Monday, July 22d, dawned fair, although there were some signs of a storm in the lowering gray cloud-folds at the horizon. However, we had decided to explore the Notch Valley and the Bellows-Pipe, between Greylock and the Ragged Mountains.

We journeyed from Mount Œta to North Adams, leaving State Street about ten o’clock, and ascended the path to Witt’s Ledge. Soon we rounded the Ragged Mountains, entering the woods near Crystal Spring, where we descended the Cascade ravine. Its rocky chasm is beautifully draped with the Common Polypody Ferns, and delicate tufts of Maiden-Hair Spleenwort, which clings in the fissured ledges. The bed-rock appears to be a flinty slate, similar to that of the Tunnel Mountain. It is not so favorable to the growth of the rarer ferns—such as the Rue-in-the-Wall—as the lime-rock formation of Gregor Rocks in Pownal. Large boulders lie in the heart of the brook bed, and the hillsides are clothed with primeval hemlocks. Just above the brow of the Cascade, I found a few Walking Ferns. The ravine is accessible to this point, but here I was forced back and climbed the southern bank to the path leading around to the waterfalls. High boots supplied with hob-nails are indispensable to safety in such climbing in the channels of streams.

From this point we retraced our steps to the Pent Road, leading up through Snuff Hollow to the City’s reservoir, at the junction of the South Adams Road. Here we trudged up the hill and entered the Notch highway at Walden’s farmhouse. Greylock Park Road turns off here through the pastures, around Mount Williams. We, however, continued straight ahead toward the source of The Notch Brook,—Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s routes, long before roads to Greylock were available. It was steady climbing, until at last we reached the pasture-land where the streams from Greylock’s Brotherhood divide; there is a stream beyond the ridge, flowing southward to South Adams, while those on the north side flow down Notch Valley to the Hoosac River. Hawthorne often sought the seclusion of this valley, and in his American Notes, under date of September 9, 1838, describes these rugged slopes. He not only followed up the North Notch, but descended the South Notch in the rocky course of the stream homeward through South Adams. He speaks of inquiring at a cottage his way to South Village, which was “across lots,” into the road near the Quaker Meeting-house, surrounded by grave-stones. He also drank of the region’s spring water,—the “most delicious” he ever tasted,—“pure, fresh, almost sparkling, exhilarating,—such water as Adam and Eve drank.”[51]

The people of this region looked upon his journeys through their valley with curiosity in those early days. The houses were more numerous then than now in the extreme southern portion of the valley. This region has been purchased by the North Adams Water Company, which has removed all dwellings above the reservoir. The last house in The Notch to-day is on the Walden Farm, at Greylock Park Gate.

Hawthorne found, in the Highlands-of-the-Hoosac, the originals of many characters described in his works. “Eustace Bright,” of Wonder-Book, was a student of Williams; and the Tanglewood Tales have made the whole world familiar with “rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire.” Here, in the seclusion of The Bellows-Pipe, “where it slopes upward to the skies,” Hawthorne loved best to come. There he could look southward over the vast fields of Berkshire’s valleys to the distant crags of Bryant’s “Monument Mountain,” immortalized as the “headless sphinx” of his own Wonder-Book. And from the northern Notch, he looked away to the blue Domes of the White Mountains, a distance of sixty miles or more.

The Limekilns along the Ashuilticook—the south branch of the Hoosac—still are smoking, as when Hawthorne and Mr. Leach visited them in 1838. The tale of Ethan Brand was suggested by the legend of an insane creature who threw himself in at the open gate of the burning kiln. Their open iron doors in the mountainside at night seem like yawning mouths of Tartarus. Hawthorne met here also his “Bertram,” who figures in the story; while “the boy Joe,” son of “Bertram, the lime-burner,” was a bar-room lad observed at the “Whig Tavern” in North Adams. Daniel Haines, then living in a desolate hut in “Willow Dell,” was formerly nicknamed in the village as “Black Hawk,” and is described in Ethan Brand as “Lawyer Giles,” the “elderly ragmuffin,” who—with the rest of the lazy regiment from the town tavern—came in response to the summons of “boy Joe” to see poor Brand returned from his long “search after the Unpardonable Sin.” The title of this story was the name of one of the prose master’s Salem acquaintances.

