Trail of Years: Explore the rich history of Mount Washington's Crawford Path

AMC Outdoors, April 2000

By Madeleine Eno

A friend and I clomp a few feet through the parking lot to find the trailhead, packed firm by snowshoes and crampons. In a swirling snowstorm, we follow the gently climbing trail as it wends along the Gibbs Brook. Snowshoe-hare tracks zigzag in front of us between young spruce, bent by four feet of snow, that arch up into the wide-open spaces of a blowdown to the right. Then we're protected under a tall canopy of like-sized spruce and fir. We move alongside the frozen stream, its waterfalls stilled into white lumps, turn right, and head for Mounts Pierce and Eisenhower. The summit of Mount Washington looms invisible, seven miles ahead. A group of winter campers, their plastic boots bright in the gray of the dusky falling snow, speed by us, silent but for their heavy breathing.

We are walking the Crawford Path, the oldest continuously maintained hiking trail in the United States. One hundred and eighty years ago, the spot where we left our car was the summer pasture for the Crawford family's mules and horses. We would have looked across the road, then a rutted path probably not any easier to travel than the Tuckerman Ravine Trail is today, at Ethan Allen Crawford's log tavern. Glancing southward, we may have seen the inn Ethan's father, Abel, had built at the turn of the 18th century. And a few steps from today's parking lot, down by where the Gibbs Brook gurgles under Route 302, we would have come upon the spot where Ethan first took to the woods in 1819, axe in hand, to clear his path. Just as we have come upon it today.

—Madeleine Eno is Publisher and Co-Editor of AMC Outdoors.

Trail of Years, main article  |  The Crawfords of Crawford Notch  | 
Building a Trail, 1819-Style  | Horses on Crawford Path  |  Life After Ethan