. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. e lineof high trees, it seemed as though we could reach the summit of the THE ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON. 359 ridge to two hours. But here we found the greatest difficulty of thewhole excursion. The slope was not very steep ; for a mile or bottom of the ravine was rather a gradually retreating stairway of enormousboulders;and, as anIrishmanremarkedin ascend-i n g thecone ofMountWashing-ton, thedumpersdid theirwork verybadly,huge rocks were piled inmost eccentric confusion;crevasses, sometimes twentyand thirty feet deep and span-
. The White hills; their legends, landscape, and poetry. e lineof high trees, it seemed as though we could reach the summit of the THE ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON. 359 ridge to two hours. But here we found the greatest difficulty of thewhole excursion. The slope was not very steep ; for a mile or bottom of the ravine was rather a gradually retreating stairway of enormousboulders;and, as anIrishmanremarkedin ascend-i n g thecone ofMountWashing-ton, thedumpersdid theirwork verybadly,huge rocks were piled inmost eccentric confusion;crevasses, sometimes twentyand thirty feet deep and span-ned with moss, lay in wait forthe feet ; thickets of scrubspruces and junipers overgrewthese boulders, and made themost sinewy opposition to ourpassage. Every muscle of ourbodies was called into play infighting these dwarfed andknotty regiments of more thorough gymnasium for training and testing the workingand enduring powers of the system, could not be arranged by six hours of steady and hard climbing,—which, added to the 4S*. 360 THE WHITE HILLS. three of the afternoon previous, made nine hours of toil in scalingthe ridge,—we gained the plateau above which the pinnacle of x\d-ams soars. The last part of our path out lay up the eastern ?wall,just where it joins the left-hand cliffs ; and here we had the excite-ment of grand rock scenery overhanging and threatening us as weclimbed; while the opposite rampart, covered with green, and chan
Size: 1409px × 1772px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectwhitemo, bookyear1876
