During the late 1920s and early ’30s, a small hut stood at the Boulderfield (12,750 feet) on Longs Peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The Boulderfield is 5.9 miles into the Longs Peak hike and the beginning of the hike’s most difficult portion. Guests could hike or ride horseback to the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin, spend the night in a bunk with a hot meals, and climb the 14,259-foot peak in the morning, usually by the north face, which was equipped in those days with steel cables for hand rails. For two or three years during the early ’30s, Hull Cook worked at the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin. He and Clerin Zumwalt, aka Zum, became famous for their rescues on the park’s only fourteener. Hull is pictured on the left in middle picture. Each morning the guides used to shout, “Indian’s a-comin’!” as they spotted the first hikers at the edge of the Boulderfield.

Back in April, the Colorado Mountain Journal posted some of Hull’s memoirs from his time at the Boulderfield. You can read them here:

As hotels go, ours was tiny and Spartan. We called it “the cabin.” There was no electricity and no running water, unless you ran while carrying it from the spring. There was also almost no privacy. It was a two-story structure, the upper floor accessed by a ladder hinged to the ceiling of the ground-floor room. By Hilton standards it was indeed small, only 14 by 18 feet, so the space had to be efficiently utilized. Upstairs, springs and mattresses were placed directly on the floor, three on each side of the stair hole, and above the stair hole was a double-decker single bed. This arrangement could accommodate 14 people in relative comfort, unless someone had to go to the bathroom during the night, in which case comfort might be called into question. He or she would have to stumble over fellow sleepers, descend the ladder and seek relief outdoors, presumably making the effort to follow the dark rocky trail to the distant privy. No lights. Possession of matches or flashlight was desirable even to find the place, and to obviate the need for a somewhat unsanitary old-fashioned pot, and although canvas curtains could be drawn between the beds, there would have been few people with the callous temerity to use it in such a setting of crowded togetherness. If you rolled over you were apt to find yourself in bed with a stranger, possibly not all that bad if it happened to be someone of the opposite sex.

Mount Mitchell, located near Asheville in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, is the highest peak (6,684 ft) in the Appalachians, and, as you can you can see from the photo above, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. Until 1845, when Texas joined the union, the mountain was the highest in the whole country.

Mount Mitchell was named after Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who determined its height in 1835 and fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls in 1857, having returned to verify his earlier measurements. Rough. His tomb is on the summit.

MP3: Dolly Parton – Y’all Come (Live)

Five days after his 1933 inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called an emergency session of Congress to install one of his most popular New Deal programs, the Conservation Civilian Corps.

The program targeted unemployed young men, veterans and American Indians hard hit by the Great Depression. The CCC boys received free education, healthcare and job training and were required to send a portion of their wages home to their parents. The boys also

Throughout its nine-year existence, the program put millions to work on federal and state land for the ‘prevention of forest fires, floods, and soil erosion, plant, pest, and disease control.’ Nationwide, enrollees planted three billion trees and came to be known as the Tree Army.

The photos above are from the Oregon Public Broadcast’s Oregon Experience: CCC. Oregon hosted dozens of CCC camps all over the state, where enrollees fought fires on the Tillamook Burns, helped build ski areas on Mt Hood, built telephone and electrical wires, and improved farm lands.

If you don’t know too much about the CCC, start here. If you find it as interesting, which you will, and want to read more, then go here.

MP3: Reverend Gary Davis – Down By The River

Ahhh. Beautiful, beautiful, Glacier National Park.

In 1891, the Great Northern Railway crossed the Continental Divide at Marias Pass. In an effort to stimulate use of the railroad, the Great Northern soon advertised the beauty of the region to the public. The company lobbied the United States Congress, and in 1897, the park was designated as a forest preserve. In 1910, a bill was introduced into the U.S. Congress which redesignated the region from a forest reserve to a national park. The bill was signed into law by President William Howard Taft on May 11, 1910. That means next week is Glacier’s 100th birthday.

To celebrate, Glacier has set up GlacierCentennial.org, a site dedicated to the history of the park. Just one more reason to visit that amazing place. Go, go, go, go, go.

MP3: The Vern Williams Band – Montana Cowboy

Before Crater Lake came into existence, a cluster of volcanoes dominated the landscape. This cluster, called Mount Mazama (for the Portland, Oregon climbing club the Mazamas), was destroyed during an enormous explosive eruption 7,700 years ago. The eruption, estimated to have been 420 times more powerful than Mount St. Helens’ 1980 blast, reduced Mazama’s approximate 14,000-foot height by around a mile. So much molten rock was expelled that the summit area collapsed during the eruption to form a large volcanic depression, or caldera. Subsequent smaller eruptions occured as water began to filled the caldera to eventually form Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the United States.

From “A Novelist Looks at the Land” by Sharyn McCrumb:

In Traces on the Appalachians: A History of Serpentine in America, geologist Kevin Dann writes that the first Appalachian journey was the one made by the mountains themselves.

