Walking the Berkshires

Hallowed Ground

I am a regular habitue of old graveyards.  This interest does not arise from some morbid fascination with death;  I find the prospect of oblivion very disconcerting, and my lone Gothic relationship is mercifully well behind me.  Rather, I am drawn to older burial grounds for the clues they hold about the past and the meaning they can bring to this time and place. 

One of my favorite books is Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, whose central poetic work is a story of a fictional Illinois prairie town told in the epitaphs of hundreds of its citizens.  Each poem gives voice to the dead and animates the spirit of the departed with all the very human flaws and triumphs of spirit possessed in life.  The view from the grave is still "through a glass darkly", but freed from the need to dissemble it can be very revealing.  I used Spoon River as part of an English as Second Language class I taught over several summers at Phillips Academy, taking my international students strolling through the old burying grounds of Andover to find subjects for their own poetry.  For many, this was the first time poetry in English made sense, and consequently, their compositions were deeply personal and highly expressive.

The stones in old graveyards do not speak as directly as those on "The Hill" above Spoon River, inscribed, as they must be, by the living in memory of the dead.  Nonetheless they have much to say about both the individuals they memorialize and the communities from which they came.  Not only the monuments but the landscape in which the graveyards are situated tells fascinating stories about the natural world and our built environments.  Many cemeteries are among the most significant green spaces in our urban regions.  Mt. Auburn Cemetery outside of Boston is renowned as a major stopover for neo-tropical migrants on the Atlantic flyway as well as for being the premier example of the America's rural cemetery movement and the design ethic that arose after 1830.  In the Spring at Mt. Auburn when the cherry and dogwood blossoms perfume the air, one may encounter dozens of warbler species in a single hour.

Because old burial grounds were managed differently than surrounding agricultural land, they often preserve rare plant species and natural community types that have all but vanished elsewhere.  One such graveyard in Southeast Massachusetts preserves one of only a handful of known populations of sandplain gerardia, a globally rare plant that thrives only when its competitors are kept at bay through frequent mowing or fire.  Some of the only unplowed land in what was once Tallgrass Prairie is found in old Illinois pioneer cemeteries like the fictional one in Spoon River.  Untilled land retains the soil complexity and seed reserves required to sustain remnants of this once pervasive habitat type, and even where prairie restoration efforts seek to reclaim old farmland the resulting habitat is significantly less diverse than was the unplowed prairie.

The oldest markers remaining in New England cemeteries are undressed field stone.  Slate was common until the late 1700s when it was often supplanted by sandstone or marble.  Granite stones tend to date from the latter half of the 19th century or later.  The colonial stone carvers art preserves what are essentially the earliest forms of public sculpture in America.  Archaeologists who make a study of New England's funereal art are able to trace the influence of individual stone carvers and their migrations across the region through the motifs they developed and modified.  Death's heads, cherubs, urns and willow trees are specific to certain time periods in our nation's early history and reflect changing attitudes about religion and death.

Burial grounds were first located among the settlements of New England, even though they were often neglected, noisome, pestilential places.  With the rise of more romantic ideals and the industrialization of our urban centers, cemeteries took on more landscaped attributes. The "rural" or garden cemetery movement (1830-1855) transformed graveyards into places for peaceful reflection amid beautiful surroundings.  The Mahaiwe Cemetery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts was expanded along these lines, a fact that local architect Anthony Barnaba rediscovered after the tragic memorial Day Tornado in 1995 devastated a swath of the graveyard and the Great Barrington Fairgrounds before crossing East Mountain and killing three children in nearby Monterey.  Barnaba received the contract to design the restoration of the cemetery and his research revealed its original pattern of trees and pathways amid the stones.

Even with more open attitudes about death, New Englanders drew the line at animal internments in their cemeteries.  The story goes that a farmer in Mt. Washington, MA, wished to be buried with his oxen, much to the outrage of his neighbors in that community.  Denied permission, his heirs managed to inter his beloved animals just outside the cemetery walls.  A Michigan lt. artillery battery apparently made the same arrangement for "Old Sam", a dray horse that had become their mascot and survived four years of Civil War without a scratch.