Among other characters which Hawthorne drew from this region, were the “seven doctors of the place.” In the “Whig Tavern boarder” Hawthorne saw and delineated himself. He describes the Saddleback Mountain and Greylock in all their different phases,—when enshrouded with dark masses of storm clouds and when: “Old Greylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some of them far down into the valley, others high up toward the summits, and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky, that it was a day dream to look at it. To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling down the mountain-road, and the driver sounded his horn, while Echo caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each contributing a strain of airy sweetness.”[52]

As we neared the head of The Bellows-Pipe, and passed the Wilbur and Eddy farms, where Thoreau was entertained, I tried to trace the paths which he had followed in his ascent to Greylock some years after Hawthorne sojourned here. He stopped that July afternoon in North Adams Village, purchased a tin cup, a little rice and sugar, and, placing them in his knapsack, started up The Bellows toward the mountains, followed closely by a thunderstorm. “The thunder had rumbled at my heels all the way,” he said, “but the shower passed off in another direction, though if it had not, I half believed that I should get above it.” He “reached the last house but one, where the path to the summit diverged to the right, while the summit itself rose directly in front.” But it seems he “determined to follow up the valley to its head,” and there find his “own route up the steep as the shorter and more adventurous way.” He believed this “occupied much less time than it would have taken to follow the path—for what’s the hurry? If a person lost would conclude that after all he is not lost, ... but the places that have known him, they are lost,—how much anxiety and danger would vanish. I am not alone if I stand by myself.”[53]

We followed up the eastern sides of Notch Valley to the head of The Bellows where the Saw Mill had stood in Thoreau’s day. We regaled ourselves upon the red raspberries along the pasture, and found the Deadly Nightshade in bloom amid the bushes. These fields furnish pasturage for yearlings and calves. The sides of Greylock are clothed with a heavy forest—“all beshaggled,”—and adorned with “headlong precipices” and innumerable rivulets. Finally we crossed to the west side of the valley, in the shadow of the great hill, and entered a ravine which we christened Æolian Glen.

I have always believed that this Notch Valley was in Thoreau’s thoughts when he wrote “Rumors from an Æolian Harp.” The name “Bellows-Pipe” originated with the early settlers for the extreme portion of Notch Valley, on account of the subtle roaring of the southeast winds, breathing like a bellows through the narrow vale. The Indians recognized in the roar of winds the anger of the Great Spirit. The Hoosac Highlands near the “Forbidden Mountain” were their hunting grounds, to which they journeyed from their Indian village farther westward near Schaghticoke, not far from Troy-on-the-Hudson.

Thoreau says of this vale’s “glen-like seclusion overlooking the country at a great elevation between these two mountain walls,” that it reminded him of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on the interior hills of Staten Island.

As Thoreau passed the last house in The Bellows, on his ascent to Greylock, “Rice” called out and told him that it was still four or five miles to the summit by the path which he had left, though not more than two in a straight line from where he was, but that nobody ever went this way; there was no path and it would be found as “steep as the roof of a house.” But Thoreau took the short cut, notwithstanding Wilbur’s warning that he would not reach the summit of Greylock that night. Thoreau says, however: “I made my way steadily upward in a straight line, through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length I reached the summit, just as the sun was setting.” After taking “one fair view of the country before the sun went down,” Thoreau “set out directly to find water.” It proved to be labor, too. Following down the path for half a mile he came to a muddy place in the road “where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up.” He drank these dry, one after the other, by lying flat on the earth. He was not able to fill his dipper, and in a place above dug a well about two feet deep, using his hands and sharp stones as spade and hoe. It soon filled with pure cold water, from which he filled his tin cup; and he says: “The birds, too, came and drank at it.” He then proceeded to the rude wooden observatory originally erected by Williams College, for the construction of which Platt—“a friend of mine,” writes Hawthorne in the Diary—hauled the material by ox-team. Platt, the stage-driver, boasted of the fact that he was the first man to drive a team to the summit of the then pathless Greylock, led by President Griffin of Williams on horseback, who directed the building of that first observatory. This tower is now replaced by a modern iron structure fifty feet high.

Thoreau collected some “dry sticks, and made a fire on some flat stones” placed on the floor of the observatory for the purpose, and cooked the rice which he had bought in the village, eating it with a wooden spoon whittled out for the occasion. He was up at daybreak the next morning, and he has left a glorious description of sunrise on Greylock, as seen from the tower in the mists.[54]

The nights are very chill on these summits, even in July. There are now several log-cabins erected on Greylock for travellers to occupy, with stables for horses and keepers in attendance. The Catskills can be seen to the southwestward from this height.

