They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.
2 SAMUEL 1:23
WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTRIGUED with those year-end “10 best” lists that you read in the papers—the 10 best-dressed celebrities, 10 best college football teams, 10 best movies, and so forth. Here we’ve compiled a few such lists of our own.
We’d like to salute the 10 greatest hikers in New England’s history. Why not? Here’s our list:
1. Chocorua. This name evokes a legend and a curse. Chocorua was a Native American, probably, whom we list as representative of what must have been a great many outstanding Native American hikers of pre-European settler days. For Chocorua New Hampshire’s rock-turreted mountain now climbed by thousands each summer is named. Legend has it that Chocorua’s beloved son was accidentally poisoned by a settler family named Campbell. Chocorua took vengeance by slaying Campbell’s wife and children. In his turn, Campbell tracked the Native American to the top of the rock-spired mountain and shot him down. The dying Chocorua pronounced a terrible curse on the white man as he fell, the effects of which have plagued New England ever since—as evidenced by the hard, rocky infertility of her soil, the great storms that rack her coast, and the results of many American League pennant races.
2. Darby Field. Mount Washington’s first European conqueror, in 1642. Field made the ascent with one or two Indians, and was the first European to tramp for pleasure and exploration in the White Mountains. Even in those days, Field experienced typical Mount Washington weather—clouds, wind, and cold. It’s been like that ever since.
3. Abel Crawford. Back in 1792 this gigantic figure strode into New Hampshire’s most spectacular mountain “notch”—the one that today bears his name—and hacked out a homestead. For more than 50 years he lived a robust mountain life there, becoming the first innkeeper to exploit tourist interest in New England’s mountain scenery. A vigorous woodsman and climber himself, he and his son Ethan cut the very first hiking trail to the summit of Mount Washington. Still heavily used by hikers today, the Crawford Path is the oldest continuously used footpath in North America. Crawford was the first and possibly the most impressive of the true mountain men of New England.
4. Alden Partridge. Back in chapter 3 we mentioned this fellow as the first peakbagger of the region. His lifelong devotion to walking and mountains was astonishing. In a day when transportation around New England was primitive, Partridge repeatedly climbed in the White Mountains and the Green Mountains and the Hudson Highlands and southern New England and even border peaks way up in the dense forests between Maine and Canada. At the age of 45 he walked 220 miles in four days, from his home in Vermont to Massachusetts and back, in order to climb a few little hills in the Holyoke Range. Later in the same year he walked to Massachusetts and back again, this time covering 300 miles, with 64 miles on the last day. If New England has always had stout walkers, surely the archetype and progenitor of the pure pedestrian was this ever-restless Partridge.
5. Thomas Starr King. In the middle of the nineteenth century, New Englanders were smitten with their first head-over-heels love affair with their mountains. This was the era when poets rhapsodized about mountains (William Cullen Bryant, for example); artists painted lavish mountain landscapes (the Hudson River School, they called it, but mountains were far more conspicuous than rivers on their canvases); Thoreau went off to live in the woods; and Hawthorne wrote short stories about the Great Stone Face and other mountain themes. In the midst of all this romantic ardor for the heights, no one extolled the mountains’ glory more than the Reverend Thomas Starr King. A preacher from Boston, he summered in New Hampshire and wrote a gushing flow of essays on the “White Hills,” as he called them. He was a walker too, getting out all summer long for close personal inspection of the idyllic landscapes he loved.
6. George Witherle. In the nineteenth century, Maine’s north woods were overrun with loggers, but few others. During this era George Witherle began trekking all over the forests, looking for mountains to climb. The country north of Katahdin became his playground. It is doubtful whether anyone since (float planes and government maps notwithstanding) has ever known or loved those small but ruggedly fierce mountains any better than Witherle.
7. Eugene Beauharnais Cook. Violinist, chess expert, connoisseur of fine wines and good living, inexcusable punster, this Hoboken, New Jersey, native adopted the White Mountains as his summer home. He was the leading mountain explorer and trail builder in the first generation of hikers who began building trails in that range. A man of stupendous appetites and energies, Cook reflected an age of vitality and exuberant love of the mountains. As a walker, he was amazing. Today only the most vigorous of New England’s hikers attempt to traverse the Presidential Range in a single day. Cook did that in 1882, covering 24 miles and about 19,000 feet of elevation, winding up with supper at an inn in Crawford Notch—then walked back home 18.5 miles over Jefferson Notch after supper.