Others in the Berkshire community were marginalized, even in death.  The main cemetery in Sheffield Massachusetts has the plain, military issue stones marking the resting place of a couple of members of the storied 54th Massachusetts colored regiment of infantry.  There were several African American families living in Sheffield at the time of the Civil War, and 11 of their members joined the 54th.  The graves are at the very edge of the cemetery - one is off by itself in a corner - and one wonders whether this was deliberate discrimination on the part of the white community.  Racism, to our great discredit, has a long history in New England as well as elsewhere in America.

The Civil War veterans' graves are particularly poignant reminders of what these Berkshire and Litchfield  towns sacrificed during that tempestuous period in our nation's history.  Regiments recruited entire companies from just a handful of communities, and one bad day in Virginia could be devastating for a small New England village.  The Town of Salisbury, Connecticut sent 79 men to the "Litchfield Regiment", which was later reorganized as the 2nd Connecticut Heavy Artillery.  On June 1st, 1864 at Cold Harbor, Virginia, the "heavies" were thrown as infantry into a suicidal frontal assault and lost 322 casualties: 22 of them from Salisbury.

The saddest stone I think I've ever seen was actually a rubbing done by an elementary student in West Cornwall, Connecticut.  It is a child's marker and says simply; "Our Willie; his last words were "I Love Everybody."  Death was an ever present fact of life before modern medicine, workplace safety, food inspections and prenatal care. 

The old names endure in graveyards and the signposts of our rural byways, even when the families themselves have departed this landscape.  Some remain, the descendants of early settlers and still retaining what remains of the family land.  Our demographics are shifting in the Berkshires as urban flight and the attractions of country living bring more second home owners who often become primary residents. Still, the old stories are written in the stones.

Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map!

Maps are fascinating.  I particular like the blank spaces in ancient maps: those strange countries and uncharted seas beyond the pale and o'er the bourne.  When fear and fancy conspire in the mind of the cartographer, whatever he can conceive might truly be.  Maps are illuminating projections of their creators, revealing much about their relationships to others and to their surroundings.

The Babylonians who wrote by pressing a wedged stylus into wet clay also had the tools and facility with mental abstraction to represent their surroundings in similar fashion, producing clay maps as early as 2,300 BC.  The ancient Greeks understood spherical geography.  Medieval Europeans piously placed Jerusalem at the center of their world view, while Sinocentric Chinese cartographers did the same with their empire.

Maps have authority, and sometimes they lie.  Look at a map produced in any country with a contested border and compare it with a conventional delineation of its boundaries.  Until recently, such a map of Ecuador would have included much of what is considered Peruvian territory.  Or find a standard world atlas and see if it shows a locality called Rehoboth in northwestern Namibia.  I have come across numerous examples of this mistake, repeatedly passing on as fact a location which does not exist in modern Namibia (although there is a different community called Rehoboth south of the capital, Windhoek).  The old Rehoboth was a mission station in Ovamboland over a century ago, but it lives on in numerous maps made today and enjoys equal but fictional status with other large towns.

Here in the Berkshires, one often finds that assessors map data differs remarkably from boundaries surveyed from deed descriptions.  I once negotiated a quitclaim on "80 acres of sprout land" somewhere in Mount Washington, MA, in the unlikely event that this lost parcel might eventually be shown to lie within lands to be protected by a conservation organization.  The open space data layers maintained by Massachusetts Geographic Information Systems are often several years out of date, which can be a challenge for communities trying to determine how much needs to be conserved and how much remains to be developed in their area.

Very few of us, I suspect, can find our way in the forest by old fashioned orienteering, any more than we can navigate by the stars.  My grandfather taught himself celestial navigation on a Liberty ship headed for the Gilberts.  He was a surgeon with a Marine Air Group (MAG-15) on Apamama and Kwajalein, and often felt his skills would be of better use closer to the fighting.  He would sometimes beg a ride on one of the planes heading out to the forward bases in hopes of saving more lives, yet in the end it was his skill as a navigator rather than a doctor that delivered them.  On a return trip over the dark Pacific, the navigational equipment on his plane failed, and my grandfather was the only one on that flight who could steer by the stars.  Somehow, they found their way back to their atoll, peering up into the heavens and down and the starlit ocean below.

