At Its Peak

Arriving at the summit of Mount Greylock after an eight-mile drive up a mountain road is like coming out of the dark tunnel at a baseball park and suddenly seeing that huge bright green field laid out in front of you. Only this time you’re looking eighty miles out, into five different states, and the field is millions of acres of red, orange, and yellow leaves that have just reached their peak.

“It’s an incredible sight,” says Alec Gillman, a Mount Greylock ranger, standing 3,491 feet above sea level on the highest mountain in Massachusetts. “But for the past two years—while a new road was being built to the summit—nobody saw it except hikers who walked to the top and some workmen who rode up on their ATVs.” Now the road is open, and the hikers, bikers, motorists, campers, naturalists, sightseers, and seekers after peace and tranquility are coming back to find their own little niche on the mountain.

The summit of Mount Greylock is a windswept, three-acre plateau with a ninety-two-foot-high granite observation tower and a bulky, rock-hugging, rustic lodge that offers food, rooms, and small comforts to all who reach the summit. The grounds are covered with shaggy field grass, widely scattered hemlocks, and clumps of stunted and gnarled trees. Gillman points out a pocket of yellow birches that look like badly arthritic hands reaching for the sky. “The high winds and frigid winter weather cripples these trees and shapes them into tortured positions. The balsams—those evergreens over there—are called flag trees,” he explains, “because the extreme weather kills the branches on the windward side, while the branches on the lee side grow out to resemble a banner blowing in the wind.”

Gillman leads the way to the entrance of the Veterans War Memorial Tower, pushes open the swinging bronze door, and steps inside the art deco vestibule. “The same weather that deforms the trees,” he says, stepping over a puddle of water on the floor, “takes its toll on this building, too. Since it was built in 1933, it’s been patched, caulked, sealed, and rebuilt a half dozen times.” In 1973, the tower was completely dismantled, stone by stone, and put back together again. But water still gets in between the cracks and freezes in the winter. It’s still damp inside from condensation. “No matter what we do,” says Gillman, “the weather up here always wins.”

The War Memorial Tower, a granite monument shaped like the bishop on a chessboard, was built to honor American men and women who died in defense of their country. It’s topped with a large glass ball, a beacon light that can be seen seventy miles away and is lit every night except during bird migrations in the spring and fall, when birds might be lured to their death by its brilliance.
Inside the base is a circular chamber, twenty feet across, with an art deco domed ceiling and inscriptions on the wall that pay tribute to the nation’s fallen heroes. In one corner is a cramped stone stairway that leads to an upper platform. From there, the stairs become iron and spiral upward to the observation level. There’s a 360-degree view from the small room at the top that holds eight to ten people.

Four bronze plaques facing in each direction tell what landmarks lie on the horizon—the skyline of the city of Albany and the Hudson River Valley to the west, the Adirondacks and Green Mountains to the north, the long view down the Berkshires to the Catskill Mountains to the south, and the high mountains of New Hampshire to the east. Gillman points out another famous monument twenty miles to the north in Vermont. “That’s the Bennington Battle Monument,” he says, indicating a 306-foot-high obelisk just visible on the horizon. “You can climb that tower, too, to get a long-range view of Mount Greylock and see how this monument looks against the Berkshire skyline.”

On the way down from the observation level, Gillman steps aside onto a platform to make way for people coming up the narrow stairs. “Out this little window you can see where the Appalachian Trail crosses the top of the mountain. You’ll see people coming through every day … hiking the trail from Georgia to Maine … 2,172 miles of the roughest and most beautiful terrain in the world.” From the summit area, no fewer than five hiking trails fan out and wind their way down the mountain. “There are seventy miles of trails on Mount Greylock,” says Gillman, “and they represent to me what this mountain is mostly about—our interaction with nature.”

Mount Greylock is like an island, very different in geology, climate, and ecology from its local surroundings. Temperatures on the upper slopes are colder, the growing season is shorter, rainfall is greater, and the winter is more severe than anywhere else in the area. Ecologically speaking, Mount Greylock is classified as sub-alpine, one of the southernmost examples of this forest type in North America. Gillman says that naturalists have described the transition in forest vegetation zones from the base of Mount Greylock to the summit as being similar to what one would find walking from Pennsylvania to northern Maine in one day. William Brewster, an eminent nineteenth-century ornithologist, described the mountain as “a Canadian island rising from an Alleghenian sea.”

