. . . in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 98
BELOW TREELINE, TRAIL TENDING presents one set of tasks, as described in the last chapter. Above treeline, we confront an entirely different challenge. Up there in the alpine zone lies a unique and wonder-filled world of jagged crags and delicately wrought tundra.
The northeastern alpine zone is a place of paradox. These scattered acres—on Maine’s Katahdin, New Hampshire’s Presidentials and Franconias, Vermont’s Mansfield, New York’s highest half dozen peaks, and perhaps no more than a score of much smaller sites elsewhere in those four states—exhibit some of the qualities of arctic tundra hundreds of miles farther north. Northeastern alpine areas have been called “the last remaining vignettes of our recent postglacial history.” Here are found alpine flowers that you’d have to go to Greenland or Baffin Island or much, much higher mountains to see otherwise. Their habitat is wracked by some of the most ferocious weather to be found on the planet Earth.
The vegetation that fights to survive here is obviously tough. It regularly resides in a zone that humans find unapproachable on many days of the year. Winds we can’t stand up in are common occurrences in the lives of those tiny plants. They must indeed be resilient, rugged, robust.
Yet that same alpine vegetation is also painfully fragile. A small disturbance is cataclysmic to its odds for survival. The tiny alpine flowers, so admired by botanists and passing hikers, can lose their precarious grip on life if subjected to unwonted force—such as, for example, a trampling boot from one of those botanists or passing hikers.
Recognition of the extreme vulnerability of the tundra landscape has generated a brisk concern among land managers, botanists, alpine ecologists, trail crews, and hikers themselves. This concern has spawned a tremendous volume of concentrated attention, study, thought, policy formulation, and just plain hard work.
During a single week in April a couple decades ago, we were privileged and immeasurably pleased to watch a quick succession of gatherings focused on saving the alpine zone. In the space of seven days we watched a schedule of four separate events involving concerned alpine-zone experts or enthusiasts, each of the four occasions with a different focus, yet all zeroing in on the tundra world above the trees.
We’d like to tell you about these four happenings. Years ago we remember a best-selling book and popular movie called Seven Days in May. We herewith present our own “Seven Days in April.” The former was an exciting but ultimately trivial bit of entertainment about a fanciful takeover of the US government by a military junta. The message, if there was one, was it could happen here, and don’t let it. Our story in this chapter is just the reverse: not quite as exciting perhaps, but neither is it as fanciful or trivial. Its message is that this is happening here, and we must do something about it—and a lot of good folk are getting together, in proud-pied April and year-round, to put a spirit of youth into the effort. The decidedly nontrivial result is a solid substantive movement among alpine managers.
We had just wound up a poor season of making maple syrup at our homestead when we drove across Vermont to the start of a three-day Alpine Managers Gathering, hosted by the Green Mountain Club. The purpose was to bring together, for the first time in one room, all of the land managers, trail workers, and concerned hikers who are working on the scattered alpine areas of the Northeast.
The first day’s “reception” was held in a slightly shabby but very comfortable low-rent ski dorm below Mount Mansfield, as 20 or 30 people began to mill about and meet each other, most for the first time. Land managers, hiking clubs, trail crews, and individual concerned hikers have been working on alpine-area problems independently all over the Northeast for most of this century, especially since about 1970. But up until this Friday afternoon they had worked for the most part in isolation from one another, hearing only fragmentary rumors of techniques being tried elsewhere. Each group was learning some interesting lessons from its own experimental experiences, but no one had found the perfect solutions to alpine problems.
The theory behind the GMC-sponsored gathering was that we could all learn from each other. The gathering provided a forum for groups to tell what they’d been doing, report what seemed to work, to warn about what didn’t seem to work, work on what didn’t work, provide some answers, to ask more questions, and explore possibilities with others.