Remote sensing and geographic positioning systems are marvelous tools, but they are the realm of technicians and often fail to capture knowledge of the ground.  Back when conservationists were trying to identify large blocks of relatively unfragmented forest in the Northeast, GIS analysis using road layers and ecological land units identified close to 200 potential forest blocks within the Lower New England / Northern Piedmont Ecoregional Plan.  It took a substantial amount of "ground truthing" to determine which of these were actually substantially unfragmented forest, or whether they had less forest cover and more development than the data suggested.  In the process, the conservationists developed some subjective measures to determine whether a secondary road was a significant enough barrier to be a hard boundary for a forest block or could be incorporated into a larger area.  One measure was whether two researchers could play a game of Frisbee on the road for 10 minutes without interruption: a measure of traffic volume that has not yet been adopted by our Department of Transportation.

A new map of a familiar area can reengage a community with its surroundings.  The Berkshire Natural Resources Council has an extraordinary map of Berkshire County that quickly became the map of choice in many Town Halls and local businesses.  It is a highly detailed topographic map with very pleasing depictions of field, forest and wetland cover.  It is easy to orient oneself and locate familiar landmarks.  I find that a good topo map is more accessible to many people than a high quality satellite image.  All those pixels in raster data make sense to the initiated but are confusing to the general public.

The best maps I've ever seen for expanding a community's sense of itself were those scratched in the sand under Acacia trees as part of local resource mapping projects in Africa.  Given rudimentary tools and an opportunity to map what is important to them, community members record what is significant to them but also build consensus when done in a participatory fashion with their neighbors.  The final results include more data than if drawn individually, and are the product of the community members themselves. They own it, and when this information later appears in a highly polished GIS map, they recognize it as valid.

There is a similar community development tool called the Community Transect Walk.  This natural science mapping technique has been used with great success by researchers at Clark University with inner city youth.  The participants walk a transect through their neighborhood and map the changes they see along the way.  In the end, their sense of their neighborhood expands by as much as 300% and they have a much better understanding of the different parts of their communities.

Here in the borderlands, where Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York lie alongside each other, the geopolitical divisions represented by Town, County and State do not neatly overlap the boundaries of community.  Until we understand this landscape in terms of its human and natural communities, we are unlikely to recognize the limitations of our maps and understand the forces which shape and influence this region.

Redemption Blues

The last time I was in Zimbabwe, if you wanted beer "to go", you needed empty beer bottles.  Zambezi Lager came in thick, green, reusable longnecks, and stores were not allowed to restock more beer than was on hand in empty returnables.  You can see that this sort of socialized recycling has an inherent problem with entropy, since one lost or broken bottle diminishes the amount of beer available at that location unless replaced at the expense of another. Enterprising backpackers have solved the question of which came first, the beer or the bottle, by ordering their Zambezi Lager at restaurants and then absconding with the empties for later use.

This is a classic Catch-22.  You can drink your beer at the store in Zimbabwe, but to walk out with it requires the prior possession of an empty bottle that by rights you can't have without having first bought a beer, which requires an empty bottle that you can only get...by buying a beer.  Most black Zimbabweans no longer can afford Zambezi Lager anyway, and stick to brewing their own yeasty concoctions from sorghum and sugar and drinking it out of plastic, liter measuring cups.  The mega-conglomerate South Africa Breweries now owns the Zambezi brand.

Zimbabwe adopted this inconvenient recycling bureaucracy, not from an overdeveloped environmental ethic or as some petty manifestation of Robert Mugabe's despotism, but because the Zimbabwean economy simply could not produce enough glass to bottle its beer.  There was a time in the late 1980s when the pressure to divest from apartheid South Africa sent foreign companies scurrying to set up shop in Harare and Bulawayo.  South Africa's subsequent liberation opened its vast market of 34 million people to multinational reinvestment.  With Mugabe increasingly unstable, the volatile issue of land tenure and the seizure of white-owned farms, an already shaky situation in Zimbabwe headed for collapse.

For a while, Mugabe's government kept price controls on three staples:  bread, beer and cigarettes.  With these comfort items cheap and subsidized, the people might grumble but they wouldn't revolt: that is, if you don't count the persecution of the rival ZAPU party back in the early days of Independence.  It was a common sight in the early 1990s to see Zambians pushing modified shopping carts over the bridge at Victoria Falls to load up on Zimbabwean bread.  Later in that decade when price controls were discontinued, the empty carts started going the other direction.