While we’re mentioning fabulous one-day Presidential traverses, let us slip in a word on the first one-day winter traverse by Willard Helburn and Henry Chamberlain in 1918. They went up Mount Madison via the Osgood Trail from the Glen House, encountered a full-scale snowstorm with high winds and low visibility, yet persevered across all the high summits and down to Crawford Notch, doing in a single day what most parties 100 years later take three days to do.
8. Roy Buchanan. A native Vermonter, Buchanan embodies the best of the twentieth-century trail workers who, like Abel Crawford in the early 1800s and Eugene Cook in the late 1800s, labored so hard for the benefit of others’ enjoyment of the woods for years to come. Buchanan was one of those handful of fellows with the indefatigable vitality, organizational skill, and follow-through to build the Long Trail from one end of Vermont to the other. He laid out and cut the final 10 miles through to Canada, built the water bars and steps necessary to check erosion, and constructed camps where they were needed so that some shelter is available to the Long Trail hiker at intervals of never much more than 7 miles. A small man of enormous energy, strength, and humor, Roy is reported to have lived on strong black coffee and homemade doughnuts. The diet worked—he headed the Long Trail Patrol for 36 years and was still vigorous when he died at 95 in 1977.
9. Earl V. Shaffer. For years after the 2,000-mile-plus Appalachian Trail was completed, no one thought of walking it all in one continuous trip. Shaffer was the first to do so, finishing at Katahdin on August 5, 1948. Some hikers of that day reacted with skepticism (was it really possible to do that?) or sneers (“a stunt,” merely). But Shaffer had a vision of the future, and his accomplishment lit the way for all those happy through-hikers we told you about in chapter 4.
10. Tom Sawyer. No, we’re not referring to Mark Twain’s adolescent scamp. The other Tom Sawyer is a computer programmer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who was the first peakbagger to climb all 445 (!) 3,000-footers of New England. Sawyer has completed this as well as the even more ambitious goal of climbing all 445 of these alps in winter. Most of these peaks lack trails, so many require 12- or 15-hour days required to bushwhack on snowshoes through miles of unfriendly woods to reach low wooded summits with no views, often at temperatures at or below zero. We have had the privilege and poor judgment to follow Sawyer through some of the densest thickets on his outlandish odyssey. We can attest that no one knows how to move through dense underbrush more skillfully and swiftly than he—a truly meritorious heir to the mantle of Chocorua, Darby Field, Abel Crawford, and Alden Partridge.
But wait a minute. Our list thus far has been all male. In this day of equal opportunity, that will never do. In fact, when you consider the extraordinary handicaps that beset women walkers for so many years, the accomplishments of the “weaker” (ha!) sex are in many ways more astonishing. Consider the dress codes that required women to wear long skirts in the woods all through the nineteenth century. Consider too that women were brought up under psychological restraints that were perhaps even more restricting. Women simply were not supposed to undertake physically strenuous activities. Consider finally that, with those obstacles at every hand, each new generation lacked female role models to follow. Yet, despite these penalties, some remarkable women came through as great walkers. Here’s our list:
1. Granny Stalbird. This hardy woman pioneered in the White Mountains in the early 1800s, when there were few people in those untamed woods, let alone women. She was said to be the first female of European descent to come through Crawford Notch, then a wild trace of a track with many rough stream crossings. Granny Stalbird had learned “doctoring” with herbs and roots from the Indians and tramped around the mountains visiting those who needed her skill. One famous patient was Ethan Allen Crawford, Abel’s son, who ran his inn in the heart of Crawford Notch.
2. The Austin sisters. In 1821 these three sisters, Eliza, Harriet, and Abigail, were the first women to reach the top of Mount Washington. At the time, they were living in Jefferson, New Hampshire, and made the climb accompanied by several men, one of whom (Eliza’s fiancé) had ascended the mountain the summer before. The group spent a few nights out at Ethan Allen Crawford’s rustic camp, waiting for the rain to stop. Then they were escorted to the summit by Crawford himself. These sisters were surely pathbreakers, as climbing for women was discouraged in those days and camping out in cramped quarters with men was not to be thought of.