People came from all over. Every one of the significant alpine areas of the Northeast was represented. Participants ranged in age from mid-20s to late 60s—big people and little people, men and women, all with lessons learned and experiences to tell about, but all also eager to improve what they were doing and profit from others’ ideas. Some were distinguished academic botanists with a string of degrees; others were down-to-earth (literally) trail workers unaccustomed to having clean hands. There was a wealth of experience in the room, yet one participant caught the spirit of the occasion when he described the gathering as having no experts, only beginners. There’s much we don’t know yet about wise stewardship of alpine areas, much we can gain from listening to what others are doing and pondering how to apply it with profit on our particular piece of alpine turf.
So at this “reception”—that word is much too grandiose for the humble setting or dramatis personae involved—you would have seen New England’s top alpine ecologist, Dr. Charles Cogbill, exchanging insights with the Adirondacks’ veteran forester, the late Dr. Edwin Ketchledge, while a few feet away a young woman from Maine’s rocky coastal Mount Desert chatted eagerly with a professional looking representative from the Mount Washington Observatory and a rugged, sunburnt ranger from the Adirondacks High Peaks Wilderness Area. A naturalist from New Hampshire recognized a former kindergarten classmate now managing the University of Vermont’s alpine holdings on Mount Mansfield—both of them here reunited after 30 years by their common concern for saving alpine vegetation.
This diverse group reflected the interesting diversity of the Northeast’s alpine areas. We all think of the Presidential Range, wherein lies the Northeast’s largest alpine area by far, a sprawling, rambling uplands that measures about 10 miles in length of unrelieved tundra, the width of which varies jaggedly, following the splattered ridge-lines radiating out from the summits of seven or more mountains (depending on how many subsidiary peaks you grant independent status to). A strong second in size is Maine’s remote Katahdin, with its high, windswept tableland. In the Adirondacks you can find seven or eight major summits with significant alpine acreage. Vermont has two major alpine areas, on Mansfield and Camel’s Hump. New Hampshire has two major locales besides the Presidentials: the Franconia Ridge and Mount Moosilauke. Maine has several high summits well west of the Katahdin group, the most notable being rugged Saddleback and the Bigelow Range.
But besides these prominent alpine areas, there are a scattering of peaks that barely poke their tips above the spruce-fir-birch forest. Each of these lesser giants has a small area where you find a tiny zone of genuine alpine qualities, sometimes perhaps 100 feet along a spiny ridge, or a little patch ringed around a rocky summit. Good examples are New Hampshire’s South Twin or Bondcliff, or Vermont’s Abraham. Because of their postage-stamp size, these areas have received generally less attention than the Presidentials or Katahdin. But in recent years, with the rise of interest in alpine ecology, new attention is being directed toward preserving these tiny gems.
Yet a third category of peaks attracts the interest of alpine ecologists, managers, and trail workers. These are the distinctly lower peaks that, for a variety of reasons, have evolved exposed ledgy areas with tundralike attributes, plus a large number of visitors whose impact creates problems not unlike those of the true alpine areas. Mount Desert in Maine’s Acadia National Park is a good example: These “mountains” aren’t even 2,000 feet high, but because of their devegetated, weather-wracked, seacoast perch, a few choice summits have extensive zones of exposed rock interlarded with islands of precarious vegetation. With a high volume of visitors swarming all over the tops, these vegetative colonies are frightfully vulnerable. Another good example is Mount Welch in New Hampshire’s Sandwich Range—a low (2,605 feet) summit with islands of fragile vegetation scattered across rocky ridges, attracting a large number of hikers all summer long.
All day on Saturday and on to Sunday noon, these diverse alpine areas were the center of attention in a series of panel discussions, with full participation by the throng of 50 alpine managers. These discussions were held in a converted barn where GMC hosts meetings of this sort—just the right size for this group. The plain board floor and exposed old wooden beams gave an aura of practical work, not theoretical speculation.
Panels focused on threatened and endangered alpine plants, trail design and maintenance, meeting the public and educational efforts, and cooperation between government agencies, hiking clubs, and individual volunteers.