In America, cheap fossil fuel has been our security blanket.  While other countries endure petrol prices above $7 /gallon, we are significantly put out by $3 gas.  Naturally, everything is relative, but our economy has been so hardwired to artificially low fuel prices that plenty of folks are taking a real hit in the thermostat this winter.  The cost of transportation with oil routinely above $60/barrel, and of everything manufactured from petroleum products - or with power produced by them- has spiked dramatically and shows every sign of staying high.

We need to wean ourselves from the soiled teats of the petroleum sow.  Yet the money saved in fuel economy with a new hybrid car is thousands less than is spent to get the fuel efficient vehicle.  We need alternative energy sources, and New York is now seriously considering putting 2 million acres of abandoned farmland back into production for ethanol.  But it is not as if that vacant land stayed still.  It has, more than likely, either been carved up and developed or is maturing to forest with increasing significance as woodland.  There are not enough family farmers left in the Empire State to put all those reclaimed acres into more corn for the gas tank as part of their operations, so we're looking at vast, industrial farms to reap this dubious harvest.

Then there is biomass, using wood chips for thermal and electrical production.  A good idea, you say, and certainly there are countries like Finland where vast scotch pine plantations and boreal forests are clearcut on heavy rotations to produce prodigious amounts of stumps, slash and chips that are efficiently harvested and conveyed on electric railways to electric plants powered by wood.  There is essentially no unmanaged woodland left in a natural state left in Finland, yet the forests of the Northeast are vastly different in species composition and structure from those of Northern Europe and consequently, sustain far more biodiversity.  Some scientists think we have too little coarse woody debris in our New England forests, not a surplus for power production. 

Hydro-power was the mainstay of the industrial revolution in New England.  More important than the timber used to frame the factories or fuel the furnaces, water power drove the mills (and the mill-workers) into the last century.  The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation is responsible for monitoring over 3,000 dams across the Commonwealth, most built before 1900, and there are many more unmonitored impoundments in our streams and rivers.  The electricity that powers my computer comes to me from Northeast Utilities, which has two nearby hydro-plants on the Housatonic River in Falls Village and Bulls Bridge, CT and others downriver.

These dams are not coming out of the Housatonic, although they are apparently for sale.  For one thing, the sediments behind them are contaminated with PCBs from General Electric's many misdeeds in Pittsfield, more than 40 miles upstream.  Meanwhile, the anadromous fish that used to spend some of their life cycles far up the Housatonic are stuck far downstream, if they return to the river at all.  We've got a Salmon Creek in Salisbury, CT but no salmon, alas. We need to remove obsolete impoundments where restoring fish passage is possible, and site our hydro-plants sensitively and not just any old place with a bit of tide or waterfall.

The same goes for wind power.  What may be a good site to turn those blades may also be a significant migration fly-way, or a ridgetop deep in an unfragmented forest that would be severely compromised by the huge towers and supporting infrastructure that a wind farm requires.  Siting criteria sounds like a good compromise, overlaying the areas of environmental sensitivity with those that have good wind generating potential and seeing what falls out.  I'm betting there are few places that are good for wind that are not also good for some desirable species or natural community. 

So it all comes down to values.  The economic ones are quantified by the free market, but ecosystem services and qualitative costs and benefits are generally left out of those calculations.  Our species, like rats in a maze, doesn't tend to modify its behavior until it directly feels the impacts of its actions.  And given a catch-22 like how to buy beer in Zimbabwe without an empty bottle, the choices we make about allocating scarce resources are either to take what we want now regardless of future cost, diversify our consumption habits to include more sustainable choices, or to opt out of the market altogether and brew our own beer.

Taconic Crest; Taconic Traverse, Part X

The Alander Mt. Trail out of Mt. Washington follows old charcoal roads in switchbacks up the western rim of the Plateau.  Along the way, it passes above a dark ravine with old growth Hemlock in its secluded depths.  A few back-country campsites lie just off the trail while a venerable, smoke-stained cabin perches near the summit of Alander itself, but that's it for overnight use on this side of the Plateau.  The entire western ridge along the Taconic Crest Trail offers nowhere else to camp, and the Taconic Park itself has camping only at the Taconic Park headquarters at the base of the Plateau or at some RV sites at distant Rudd Pond.  This is no problem for day hikers, but represents a significant challenge to those making a circuit of the Plateau using the AT and Taconic Crest.  I began my morning's hike way back at Laurel Ridge on the AT, and it was mid-afternoon when I reached the Taconic Crest: too early to set up camp, but too late to reach the Quarry Hill trail-head before dark.