3. Lizzie Bourne. This heroine of tragedy became famous because of the relentless drama and pathos of her death on September 14, 1855. Lizzie was not the first person to die on Mount Washington, but it is her death, over all deaths on that mountain, that has captured and held our collective imagination. She was 23, engaged to be married, and she perished within sight of the summit buildings she never knew were so near. Lizzie’s hapless last day contains many lessons for us hikers. The party—Lizzie, her uncle, and her uncle’s daughter—had not started on their climb until two o’clock. They would not be dissuaded from continuing by the caretaker at the Halfway House, and so they were caught by darkness, struggling with a merciless wind high on the mountain. Lizzie collapsed and died that dark and stormy night as guests at the Summit House—literally just a stone’s throw away—had a cozy dinner before the blazing fire.
4. Lucia Pychowska. This great mountain lady was Eugene Cook’s sister and his flamboyant equal in enthusiasm for exploration of the New Hampshire mountains they held so dear. An ardent bushwhacker of the 1880s, Madame Pychowska (she was married to a Polish chevalier, a concert musician) dedicated herself to dress reform for women bent on climbing mountains. Recognizing that their restrictive dresses could keep women out of the woods and away from the mountain heights, she wrote an article published in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s journal, Appalachia, on how to modify one’s long skirts, yet not appear too shockingly immodest. Lucia and her daughter, Marian, her equal in effervescent spirit, delivered papers on their investigations of the rugged Mahoosucs; built trails on the high peaks that encircled their Randolph, New Hampshire, home; and were full participants in the joyous life of mountain climbing that took place in the Northern Presidentials more than a century ago.
5. Martha F. Whitman, Charlotte E. Ricker, and—possibly—Martha A. Knowles. In 1882 two women made a weeklong traverse of New Hampshire’s Pemigewasset peaks, crossing through densely wooded country and climbing trailless mountains. They wore long skirts, which got ripped—actually, shredded—during the day’s bushwhack, and which they sewed up at night while sitting around their campfire. These women were accompanying the AMC’s new councillor of improvements, A. E. Scott, to scout where to put a trail across the rugged and nearly unexplored country wherein lie such White Mountain summits as North and South Twin, Guyot, and Bond. Their bold, unquenchable spirit and most excellent of humors inspire all of us who’ve ever tussled in a spruce thicket high up at 4,000 feet.
6. Miriam Underhill. An alpinist of rare ability, she was the first person to claim title to three coveted New England mountaineering feats: (a) she climbed all 46 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers—in winter—many when she was over 60; (b) she went on to conquer New England’s sixty-three 4,000-footers; and (c) she climbed the 100 Highest of New England. A knowledgeable enthusiast of alpine flowers, Miriam was the organizer of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s guidebook, Mountain Flowers of New England, for which she took the photographs. Her autobiography, Give Me the Hills, tells of her pioneering all-women climbs in the Alps, her adventures out West with her husband, Robert, as well as her story of how they climbed the 4,000-footers in winter for the first time.
7. Emily Klug. A transplanted German who was a nurse in Brooklyn, New York, Emily Klug spent up to a month during the year more or less meandering among mountains, mainly the Presidentials. Her wandering was, in part, due to Emily’s extreme near-sightedness, and not being exactly sure where she was headed. These trips took place from 1914 or so until she returned to her homeland just before World War II (possibly not a wise time to go home). Emily climbed alone, shunned crowds, and avoided shelters, plunking down to camp wherever night caught up with her, rain or clear. She used half a sleeping bag, reaching her waist, and a cape. Emily was devoted to the hutboys of those quieter years, and they to her, always giving her a hot meal in return for which she’d darn their socks, mend their shirts and pants, and nurse them if they had a cold. Emily was “the best friend a hutman ever had,” reported one. Emily’s outfit was practical, if picturesque to the point of eccentric. She wore hobnailed boots and carried a small pack. She wore a wide woolen skirt with breeches underneath. While climbing she belted up the skirt around her waist so as to turn it into a pack, and in its folds she carried most of her belongings. Off of hooks on her wide belt she hung a knife, a camera held together with rubber bands and tape, a saucepan, and a pendulous bag of food. Emily kept most of her supplies in an ice-filled cave in Huntington Ravine that was a base for her mountain tramps.
