to a sled and pulled them to Bethlehem, a distance of twelve miles. The spirit of the Appalachian Mountain Club hut system in the White Mountains owes its existence to the hospitable spirit of the Crawford family, the first innkeepers in the Whites.
In 1820, a group of men from Lancasterāincluding Philip Carrigan, secretary of state of New Hampshire noted for his great map of the stateāasked Ethan to guide them to the summit of Mount Washington by way of his new path. This party proceeded to name the highest peaks of the White Mountains after the presidents of the United States, the idea being to name them in chronological order. At the time, Adams, Jefferson and Madison were officially named.
Ethan Allen Crawford considered hospitality synonymous with making a life in the mountains. In 1823, when a man from Boston commissioned Ethan Allen to build a good carriage road to which $200 had already been subscribed, Ethan Allen refused, saying (in Lucyās words): āI did not feel able to build an addition to my house, and I well knew that if I made this road, and did not have suitable accommodations for those who would be likely to come, it would only be imposing upon the public to have a road to the Mountain and not have house room enough to make those comfortable who came to stay with us.ā
Crawford Notch and the Crawford Path bear the name of a generous family of mountain innkeepers who not only carved a path but, despite yearly erosion from rain and snow, kept rebu...
