Fellowship
In 1955, Ben English, Jr. was staying at AMC’s Madison Hut with his parents for a few nights. After dinner one evening, the 16-year-old helped the hut crew with the dishes, as guests often did back then. While in the kitchen, he noticed “this tall thin guy named Stretch just hanging around,” talking with the hut crew.

“I heard them talking about things like axes, cooking over the campfire, cutting blowdowns, and standardizing, and sleeping out in the shelters and tents,” Ben recalls.

Later that evening, he walked up to Stretch, AMC’s trailmaster that season, and told him, “I like the sound of what I heard you say out there in the kitchen.” Stretch (David Hayes) encouraged Ben to apply for the next season. He did, working the summers of 1956, 1957, and part of 1958.

Ben talks about his crew days sitting on the faux leather cushions of the large couch in the second-floor common area of Hutton Lodge in Pinkham Notch—the weekend accommodations for trail crew members when they come out of the woods on Fridays. A retired junior high school English teacher who lives in Jackson, N.H., Ben is an active trail crew alumnus who often hikes out to visit crews at worksites. Cali has called him “the grandfather of trail crew.”

Much has changed since Ben worked in the woods. Before hiking boomed in the ’60s and ’70s, erosion wasn’t a serious threat, and the crew didn’t do the rock work that’s done today. Instead, Ben says, in addition to building shelters and bridges, crew members focused on standardization: cutting back the brush and branches to ensure that the trail corridor was open enough for hikers to pass through without pack or body touching anything.

Across the couch from where Ben sits, pictures of Everett are tacked to a closed dorm room door. In one, he is sporting a mohawk. It’s a hairstyle most first-years adopt, a tradition that likely began in the ’80s. The tradition is also tied to Ax Day, a spring ritual when first-years learn how to identify and care for a good ax. They are given a hickory handle and a single-bit ax head and told to “hang the ax”—a process by which they fasten the head correctly onto the handle. That’s now the night that willing first-years also shave their heads.

An ardor for axes typically springs up amongst crew members. Required to provide their own tool, upper-years will go antiquing to find old gems, ones with blades on both ends, rather than the single-bits given to first-years.

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