Thoreau Country: Location Note

Mount Washington or Agiocochuck (N.H.)

(1) Thoreau's first ascent of Agiocochuck: an 1839 adventure with his brother

In 1839, the two young Thoreau brothers, John (24) and Henry (22), made an expedition to Mount Washington (6288') and the Presidential Range. This 1873 photo shows Mt. Washington (their destination), the Presidential Range, and the Ammonoosuc River from the west (near present- day Bretton Woods). This would have been the landscape the brothers would have seen as they approached the mountain. [Photo from Mt. Washington Observatory Collection.]

They probably climbed and descended the Crawford Path, according to William Howarth in Thoreau in the Mountains (1982). This 1819 path even now ascends from Crawford Notch (out of the photo to the right) and follows along the treeless ridge line, passing Mts. Eisenhower and Monroe and the Lake of the Clouds to the summit. (And at that time, hotels had not yet appearedthere.) After John's death, Henry was to write of the experience in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

Howarth says the brothers had a good day for their climb. As they approached Washington along the Crawford path, they would have passed Lake of the Clouds at about 5000'. Washington's modern summit house is just visible. (Slides by S. Ells, ca. 1953.)

As they climbed towards the summit, they probably looked back down the Crawford Path toward the Lakes of the Clouds (and the modern AMC hut), Mt. Monroe, and their starting point. It can be an intoxicatingly spacious walk. Alpine vegetation abounds, but as far as we know, botantizing was not a priority for the brothers. They descended the same day. A brisk day's walk for fit young men.

In his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Henry only crypticly alluded to the actual ascent of Mt. Washington, which he called Agiocochuck, the native people's name meaning "the place where the Great Spirit dwells." John had died of lockjaw in Henry's arms two years after their trip, and Henry had retired to Walden Pond for the purpose of writing this book about their journey. After a build-up of 392 pages in A Week, his entire description of the approach (through stunning scenery) and the ascent (normally the climax of a travel memoir) is stunningly succinct:

"Wandering on through notches which the streams had made, by the side and over the brows of hoar hills and mountains, across the stumpy, forested and bepastured country, we at length cross prostrate trees over the Amonoosuck, and breathed the free air of the Unappropriated Land. Thus, in fair days as well as foul, we had traced up the river to which our native stream is but a tributary, until from the Merrimack it became the Pemigewasset that leaped by our side, and when we had passed its fountainhead, the Wild Amonoosuck, whose puny channel was crossed at a stride, guiding us toward its distant source among the mountains, and at length, without its guidance, we were enabled to reach the summit of AGIOCOCHOOK.

  

 'Sweet days, so cool, so calm, so bright
The bridal of the earth and sky,
Sweet dews shall weep thy fall to-night.
                  For thou must die.'
                                   --Herbert."

The very next words are the pedestrian "When we returned to Hookset...," and with that abrupt transition Thoreau starts their literary return journey downriver to Concord. Some things can be expressed only in metaphor or symbol.

Go to | Mount Washington 1858 botanizing trip |

 [Prepared by S. Ells, 2/2002.
See, <http://homepage.mac.com/sfe/henry/index.html>]