In 1902, two middle-aged women organized a hiking trip through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which were at the time under threat from logging and fires.
Whately, Massachusetts, botanist Allison Bell credits the trip with preserving the White Mountains for decades to come.
When she recently invited me to retrace parts of that century-old journey, she noted the unusual weather.
“We have managed miraculously to land on what must be the most gorgeous, friendly Mount Washington day in the history of the world,” she said. “Most of the time, especially as you go up the mountain, you can expect rain, cold, fog and a whole lot of wind.”
Bell has been up Mount Washington — the tallest peak in New England – about 200 times. She agreed to meet me at the bottom, 2,000 feet above sea level in a spot called Pinkham Notch.
We piled into her wife Leslie's pickup truck to make the eight-mile trek up the mountain's toll road.
The road was built a century and a half ago, originally for horse carriages full of tourists.
“This this flat place here is where they call the halfway house,” Bell pointed out through the car window. “It was for the teams of horses to switch out after they'd done half the climb, and then they'd send a fresh team up, and vice versa.”
Bell is a graphic designer by day, naturalist by weekend. She often leads tours of the alpine flower gardens in the White Mountains.
“If you look out the window now, we are in northern hardwood forest,” she said. “We've got sugar maples, beeches, and yellow birches. A few hemlocks.”
Bell has written field guides for the Appalachian Mountain Club and recently co-wrote the book, "Glorious Mountain Days," with Maida Goodwin, about a camping trip through this terrain 117 years ago.
That the 1902 trek was organized by two unmarried women over 40 — Hattie Freeman and Emma Cummings — made it especially unusual for that era.
Freeman was a wealthy, conservation-minded woman. Cummings was her frequent hiking companion. For this week-long trip, they took Freeman's nephew, her cousin, and a professional guide.
“When Hattie and Emma and their crew started out,” Bell said, looking out over the landscape of the White Mountains, “they started in Randolph, which is on the opposite side of this mountain range.”
We didn't have time to retrace their exact steps, but Bell did point out a few key stops they made along the way.
“This 'krumholz' zone, right at the top of the forest before we enter into the Arctic alpine zone, was a place that Hattie and Emma were particularly interested in seeing, because they had long wanted to see a winter wren,” Bell said.
At night, the hiking group stayed in wooden shelters and a hotel — now long-gone — at the top of Mount Washington, which is known for some of the most extreme weather in the world.
“You can see how exposed this is,” Bell said, bracing against several fast-moving gusts. “The prevailing wind is coming exactly the way it is right now from the west.”
And this was about a century before you could check your weather app for the forecast.
So after waiting out a thunderstorm in the hotel, the hikers had to use the brand-new telephone line installed at the summit, call a building far below, “and get someone to literally look out the window at the mountain and see what the clouds were doing,” Bell said. “That gave them an indication… that they could walk down and get out of the clouds.”
Bell's book includes letters Freeman wrote during the trip and her photographs. Looking at them now, the attire is nothing like the sleek outdoor gear of today. The women are wearing formal-looking brimmed hats; laced up leather shoes; long-sleeved, button-up shirts and thick, long skirts.
Those skirts were considered downright revolutionary for the time, “because they didn't hit the ground,” Bell said. “They came up off the ground three or four inches. Those were the short skirts. If you're climbing through this stuff right here, you're less likely to tear them.”
Bell suspects they hiked up their skirts when no one was looking, and probably skipped the corsets. But she said the fact that these women were doing the kind of rugged activity mostly reserved for men is only part of the story.
“The greater significance of it is that Hattie and Emma and their companions were keenly aware of the fact that the forests — at least that side of the northern Presidential Range — were in imminent peril,” she said.
Bell said the state had sold large tracts of land to logging companies, which were clear-cutting to make paper. The logging was also destroying hiking trails, leaving waste and brush all over, and making the land vulnerable to devastating fires.
“Hattie and Emma decided they really had to try to do whatever they could to get people motivated to help preserve the White Mountains,” Bell said. “And remember [in] 1902, these are women who had no vote — so they're not going to be voting their politicians in.”
Instead, when they got back, they held public meetings, and published letters and photographs from the trip, making the case that tourism is a more sustainable industry than logging.
Freeman also had friends with political influence. Within a few years, they helped get federal legislation passed that created the White Mountain National Forest.
But Bell said the women could scarcely have predicted all the environmental threats that exist today. After all, logging is visible and obvious.
“That was an easier thing to kind of wrap your head around,” Bell said. “Things like climate change and even invasive plants is more insidious, silent, even abstract kind of problems.”
Bell is herself an avid conservationist who imagines Freeman and Cummings would have joined many environmental causes today.
There's a controversial proposal to build a new hotel at the top of Mount Washington. And there's the threat of invasive plant species tracked into the White Mountains from travelers and vehicles. For example, a few years ago, Bell organized a group of volunteers to pull out a patch of dandelions.
If Hattie Freeman were alive today, Bell said, “she would've been out there helping us pull dandelions, for sure.”