A trail crew boss from Maine’s Katahdin described an ingenious method for transporting rocks for trail work without trampling vegetation. Vermont and New York reported on their disparate programs for on-site education in the alpine zone. An ecologist from the University of Vermont reported the results of a study of Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump. Participants brought up such varied sources of potential damage as large parties, dogs, and winter campers.
One striking feature of this alpine managers gathering was its studied neglect of hierarchies: Everyone seemed as keenly interested in the problems of little Mount Abraham as those of lordly Katahdin; the large professional staff of the high-budget Appalachian Mountain Club was no more prominent than the moonlighting volunteers of the Adirondack 46ers, the academic expert was no more an expert than the fieldwise young trail worker. And throughout the weekend a frequent theme was the recognition that we were all part of the problem and must all be part of the solution; the need to avoid thinking in terms of those bad hikers and us good managers. Said one participant: “We want to share with our fellow hikers the stewardship of the mountains.”
While formal sessions were lively, perhaps the most useful part of the weekend was the opportunity to meet helpful new colleagues in this struggling art of tundra preservation. The group concluded the weekend with a discussion of what to do the following year and how to continue this exchange of information, ideas, and inspiration.
One could not help wondering if, high on the snow-strewn slopes of the Northeast’s alpine areas from Algonquin to Hamlin, the mountain gods nodded their approval of this struggling effort by 50 frail mortals to understand better and to work together more fruitfully.
After driving home across Vermont on Sunday afternoon, we immediately took off again on Monday morning in the opposite direction, to the town of Randolph, New Hampshire, at the foot of the Northern Presidentials. High on the slopes of Mount Adams, the Randolph Mountain Club maintains four small cabins for the use of hikers. Only one cabin has a stove for winter warmth, but that doesn’t stop winter climbers from staying in all four. For the assistance of these guests, for the protection of RMC’s property, and as a first line of search and rescue, RMC hires a caretaker to spend the winter in the heated cabin, to check in on the other three, and generally to provide a useful presence in the Northern Presidentials during the winter months. That caretaker takes a few vacation days from time to time, and one of us had agreed to serve as his substitute during days off.
So, after three days of indoor discussion of alpine problems, one of us now headed up for three days of practical application, one might say. During the next three days we handled a multitude of little chores, from dumping the slop bucket and replacing toilet paper in the outhouses to checking on avalanche conditions on the side of Mount Jefferson and answering questions about whether it was prudent to try for Mount Adams that afternoon. On this and several earlier stints for RMC, we had seen every kind of weather, from warm all-day rain to -28°F and one day that never got above -12°F; every kind of population density, from 26 one night (in a cabin with a theoretical maximum of 18) to one train of three days without seeing another soul, day or night; and every kind of visitor, from crack trained alpinists to novices in blue jeans and summer hiking boots.
Full moon rose on the 16th of this April, so on the last evening there, with no guests and after reporting in on the radio to RMC’s valley-based authorities, we took off by moonlight to the top of Mount Adams, second-highest peak in the entire Northeast. Unusually heavy late-winter snows had carpeted the peaks in white, and quick thaws and refreezing had left a hard crust ideal for crampons. The moonlight glistened. The prospect from the subsidiary peak known as Adams 4—with Mounts Madison, Quincy Adams, Adams, and Sam Adams arrayed above—looked positively Himalayan. The relative calm at 4,500 feet gave way suddenly, above 5,500, to a chilling breeze on the final rise to 5,774-foot Adams’s summit, with its cavernous drop to the low forests on the far side. The scene provided a stirring reminder of the values of the high alpine experience, the ultimate reason why 50 concerned managers had been meeting for the preceding three days to try to figure out how to preserve this incomparable landscape, this vitally important inspiration for the human spirit.
Early the following morning, we rendezvoused at the base of the RMC’s trail so as to whisk off to two other meetings that same day.