Water proved another challenge.  The deep gorge at Bash Bish Falls is the only perennial drainage along the Taconic Crest.  The few intermittent streams and their upland catchments on this side of the Plateau were bone dry in September.  I tried without success to filter enough stagnant water from one small stream-bed to fill a single nalgeen bottle.  The two liters I picked up in Ashley Hill Brook had to last to the trail-head at Quarry Hill: a distance of about 6 miles with several peaks to summit and descend along the way.

Inconveniences and second-day grousing aside, I prefer the Taconic Crest trail to the AT.  Although it runs along the ridge from Catamount Ski Area to Quarry Hill, very few people hike the Taconic Crest as a through trail.  Significant sections are in Massachusetts, and although long a dream of NYS Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP), the trail does not yet extend to Rudd Pond at the south end of the Plateau.

Conservation entities have been dreaming big about the Taconic Plateau for nearly a century. Back in the 1920s, New York State apparently had a policy of only acquiring new conservation land where it was adjacent to existing open space.  A resident of Copake, New York bought Bash Bish Falls-the highest waterfall in Massachusetts- to spare it from hotel development. The new owner of Bash Bish Falls promptly gave it to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, thus enabling the Taconic Park Commission to start protecting adjacent lands in New York.  Today, the Taconic State Park protects more than 5,500 acres along and 11 miles front, while just across the Massachusetts border lie Bash Bish Falls State Park and Mt. Washington State forest.

For a time there was talk of a massive, Tri-State Park encompassing much of the Taconic Plateau.  This proved unworkable - state boundaries are deeply entrenched administrative units - but one still finds echos of this dream from time to time in some of the literature and web sites of conservation entities that refer to the potential Tri-State park.  The residents of the Plateau, particularly in Connecticut and Massachusetts along the Appalachian Trail Corridor, are wary of such schemes and are quite naturally concerned about the taking of private property that could accompany such a move. 

The western views from the Taconic Crest make the hike worth the effort in almost any weather.  Viewed from the summits of Alander, or North or South Brace, the Catskills loom above the Hudson Valley.  Glimpses of the great river itself gleam like polished silver in the afternoon sun.  The rural landscape of southern Columbia and northern Dutchess counties is a mosaic of farm fields and wetlands and rolling hilltops still in agriculture instead of reverting to forest.  South of Mt. Alander, the Oblong Valley of Ancram and Northeast, New York is as gorgeous from above as when experienced in the shadow of the Taconics below.  A planned extension of the Harlem Valley Rail Trail from Millerton to the terminus of the existing section at Boston Corners will  run through this valley, and one hopes that NY OPRHP will take the opportunity to protect its buffering lowlands as thoroughly as it has conserved the western slopes of the Plateau.  For views are deceiving, and on closer scrutiny the pastoral idyll overlooked from the Taconic Crest Trail shimmers like a mirage.

There are empty silos and collapsed barns scattered across the valley floor.  Henry Beneke's Holsteins still graze in the Oblong, but active dairy farms are in free fall and show no sign of slowing their plunge.  Those vast corn fields, almost 3,000 acres in all, were until recently leased by Odyssey Farms. Odyssey Farms is now for sale and it is extremely unlikely that the buyer will be another dairy farmer.  The landowners of the valley are eligible for an agricultural tax abatement only as long as their fields are farmed.  Without that abatement, the highest and best use of the valley lands is residential development.  No dairy farmer in this area will buy cornfields at $8,000 /acre, but developers will, and large houses now rise in the middle of the fields.

There is also a tremendous amount of gravel just below the surface of the rolling fields.  The "Big Dig" in distant Boston drove up demand for gravel across New England, and prices for bank run gravel rose by 300% in some parts of this region.  The gravel is here because the valleys were once flooded by glacial lakes, and the terraces they left behind were thick with sand and crushed stone.  Farther south along Rte 22, in Amenia and Dover Plains, the valley has been extensively mined and industrialized. 

