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Trail of Years: The Crawfords of Crawford Notch AMC Outdoors, April 2000 Only a few years after European settlers' discovery of the verdant notch in 1771, the pioneering Abel Crawford moved his family from Vermont to hook their fortune and future on "this great defile in the mountains." Business at his inn, located near the present-day town of Bartlett, grew brisk, and young Ethan shared his father's entrepreneurial spirit. Ethan grew up to be known as the Giant of the Mountains, not only for his physical stature and endurance — the six-foot-three-inch man once toted a 200-pound load down Mount Washington — but also for his moral courage. His wife, Lucy, author of A History of the White Mountains, which details the trials and tribulations of the couple's life in the notch, writes of her husband, "And as the Scripture saith of men of ancient times — 'There were Giants in those days.'" Until 1819, Ethan had passed his days running a tavern with his father, farming, building a road through Crawford Notch, raising a homestead, and starting a family with Lucy, his childhood neighbor. In those years, says Nick Howe, a journalist and White Mountains historian who's tramped the Crawford Path for 60 years, there was a surge in visitors to the area. "There was a romantic fascination with wilderness. The landscape had a moral value, plus people were beginning to have the money and leisure time to take vacations." Going to the mountains, says Howe, had become a fashionable way to get out of the city. It was "the first wave of green thinking." But it was not with the notion of service or any particular desire to climb that Crawford cut his path in 1819 — no, this giant had dollar signs in his eyes. In May, he and his father set out with axes and saws to build a trail for the sole purpose of guiding growing numbers of curious travelers up the slopes of Mount Washington. By that point, not three decades after scientists had first computed its elevation (estimating it within a few feet of the correct altitude), Mount Washington had become a compelling destination for the adventurers of the time. As a strong, young innkeeper with close proximity to the hills, Ethan found himself several times in the position of mountain guide and, not willing to bushwhack with his guests, decided to clear a route from his inn straight up to the summit: We thought it best to cut a path through the woods; accordingly my father and I made a footpath from the Notch out through the woods and it was advertised in the newspapers and we soon began to have a few visitors. After a few years, and at least a few dozen more times up and down the mountain via this route, Ethan and a neighbor set out to find an easier way to the summit to avoid what one botanist-tramper called "the villainous break-neck route. God help the poor wight who attempts that route as we did." We spent three days in making this search and returned well satisfied we had found the best way . . . over a comparative level surface for nearly seven miles, following the source of the Amanoosuc [sic], until we arrived at the foot of Mount Washington, and then taking a ridge or spur of the hill. We could now ascend without much difficulty and found that there might be a road made . . . which we thought would facilitate the visitor very much in his progress. This second of the Crawfords' routes followed roughly the same course the cog railway does today, though they never really got this one into operation, says Howe. In 1840, Ethan would begin improving the original path — the one that began near Saco Lake in the heart of the notch — into a bridle path, and stick to it for the rest of his time as a guide. His personal path was not quite so easy, however, acknowledged by his wife when she wrote, "men suffer various ways in advancing civilization." In 1819, hours after his first son was born inside, his house burned to the ground, leaving him and his growing family homeless and broke with only "new cheese and the milk of the cows." Four years later, as he was cutting the second path, Ethan fell off a log and nearly severed his heel with his axe: "This wound laid me up pretty much the rest of the summer, but still we persevered, and . . . finished cutting the path."
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