8. Laura Cowles. She lived in Burlington, Vermont, and was active in the earliest days of the Green Mountain Club (GMC) and the beginnings of the Long Trail. This was around 1910. Her husband, Judge Clarence Cowles, built the earliest sections of the Long Trail on Mount Mansfield. Laura was an active snowshoer in those early days, climbing Mansfield many times. She was an early president of the Burlington Section. A trail on Mansfield is named for her.
9. The Three Musketeers. This colorful feminine trio traversed the entire Long Trail from Massachusetts to the Canadian line, and so became the toast of the GMC. The three were Kathleen Norris and her gym teacher, Hilda Kurth, both of Schenectady, New York, and Catherine Robbins, a schoolteacher from Brandon, Vermont. In 1927 the northern part of the trail was not yet cut, merely blazed, and the women once went six days without seeing another hiker. Their walk, taking 32 days, was one of the earliest through-hikes of the entire Long Trail and had a quality of pioneering adventure unobtainable today. It became a public relations coup for the Long Trail and the GMC. The threesome was hailed as the “Three Musketeers,” and their story hit the newspapers from coast to coast, with photos in the rotogravure sections of the New York Herald Tribune and the San Francisco Sunday Examiner.
10. Diane Sawyer. We first met Diane Sawyer for a weekend trip on the Long Trail in January, during which we snowshoed through a drenching all-day rain and through deep snow that was speedily turning into the consistency of mashed potatoes. Diane and her husband, Tom (mentioned earlier), went on to complete their adventure of hiking the entire Long Trail in winter. Although Diane claims that Tom is the prime mover, planner, and captain in their peakbagging odysseys, we know that she is the cheerful, unflappable, stalwart, ever-ready, and dependable crew without which the Good Ship Sawyer could never leave port. Diane is the quintessential first mate. She has probably climbed as many of the Northeast’s mountains in winter as anyone we know. That is, Diane and Tom together.
These two sets of 10 great walkers are the celebrities of the hiking fraternity. We concede that history has not recorded the walking feats of many unsung striders along New England’s rocky footpaths. The early pioneers moving north and west into the hills; the logging scouts seeking the virgin white pines of Maine’s north woods; later, the Yankee peddlers and itinerant preachers roaming the rough paths between isolated settlements; still later, that hardy twentieth-century breed, the Maine guide and his counterpart in the Adirondacks; and still more recently, the tough hut people who stocked the high White Mountain huts, lugging 200-pound loads up steep mountain trails before the helicopter took over—all these must have been walkers of prodigious strength and energy.
Let’s expand our horizons from New England to the whole wide country—plenty of space to walk in. Here’s our list of the 10 greatest backcountry walkers this country’s ever seen:
1. Daniel Boone. Representative of those many prodigious walkers who pioneered the first footpaths off the Eastern Seaboard, Boone drew his pay as an advance agent for the Transylvania Company. He blazed the Wilderness Road, the first main artery used by settlers into the “southwest” (what is now eastern Tennessee) and on into Kentucky. Boone walked all over the previously unopened hills of that region, eventually reaching Missouri, experiencing many hair-raising adventures along the way, which subsequent legends have doubtless greatly enlarged.
2. Meriwether Lewis. Lewis and Clark have found their names as inextricably linked as Gilbert and Sullivan, Sacco and Venzetti, and Ben and Jerry. We don’t know who walked and who rode the canoe more, but we pick Lewis to represent the first great western walk, the expedition from Saint Louis to the Pacific—and back. Much of the trek was taken afloat on the Missouri River, but enough of it was on foot to make either Lewis or Clark qualify.
3. Brigham Young. Quite possibly the greatest hike in the history of America was the incredible trek by the Mormons across the prairies and mountains of the uncivilized West in 1846–47. The man who led that excursion was Brigham Young, a brilliant leader, stern moralist, and astonishing husband (he married 27 wives under the then-prevailing Mormon custom of polygamy).
