Massachusetts
#5 Mount Greylock, elevation 3,487 ft.
Old coots. Brambles. Bikers. Scroll down for the full story…
The Cheshire Harbor Trail was steeper than I expected and more creek bed than trail.
It skirts a small pond built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as a water supply for Bascom Lodge, the seasonal chalet on the summit. On my second trip, with Thomas and Clem, we took the Bellows Pipe Trail (in reverse) to the Thunderbolt on a blisteringly hot day, and regretted it. The bugs were out, and the heat was unbearable for everyone except the overfed bugs. The summit was breezier than the ramparts, however, and we bought grilled cheeses with caramelized onions at the lodge, shown in a vintage postcard.
The hike was one of several I made that summer in preparation for Katahdin. It was also a signal moment in the development of the Dolley Inferno website, because on that hike I realized that instead of one definitive slideshow or video, what I really wanted was an archive that could be edited and updated. I’d like to return to Greylock and see it in the fog, like Thoreau did when he awoke on the summit surrounded by an "ocean of mist." Staring out on that sea of cloud, like Friedrich’s Wanderer, Thoreau later claimed, put him on the path of his life's work. I’d also like to see the summit area with smaller crowds, which are unavoidable in peak season.
On the way down, we met an older man who ended up walking down most of the Gould Trail with us. He was an experienced hiker, trail worker, and, we learned, a physicist. He was wearing the same pair of new hiking boots I was, and he, too, was using the hike to break them in. He drove the same Subaru as Thomas, and his field of work was related to Clem's. I knew the legend of the Old Coot, the ghost who appears on the Bellow's Pipe trail always headed up the mountain, never down. Our physicist was fully corporeal, in any event. I spent most of the descent picking his brain about hiking in the West, and he gave solid advice. We passed an enormous hollowed-out tree that you could fit inside. As I huddled within the trunk, he asked me if it was an anechoic chamber. That’s when we learned he was a physicist. He'd worked at MIT and Brookhaven and studied magnetism. Definitively not the Old Coot.
The hike was one of several I made in preparation for Katahdin that summer. It was also a signal moment in the development of the Dolley Inferno website, because on that hike I realized that instead of one definitive slideshow or video, what I really wanted was an archive that could be edited and updated as often as necessary.
I’d like to return to Greylock and see it in the fog, like Thoreau did when he awoke on the summit surrounded by an "ocean of mist." Staring out on that sea of cloud, like Friedrich’s Wanderer, Thoreau later claimed, put him on the path of his life's work.