At lower levels, the woods are filled with red oak, beech, birch, ash, and maple trees. Toward the top of the mountain, balsam and red spruce become dominant. As for animals, there are abundant deer, black bears, bobcats, coyotes, porcupines, beavers, raccoons, snowshoe hares, and, in recent years, moose. “One hundred species of birds inhabit the woods and waterways of Mount Greylock,” says Gillman, “and a lot of them are special. Mount Greylock is the only known nesting site in Massachusetts of the Blackpoll Warbler,” he says, “a discriminating little bird that flies from South America every year just because it finds Mount Greylock the perfect place for setting up house and laying eggs.”

Gillman is a tall man, lean as a whippet, in his early forties with short cropped, prematurely white hair and intense, pale blue eyes. As one who interprets the mountain and nature to the public, Gillman is an articulate spokesman, patient teacher, and the epitome of what one expects a park ranger to be. In the woods, he notices and can identify nearly every bird, tree, or geological formation. He has a knack for making little discoveries interesting to his audience. For Gillman, the mountain is an almost sacred place that deserves everybody’s respect; thus, to him, littering is the ultimate act of disrespect.

In mid-sentence, he’ll walk off the trail to pick up a discarded can or tissue. At the Adams Overlook, he gently admonishes a young girl who puts on a bandage and lets the white tab flutter to the ground. “If you bring it in,” he reminds her, “bring it out.” His mission as an interpretive ranger, he says, is to connect people to the mountain, to get them not only to appreciate its treasures but understand that it’s their mountain. “They own it,” he says, “and they have a responsibility to be good stewards of it.”

Gillman gave up a promising career as an artist and illustrator—he was trained at Pratt Institute in New York—to work in the great outdoors. Today, he says, the mountain satisfies his aesthetic sensibilities. He finds beauty in every sight, sound, smell, and sensation the mountain has to offer.
The 12,500-acre Greylock Reservation, the first state park in Massachusetts, isn’t just a destination for day-trippers. On the southwest side of the mountain is an overnight campground that campers can reach only by hiking a mile and a half from a parking lot on Rockwell Road. “This is wilderness camping,” says Gillman. “No trailers, pop-up campers, or motor homes. No electricity, no plumbing, no shelters. Everything people need, they bring in on their backs.”

The campground has sites for fifteen individual tents, with four people allowed per tent. Seven group locations and five lean-to sites, accessible only by backpacking, each accommodate up to twelve people. Wherever they pitch their tents or climb into a lean-to, campers on Mount Greylock are reminded that what they’re doing is something more than a picnic in the park. Signs around the reservation inform them they’re in bear country and tell them how to deal with a black bear if they should meet up with one.

About a mile past the campground, on the same hiking trail, is Stony Ledge. This is the rocky promontory that overlooks the Hopper—that vast, steep, semi-circular valley where three mountains converge and form what appears to be a huge grain hopper. “This view is unique,” says Gillman, “because here you’re looking straight out at the side of mountains rather than across the top. You get a real feel for the vastness of the slopes and a sense of how big Mount Greylock really is.”

Gillman steps to the edge of the precipice and looks down at two hawks circling on the updrafts. “If you look there to the left,” he says, pointing down the steep slope, “you’ll see several patches of dark green trees surrounded by lighter colored hardwoods. Those are stands of old growth red spruce that have been growing there for a couple hundred years.” The tree stands are so rare and impressive they were named National Natural Landmarks by the National Park Service in 1987. Other trees on the mountain are more than three hundred years old.