4. Johnny Appleseed. Most people seem to think this character was a myth created by Hans Christian Andersen or Walt Disney, or perhaps the public relations agency for the Apple Growers Association. In fact, he really existed, as John Chapman, born in 1774, a pioneer who walked all over Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in the first half of the nineteenth century, earning the celebrated nickname by promoting apple orchards wherever he went.
5. John Muir. The archetypal walker. Walks of 500 to 1,000 miles were his delight. His quests took him from Niagara Falls to Florida, from Cuba and South America to California and Alaska. Always full of inquiry, he studied botany, geology, and glaciology (“the inventions of God,” he called them) as he walked along, filling notebooks that were later to become such books as Studies in the Sierra, Mountains of California, Travels in Alaska, and many others. In 1892 he helped to found the Sierra Club, creating through his influence and writing a great sentiment for conservation at the turn of the century.
6. Norman Clyde. Quoting Emerson, he shouldered his pack and walked into the mountains in 1928, saying: “Goodbye, proud world, I’m going home.” He spent the next 40 years living in the High Sierras and climbing countless peaks, many previously unclimbed and many by new routes of surprising difficulty for a man climbing alone. His strength was incredible and so were the enormous packs he carried. His load often weighed more than 100 pounds, because Clyde took everything an unusual man might need: an iron frying pan, several large kettles, cameras, a rope, ice ax, several pistols, a fishing rod, cups and dishes, cans of food, and a library of books in Latin, French, German, and Italian.
7. John Burroughs. Perhaps this country’s best-known and best-loved naturalist. Patriarchal with his long, white, flowing beard, with a head that Hamlin Garland noted “had the rugged quality of a granite crag,” he tramped the Catskill Mountains. Burroughs wrote 25 books, all on some aspect of nature, many while in residence at “Slabsides,” his simple country log hut. In later years his stature was legendary. The public imagination responded to his trip to Yellowstone with Roosevelt, his mountain walks with John Muir, his camping trips with Edison, Ford, and Harvey Firestone. Burroughs was not a ground coverer like Muir. He saw walking as a state of mind. He wrote: “You are eligible to any good fortune when you are in the condition to enjoy a walk.”
8. Robert Marshall. His Adirondack exploits, his long walks over Alaskan wilderness and in many areas of the Rockies, not to mention his leadership in conservation as an assistant secretary of the interior and cofounder of the Wilderness Society, all rank him as a national figure in hiking circles. He also was just plain a wonderful guy. Of all the historical heros we’ve read about, this is the one we most wish we could have known and hiked with.
9. Colin Fletcher. The men we’ve listed so far were mostly hiking with an explicit goal in mind—usually one of exploration. Muir, Burroughs, and Clyde sought inspiration in the mountains, but they were also seeking to find new places or reach hitherto unattainable goals. We list Colin Fletcher as the man whose name is perhaps most associated with that post–World War II development: purely recreational noncompetitive backpacking. Both as walker and writer, Fletcher has touched a responsive chord in a generation of for-pleasure-only backcountry walkers.
10. Grandma Gatewood. Three-time end-to-ender on the Appalachian Trail, she started hiking at the age of 65. An Ohio farm woman, Grandma raised 11 children and then took up long-distance hiking. She broke all the rules, wearing sneakers and carrying her duffel slung over one shoulder. Not content with her 70s, she trekked across most of the US along the route of the pioneers, the Oregon Trail.
Not to stop at our national borders and a paltry few hundred years of recorded history, who are the 10 greatest walkers of all time? May we have the next envelope, please. Here are our nominations:
1. Moses. Trip leader for that hike from Egypt to the Promised Land, and the only person to lead a hike through the bottom of the Red Sea, others having been unable to work out the arrangements. The Exodus was undoubtedly one of history’s most significant walks.
2. Po Chü-i. A Chinese poet of the ninth century who makes our list because he was the first person who recorded climbing mountains purely for recreational reasons. Some of his climbs sound technically difficult:
Grasping the creepers, I clung to dangerous rocks; My hands
and feet—weary with groping for holds.
Even Po Chü-i, however, faced those Monday morning blues when, like most of us, he had to return from a great weekend in the mountains to go back to the office, as he wrote:
Came back to the Ant’s Nest.