There have been notable successes in preserving the rural character of the lowland communities on the western side of the Plateau.  The community of Ancram successfully fought off a proposed 79 acre gravel mine in the heart of the valley, and established a scenic overlay for the Rte. 22 corridor that its northern neighbors in Copake have recently extended as part of their own zoning.  The appalling, coal-fired cement plant proposed upwind of the Plateau in nearby Hudson was recently denied its permits after a massive campaign waged by both opponents and supporters of the plant.  Both the Columbia and Dutchess Land Conservancies have protected thousands of acres within the viewshed of the Taconic Crest Trail.

Despite these encouraging developments, the region is caught in the vice of rural sprawl extending north from Manhattan and south from Albany.  Acid rain falls heavily on the Plateau.  The high price of land is prohibitive both for 1st time home owners and for conservation organizations to buy at fair market value.  Some farms have gentrified, others have been developed and cut into ever smaller parcels.  New York has weaker wetlands regulations than either Connecticut or Massachusetts, and habitat destruction is an acute problem for species like the federally threatened bog turtle, which persists in seepage wetland pockets up and down the valley.

I reached the Taconic Crest at 3:00 p.m. and decided to strike out for Mt. Brace before sunset.  Postponing the decision of where to spend the night, I trudged along the trail, pausing to look out over the landscape and look for water in the dry ravines but otherwise pressing to reach the summit with daylight to spare for my descent.  Looking out over the scrub oak on the ridgeline, I was startled to see parasails hovering over the valley.  They were launching from the top on North Brace and cruising above the ridge and out over the valley without apparent loss of altitude.   I turned my earthbound feet toward them, wishing I could soar across the ridge on their wings, and reached the summit an hour before dark.  There were five gliders, four of whom launched from the west face of the peak and a fifth who decided the winds were beyond his skill and started to carry his parasail back down the trail as I arrived at the top.  I suspect these gliders use North Brace without official sanction, but  what a sight they made, swooping down like buzzards into the shadows of the valley and landing in a farm field as the sun dipped behind the Catskills.

I pushed on down the trail in the twilight, and found a place with cellular service to call my wife and family.  We arranged for them to pick me up in the morning at Rudd Pond, extending my hike a few miles along the roadside in the valley floor.  I spent the night as best I could and was up before dawn.  Climbing down the steep ravine to Quarry Hill, the waterfall was dry and lifeless.  I trudged through the Quarry Hill development, along the wetlands of Webatuck Creek, and dropped my pack at the Rudd Pond entrance road about five minutes before my family arrived.  All told, I hiked about 25 miles in 48 hours, and was pleased to find I still had the stamina to make such a trek after so long off the trail. 

It is now November, and the leaves have piled in my yard.  I can see the mountains through the trees, and will carry the memory of my journey around the Taconic Plateau until Springtime, when I'll ascend to heights again.

Charcoal Dust on the Soul; Taconic Traverse, Part IX

Striking out westward from Mt. Everett, I dropped over the lip of the bowl of the Taconic Plateau and into the Town of Mt. Washington.  With the third smallest population of any locality in Massachusetts, Mt. Washington is in some respects more like an island than any other town in the Berkshires.  Like islanders, stubbornly outside the currents of onshore living, the residents of Mt. Washington are proudly independent and protective of the unique qualify of life their mountain community affords. 

There is no local economy, no municipal infrastructure apart from the highway department garage and the one room Town Hall. People living in Mt. Washington largely make their living away from the mountain, except for a few contractors who service neighboring properties.  The Town is therefore heavily dependent on its residential tax base.   The municipal budget is modest in comparison to nearby communities, usually less than $500,000.  Still, any year with large capital costs, such as repairing one of the two, all weather roads that connect the mountain to surrounding communities, can easily exceed the total annual budget.  Some residents fear that the Town, which already receives many municipal services from its neighbors, may eventually be non-viable and be absorbed by neighboring Egremont. 

Walking through this wooded landscape, it is hard to conceive of a time when the crisp, mountain air was routinely thick with smoke and the forests mere sproutlands cleared for charcoal.  Yet scattered throughout the woods today, one often encounters the level remains of an old charcoal mound, its blackened heart just inches below the surface duff.  The oldest of these have mature trees growing on them, and they form oval terraces across the mountain slopes.  Only the most inaccessible groves escaped the ax, deep in the ravines or on the steepest flanks of the mountains, and these woodlands contain Mt. Washington's remnants of old growth forest, fully a third of the total recorded for all of Massachusetts.