The proof of this can be found in a vein of a green mineral called serpentine which forms its own subterranean “Appalachian Trail” along America’s eastern mountains, stretching from north Georgia to the hills of Nova Scotia, where it seems to stop. This same vein of serpentine can be found in the mountains of western Ireland, where it again stretches north into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and the Orkneys, finally ending in the Arctic Circle. More than two hundred and fifty million years ago the mountains of Appalachia and the mountains of Great Britain fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift pulled them apart at the same time it formed the Atlantic Ocean.

The mountains’ family connection to Britain reinforced what I had felt about the migration patterns of the early settlers.  People forced to leave a land they loved come to America. Hating the flat, crowded eastern seaboard, they head westward on the Wilderness Road until they reach the wall of mountains. They follow the valleys south-southwest down through Pennsylvania, and finally find a place where the ridges rise, where you can see vistas of mountains across the valley. The Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Cornishmen – all those who had lives along the other end of the serpentine chain – to them this place must have looked right. Must have felt right. Like home.  And they were right back in the same mountains they had left behind.

Perhaps it isn’t a unique experience in nature, this yearning for a place to which one is somehow connected. After years in the vast ocean, salmon return to spawn in the same small stream from whence they and their forebears came; monarch butterflies make the journey from the eastern seaboard to the same field in Mexico that had been the birthplace of the previous generation. The journey there and back again is unchanging, but each generation travels only one way. Is it really so strange that humans might feel some of this magnetism toward the land itself?

I thought this bit of mountain geology was a wonderful metaphor for the journeys reflected in The Songcatcher, and that, in a sociological way, it closed the circle. I imagined my ancestor, Malcolm McCourry, harkening back to memories of the hills of Scotland he knew as a child. Perhaps when he saw the green mountains of North Carolina, he felt that he had come home. When I visit Scotland, I marvel at the resemblance between their land and ours— surely the pioneers felt the same awe in reverse.

If you go looking for the serpentine chain in Britain, the best place to find it is on the Lizard, a peninsula in Cornwall between Falmouth and Penzance that is the southernmost tip of England. There, at Kynance Cove, you can see the cliffs of magnesium-rich serpentine, and the chain of rocks in the bay that marks the path to Ireland’s link on the great geologic chain. Serpentine began as peridotite, first as molten rock beneath the surface of the earth, and then as a deposit on the ancient seabed of the Rheic Ocean, some 375 million years ago. When two prehistoric super continents collided, the Lizard was slammed into the landmass that would become Britain. Another continental do-si-do produced Laurentia, which traveled north of the equator, passing the Tropic of Cancer 100 million years ago. Since the last Ice Age, the Lizard has rested at 50 degrees north latitude, part of an island walled away from continental Europe by the rising sea. The boundary between the landmass of the Lizard and the rest of Cornwall lies at Polurrian Cove, a clear demarcation. In the tiny village of Lizard, craftsmen today carve bowls and pendants out of tremolite serpentine, just as the Cherokee indians in eastern America once carved bowls of their own from this mineral– just as the Vikings farther north on the European chain carved spindle whorls from the soft rock. Will the circle be unbroken? Indeed.

I have scores of cousins who have never left that mountain fastness: no amount of money, and no dazzle of city lights could ever tempt them to abandon the land. I feel some of that power of place as I write, looking out across the ridges of mountains stretching along the Virginia section of the Appalachian Trail, and knowing that deep in the earth the serpentine chain is snaking its way past my farm, pointing the way to Canada, to Ireland, to the Orkney Islands. My office sits perched on the edge of the ridge so that from my window I can see green meadows far below, and folds of multi-colored hills stretching away to the clouds in the distance. It could be any century at all in that vista, which is just the view one needs to write novels set in other times. I tell myself I don’t want to live anywhere else, but every year or two, I make my way back to Britain, and I spend a few weeks wandering around the west of Ireland, or the coves of Cornwall, or the cliffs of Scotland – an ocean away from home, but still connected by the serpentine chain.

An illustrated letter that President Theodore Roosevelt wrote from Yellowstone National Park to his 6-year-old son, Quentin, is being sold in Philadelphia for $25K. In the 1903 letter, Roosevelt tells his youngest son what life was like in Yellowstone. The note includes a sketch the president made of a mule carrying his gear. (via)

MP3: Sonny and Cher – The Letter

In 1880, Harry Yount was chosen by the second superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, Philetus Norris, to act as “gamekeeper.” He spent one winter alone in a cabin in the Lamar Valley controlling poaching and vandalism in the park. Horace Albright, a founding father and the second Director of the National Park Service, wrote of Yount, “After that first winter alone, with only the geysers, the elk and the other animals for company, Harry Yount pointed out in a report that it was impossible for one man to patrol the park. He urged the formation of a ranger force. So Harry Yount is credited with being the father of the ranger service, as well as the first national park ranger.”

Tons more interesting information at NPS.

What a heartbreaker of a race.

MP3: The Replacements – Alex Chilton (RIP)

In 1966, Pete Seeger, his wife, Toshi Seeger, and a handful of Hudson Valley residents came together believing “by learning to care for one boat on one river, the public could come to care for all our threatened waterways.” Three years later, in 1969, the Clearwater made her maiden voyage down the Atlantic Coast from the Harvey Gamage Shipyard in Maine to the South Street Seaport in New York City.

To see a list of Clearwater events this coming spring, click here.

MP3: Pete Seeger – River Of My People