3. Marco Polo. Maybe history’s most famous traveler, he went from Venice to Beijing and back in the thirteenth century. That sure beats the Long Trail.
4. David Livingstone. Probably best known as the subject of Henry Stanley’s presumption, this Scottish missionary crossed the breadth of Africa, including the Kalahari Desert, discovered Victoria Falls and the Zambesi River, and made a prolonged search for the sources of the Nile. He probably did more to fill in European knowledge of African geography than any other single individual.
5. Sven Hedin. What Livingstone did in Africa, the Swedish explorer did on the grander scale of the world’s largest continent. Hedin crossed the great central regions of Asia, including the Takla Makan Desert and the Kunlun Mountains, eventually reaching Lhasa, the forbidden capital of Tibet. A fair hike from Stockholm.
6. Hernando de Soto. As Livingstone is to Africa and Hedin is to Asia, so de Soto is to what is now the southern United States. Landing in Tampa Bay in 1539, the doughty Spaniard proceeded to walk across Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, touching base in Tennessee—all of it wild, Indian-populated backcountry at the time. He was the first white man to cross the Mississippi River, whereupon he continued his hike as far as present-day Oklahoma. All told, his hike was almost as long as the modern Appalachian Trail, but with no shelters, no trail signs—for that matter, no trail. With all that walking, it seems ironic that the poor man wound up with a car named after him.
7. John Muir. We mentioned him in the American list, but he ranks among the greatest of all time too, as the man who most walked over and celebrated the great American West.
8. Roald Amundsen. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the toughest hiking in the world is polar exploration. Week after week of way-below-zero temperatures, howling blizzards, and brutal sled hauling (those dogs need help) put this kind of walking in a class by itself. Several extraordinary men have walked across arctic and antarctic wastes to a place in history—giants like Scott, Shackleton, and Peary—but we give the nod here to the man who first reached the South Pole, the greatest post-Viking Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. As Wilfred Noyce wrote of another of the great antarctic walkers: “He was tough, and he enjoyed being tough.”
9. Tenzing Norgay. In the annals of history’s great walkers a place surely must be reserved for one of the two men who first walked to the top of the world, the summit of Mount Everest. Without wishing to limit the credit due to that great New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, we award this spot to his partner in the Everest climb, the redoubtable Sherpa Tenzing. Nepal is a land of few motorized vehicles; people still walk wherever they go, even between cities a hundred miles apart, over ground that might fairly be described as hilly (the Himalayas). Tenzing is a worthy representative of the earth’s greatest walking people, the Sherpas of Nepal.
10. Some nameless Buddhist pilgrim, inchworming his way from the plains of India over the mountain passes and across the Tibetan plateau to Lhasa. The approved system apparently involves a procedure as follows: (a) stand facing Lhasa, (b) utter a prayer (you’ll see why in a moment), (c) throw yourself prostrate on your chest, (d) regain your feet, now one body-length nearer to Lhasa. Repeat this procedure as often as necessary to cover 1,000 miles or so. As you cross the higher mountain passes, it becomes tricky to keep snow off your tie. In the lower valleys, check for cobras before each step. You think the Appalachian Trail is tough!
We can’t help observing the strikingly cosmopolitan character of this list—almost as varied nationally as an “all-American” soccer team. It shows how worldwide is the impulse to walk, to explore, to discover, to find out what is on the other side of that mountain pass. Our list includes:
one Jew one Spaniard
one Chinese one American
one Italian one Norwegian
one Scot one Nepalese
one Swede one Indian
If any country deserves more credit for its walkers, it would be England. Besides those great Antarctic heroes we mentioned, Scott and Shackleton, and their men, we could have included such others as Sir Richard Burton, the disguised explorer of then unknown Arabia (and translator of The Arabian Nights); Sir Francis Younghusband, who walked from Beijing to India over the Mustagh Pass in the Karakoram; or the late H. W. Tilman, the mountaineer and intrepid walker who once bicycled across Africa, despite few roads, broad rivers, and hostile beasts and tribes—to mention a few impediments not encountered by most 10-speed aficionados today.
Walkers one and all: from Chocorua to Miriam Underhill, from Moses to the out-of-shape weekend backpacker on Mount Chocorua today, they all heed the mandate of Isaiah:
“This is the way, walk ye in it!”