The charcoal fueled the colonial iron industry which centered on this region.  The Berkshire and Litchfield Hills possessed the three key ingredients needed for iron production in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  In addition to forests for charcoal to fuel the furnaces, there was iron for the smelters and plenty of lime to separate the slag from the ore.  The remains of these stone furnaces are strewn across this region, and many towns have their "Lime Kiln Rd."  Connecticut troops were detailed to protect the blast furnace on Mt. Riga during the Revolution.

When iron production shifted to the coal fields of Pennsylvania, the furnaces of this region gradually shut down and the forests started to recover.  It is still a relatively young forest -although ancient in places - and since there is little commercial forestry on the Plateau there has been little high-grading in modern times. 

I picked up the Alander Mountain Trail at the Department of Conservation and Recreation Park headquarters and refilled my canteens in Ashley Hill Brook.  It would be the last water I found for the rest of my journey, for the hillsides were parched in September and the intermittent streams ran dry.  Since then, we have endured weeks of rain, with totals in excess of 15 inches and pronounced flooding in the river valleys.  But August and September were sere and waterless, and I had many miles to go on the Taconic Crest Trail before concluding my hike.  We'll take that trail together in the next and final installment of this serial account of my sojourn through the Taconic Plateau.

Mt. Everett Ephemera; Taconic Traverse, Part VIII

Mt. Everett is named for the 19th century Massachusetts Governor and orator whose monologue preceded Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  Everett is remembered not for his speech, but for recognizing afterward that Lincoln had said more in two minutes than he had said in two hours.  The highest mountain on the Taconic Plateau, Mt. Everett used to be known simply as "The Dome" and its east facing profile has the soft curves that glacial scour gives to New England's rough edges.

There used to be a fire tower on the summit, long disused and protruding above from the ridgeline.  Even dormant fire towers have their followings, but these advocates were largely silent a few years ago when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts entertained allowing a local school to place some weather forecasting equipment on the tower.  Always wary of the intentions of Boston, and of state agencies with questionable motives, a strong citizen resistance arose in the tiny community of Mt. Washington, a village that perches atop the Taconic Plateau and contains Mt. Everett Reservation among the more than 67% of Town lands classified as protected open space.  The specter of cellular towers, of the industrialization of the mountain, and of impacts to the unique and fragile ecology of the summit drove most of the residents of Mt. Washington to oppose the state, and further, to lobby for the tower to be removed entirely so that it would no longer be an attractive nuisance.

More than NIMBY was at work, here.  Citizen science also played an important role.  Green Berkshires raised private funds to evaluate everything from the lichen communities on the summit to near 1,000 of previously undocumented old growth on the steep eastern flank of the mountain.  After a couple of years of fierce opposition, the Commonwealth changed its plans for the summit and instead adopted a summit plan that recognized the importance of the natural communities on Mt. Everett and planned to remove the tower by air.

As so often happens following public comment periods, the resistance to the fire tower removal got organized after the plans had been vetted and approved.  Friends of Mt. Everett, including recreational enthusiasts who appreciated the views afforded by (illegally) climbing the tower, public safety advocates who felt the tower still had the potential to help detect wildfires if it were put back in commission, and a few folks who just felt the public hearing process hadn't been public enough, organized a campaign to save the tower.  Many, but not all of these constituents for the fire tower lived off-mountain, and the local weekly paper made hay out of the controversy for many months. 

It was a sad, frustrating dispute, and it fractured both the environmental community and the community of Mt. Washington.  Supporters of tower removal were branded elitists and those opposing it were labeled outside interests insensitive to the desires of the majority of Mt. Washington residents.  When the tower was cut from its foundations and airlifted from the summit, a Mt. Washington resident bought it on eBay for $400.

After the splendid solitude of Mt. Race, I found Mt. Everett a bit of a letdown.  Certainly, the novelty has worn off for me, since I get up here several times a year.  There was a crew of foul-mouthed teenagers on a three day camping trip hanging out near the summit, and the partially repaired but still closed road up the mountain promises to bring many more people to the top once it reopens.  To each their own.  There are many, less visited peaks on the Plateau, and only a small part of Mt. Everett sees heavy visitation.  Still, I cannot help but wish that the mountain were more gently used.  With so many constituents, it deserves better stewardship.