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Trail of Years: Building a Trail, 1819-Style AMC Outdoors, April 2000 While today's trail maintainers in the White Mountains rarely build completely new trails, if they were going to they would incorporate a variety of techniques: They would hoist boulders with iron winches to create stabilizing rock steps, refer to topo maps to build water bars to redirect drainage, and plan their routes around fragile alpine areas. But nearly 200 years ago, Ethan and his father looked up at the summit and plunged in, hacking their way over several years through the sweet-smelling forest along the Ammonoosuc. And they did a great job, says Tim "T-Bone" Levesque, AMC's White Mountains trails supervisor. "It was a monumental task, and the Crawford Path has stood the test of time." How did they pick their route? Decades later, AMC trail builders came along who were schooled at MIT and Harvard and used intricate, scientific methods involving compasses and lengths of string. Not so the Crawfords. "Basically," says Howe, "they just started from the hotel and headed up to the ridge. They were practical, not as educated, and needed to get to business faster. If you look at the ridge, it's obvious where that trail needed to go." While the physical labor involved for a few men to build a seven-mile trail seems daunting by today's standards, keep in mind the culture of the time. Says Howe of the Crawfords and their contemporaries, "If their eyes were open, they were working. They took for granted an unimaginably high level of work. [The early trail builders] were also extraordinarily skillful, natural engineers [who] had a very reliable sense of the best locations and good instincts—then they'd just get in there with an axe, a crosscut saw, and a shovel." As the years progressed, plucky Ethan would lead hundreds on horseback up the mountain on his Crawford Path. Sometimes, depending on the fortitude of his clients, they would rest for the evening at a halfway-point camp he built, heating salt-pork dinners packed by Lucy. Howe—who has searched long and hard for this shelter—has never found any signs of it, but assumes it must have been near a water source, probably close to the the small spring just beyond Mount Eisenhower (called Mount Pleasant at the time). Other times, Ethan, his clients, and their horses would plow through the seven miles straight on to the summit. He'd built a small camp there which "consisted of three stone huts, and later of a large tent, furnished with a sheet iron stove, a roll of sheet lead, and a plentiful supply of dry moss for bedding. The lead was the cabin register on which visitors left their names engraved by a piece of sharp iron." Names scratched into that lead sheet likely included Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, AMC founder Edward Charles Pickering, and a group of 52 lively cadets from West Point (all fed and housed by the patient and long-suffering Lucy). Also noted in Lucy's History was the 1921 visit by the Misses Austin, three "ambitious" young sisters who were the first recorded females to place "their feet on this high, and now celebrated, place."
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