The first was the Alpine Study Committee, a small advisory group assembled by the staff of the White Mountain National Forest at their staff headquarters at that time in Laconia, New Hampshire. The purpose of this gathering is to advise on alpine-area problems within the forest, with primary focus on the Presidentials. This group brings together Forest Service personnel with representatives of the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, botanists from the Natural Heritage Inventory, staff members from the Appalachian Mountain Club and New Hampshire’s Nature Conservancy, plus a couple of interested individuals. The agenda ranges over everything from how to reduce the impact of winter camping and how to clean up the mess left by an Air Force research program shortly after World War II, to how to word an educational sign for posting at treeline.
What we find impressive is that the Forest Service staff treats these meetings as vital to its managerial role. Top staff people regularly attend, and they take notes on which to base action. Clearly these public servants are listening to the public they serve and keeping a sharp eye open for preserving the integrity of the land they’re commissioned to manage.
At three o’clock sharp the meeting broke up, and five of us piled into a Forest Service van and headed for Boston. In an unseasonal snowstorm, we crawled through rush-hour traffic along the Tobin Bridge and Storrow Drive to a parking lot under the Boston Common, and eventually to the headquarters of the Appalachian Mountain Club, one block from the Massachusetts State House—and a long, long way, geographically and spiritually, from the moonlit, windswept snows of Mount Adams just 24 hours before.
Here in the heart of Boston, at 7:30 that evening, a group of active winter campers from the AMC’s Boston chapter had requested an opportunity to hear from and discuss the Forest Service and others the latest regulations affecting winter recreation in the alpine zone.
Until the winter of 1990 winter camping was unrestricted in the alpine zone. Then, responding to botanists’ concerns for the safety of alpine vegetation, the Forest Service instituted a complete ban on all winter camping above treeline. In 1992, responding to the concerns of the winter campers, a compromise policy was reached: above-treeline camping only where there was a cover of at least 2 feet of snow. The theory behind this policy is that alpine vegetation is well protected from the effects of tenting when swathed in a protective coating of snow and ice. Earlier that winter we had conducted a hasty survey of where 2 feet of snow seems to form regularly in the Presidentials, and prepared a map of such places—hence our inclusion on this panel.
The resulting discussion was animated and frank, with many campers asking questions and voicing informed views on what they looked for from the Forest Service, and how the impact of their arcane sport might be held to acceptable limits. On both sides there seemed to be recognition of the importance of balancing the needs of a fragile physical environment with the legitimate opportunity for people to experience a night out in that incomparable alpine world. One of the Forest Service officers later wrote to one of the more articulate campers:
There is a large pool of skills and knowledge “out there” which we often fail to fully recognize and use. There were many suggestions and ideas presented that consider the balance between a unique recreation opportunity and protection of an exemplary natural community. The meeting “set the seeds of developing an ethic for use of the alpine zone.”
It was after midnight before that Forest Service van crawled home through the snowstorm and we got into our own car and headed for a night’s sleep.
Thus ended our seven days in April.
In this one week it was our privilege and pleasure to see an intense focusing of a lot of able and involved individuals and groups on the special world of the alpine area. Much of the time we dwelt on specific and tangible issues, practical measures, here-and-now solutions to urgent problems. But underlying it all, for the entire week, we were conscious of a rising concern throughout the Northeast, a public conscience, and a deep commitment to that special world above the trees.
At stake is a reconciliation of twin objectives: to preserve the threatened and endangered species of alpine vegetation or, more broadly, the fragile alpine ecosystem of which such vegetation is a natural part; and to preserve equally the opportunity for people to be up there on the mountain heights, to honor the great value to the human spirit of experiencing that realm of the mountain gods.
To reconcile and synthesize these vital objectives is why 50 managers gather in an old barn in Vermont for three days, why RMC stations a caretaker on the high slopes of Mount Adams, why a government agency convenes and harkens to an advisory group, and why Boston hikers meet with Forest Service managers during a snowy evening on Beacon Hill.
With such forces let loose, one cannot resist a fundamental optimism. During those seven days we were aware of differences of viewpoint about alpine-zone policy—at times distressingly aware. But with many people of good faith working together toward solutions, one must be hopeful. Above all, though, stands that bright vision of the pure alpine snows by moonlight on Mount Adams.