Thoreau set his compass for a lake in the valley to the southwest, and descended the mountain by his own route, on the opposite side to that of his ascent.

My companions and I had climbed the slippery glen to where Thoreau commenced his ascent, and a tiny rivulet slipped over the rocks, which had formerly been dimpled with miniature pot-holes. Along the moss-grown banks, above the brook-bed, grew the familiar leaves of the Wild Ginger, while at the very entrance I discovered the Wild Black Currants (Ribes floridum), similar in taste and appearance to the cultivated species. The fruit was covered with bristles, and produced a disagreeable odor like that of the Wild Red Currants on the Dome—reminding one of a skunk.

At the entrance of Æolian Glen, a long log-like slab of rock lay upon the ground, strangely suggesting a petrified tree. Slowly we descended the western side of the vale, counting no less than twenty-two flowing brooklets, and four sun-dried brook-beds between Æolian Brook, at the head of the Bellows, and Walden Farm below. As we approached the meadows where the Wilbur Farm buildings formerly stood, we found a half-dozen spikes of the Ragged Orchis (Habenaria lacera) amid the damp grasses. This species I collected also later in the pastures of Rattlesnake Swamp, and found the pure White-Fringed Orchis along the roadside of Ladd Brook Valley in Pownal.

We now arrived at Crystal Spring, where we freshened up before entering the City in the “hollow vale” three miles below.

The formation of the Notch Valley was brought about by one of the successive terminal moraines flowing from the glaciated slopes of the ice-mountains farther northwestward, in the Adirondack region; while later the glaciated shoulders of Greylock’s Brotherhood slowly melted, eroding the slopes with small ravines in which the numerous rivulets flow to-day. The continental ice rivers from the higher glaciers northward apparently culminated in tremendous and successive cascades above Notch Valley, eroding the deep-cut gorges between Greylock and Ragged Mountains. The general directions of these currents, below these waterfalls, were various, finally leading down to the ancient Hoosac Lake, and flowing with it through the natural dam, northwestwardly, to the Hudson Valley, and thence to the sea. According to Professor T. Nelson Dale, an ancient lake six hundred feet deep existed in the Hoosac Valley ten thousand years ago. Perhaps ten times ten thousand years ago, a greater glacial sea overflowed the Hoosac Tunnel Mountains, leaving the bald summit of Greylock alone towering above the waves. As the terminal moraines of the great ice-sheet slowly receded, the various cascades formed pot-hole erosions, in their descent on the Canaan Hills, above the Connecticut Valley. Deerfield Arch was similarly formed by the force and chemical action of the eroding ice rivers, which flowed from glaciers, and wore through the wall of rock spanning the Deerfield Valley. Hawthorne compared this arch to “the arched entrance of an ancient church, which it might be taken to be, though considerably dilapidated and weather-worn.... It was really like the archway of an enchanted palace, all of which has vanished except the entrance—now opens only into nothingness and empty space.... This curiosity occurs in a wild part of the river’s course, and in a solitude of mountains.”[55] Dr. Wolfe says: “The summit of the arch and the water-worn pillars upon either side display ‘pot-holes’ and other evidences of erosion, and in the bed of the current lie fragments of similar attrite rocks which seem to indicate that at some period a series of arches spanned the entire space from mountain to mountain.”[56]

Other erosions known as the “Twin Cascades” are found on the eastern slopes of Hoosac Mountain, above the eastern portal of the Tunnel, formed ages before the Hoosac Lake rippled in the “hollow vale” at North Adams. The Natural Bridge of the Mayunsook Valley is one of the greatest natural formations in Berkshire Highlands, and was also caused by erosions of the ice-currents ages ago.

On August 16th, this season, a great landslide occurred on the southern brow of Greylock, caused by a cloudburst. It began within a few feet of the summit, widening as the loosened soil slipped off the bed-rock of the mountain. It swept down with velocity, becoming several rods wide as it reached the valley. It covered Gould Farm with earth, rocks, and logs gathered in its descent to South Adams, and the machinery in the mills in the village, three miles away, was crippled by the sand and water pouring in about the engines; the streets became canals, and boats were necessary to move about in. However, no lives were lost. The formation rock, from the base of Greylock, is laid bare in the path of this landslide. Six to ten terraced ridges, like stone stairs, are revealed in the ascent for some distance, indicating many ages in geological history. Here is evidence of those slowly receding seas and lakes as they drained from the summits down, stair by stair to the winding Ashuilticook River of to-day.