Just as Gillman starts back down the trail, Lori Murphy, a high school teacher from Dalton, Massachusetts, comes over the ridge from the west after a long hot climb from the trailhead on Roaring Brook Road. “It took me more than an hour to get here,” she says, sitting on a rock and pulling her lunch from a backpack, “but it’s worth it. This is my favorite view on the mountain, better than the summit. In fact, you can look up from here and see the summit. How cool is that.” Murphy, who has two of her students in tow, says she hikes to Stony Ledge and other places on Mount Greylock to find escape from the stresses of life on the valley floor. For several minutes the hikers are silent, watching the shadows of clouds dance across the distant ridge. “If I’m wrestling with a problem,” says Murphy, “I find clarity when I hike to a place like this.” She says she also thinks it’s important to show her students that there’s a real life out here away from their electronic tools and toys.

It’s not too surprising, then, that Greylock is a mountain that has captured the imaginations of some of the greatest literary minds of the nineteenth-century. Herman Melville watched the daily weather changes on Greylock through his study window as he wrote Moby-Dick in his Pittsfield, Massachusetts, farmhouse. He was so entranced by the sight he dedicated his book Pierre to “Greylock’s Excellent Majesty.”

We know that Melville once scaled the mountain in a horse-drawn wagon with some heavy-drinking friends and spent the night on the summit in a tower that had been built by Williams College students. Henry David Thoreau made a legendary trek up the mountain in 1844 and wrote about it in his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. To this day, in July, about a dozen people take a memorial hike up Bellow’s Pipe trail, following in Thoreau’s footsteps. They discuss Thoreau’s work along the way and enjoy the same ambiance of the woods that Thoreau wrote about in his book.

Another literary star, Edith Wharton, also played a small part in Mount Greylock history. In 1897, her chauffeur, Charles Cook, fired up his boss’s big Mercedes and took it for a joy ride to the top of the mountain. It’s said he was the first to drive to the summit. Since then, untold millions of cars have made the trip up the winding road, and last May a new road was laid to make the trip safer and a lot more enjoyable.

This two-year, $21.3-million-dollar project, under the direction of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), put the new road up the mountain on the same bed as the old one. It may be new, but they didn’t jazz it up with a modern look. Ken Neary, the DCR’s project engineer, says, “We did everything we could to retain the look and feel of the original road as it was built by the Civilian Conservations Corps [CCC] in the 1930s. We used the same footprint and didn’t cut any new passages.” The width is about the same as the old road, but smoother (potholes and ragged edges are gone), safer, better drained, more clearly signed, and the views from many of the overlooks are improved.

Neary says they tore out the ugly old “hippo’s teeth” metal guardrails and replaced them with wood rails that resemble the ones the CCC put in originally. All along the way, the stonework on culverts and retaining walls is meticulous, constructed by hand with native stones. The 13.5-mile road (total distance up one side and down the other) is remarkably simple, unpretentious, and unobtrusive. It blends neatly with the landscape and doesn’t intrude on the wilderness it moves through.

Where the road reaches the summit it comes to the doorstep of Bascom Lodge, a rustic oasis for weary travelers. The lodge is a formidable, fort-like structure that looks as though cannon barrels should be poking out of its windows. Built by the CCC between 1933 and 1938, the lodge is made of native Greylock schist and native wood—red spruce and oak. With massive, hand-hewn beams, thick stone walls, rich maple floors, and three oversized stone fireplaces, the place wraps its arms around visitors and embraces them in rooms that are as casual and comfortable as old shoes. John Dudek, a longtime baker and personal chef, runs the lodge with his brother Peter and Brad Parsons, all Berkshire natives.

“The lodge,” says Dudek, “accommodates mostly day-trippers, but we also have rooms for thirty-four overnight guests—private rooms, family rooms, and larger bunk accommodations for hikers. Thirty-five dollars buys a night in a bunk room, and a hundred and twenty-five dollars gets a private room with a queen-size bed.”

The lodge also serves food—breakfast, lunch, and dinner (reservations needed for breakfast and dinner unless staying at the lodge)—that’s homemade, organic, and, whenever possible, locally grown. Each week the chef changes the dinner menu to highlight a different cuisine—one week it’s Italian and another it might be Greek or Mexican—and meals are served in an enclosed, window-lined porch that looks out on a view that’s stunning in any language. Since taking over the lodge on a thirty-year lease last June, the partners have made renovations to the building and fitted out the interior in an Arts and Crafts motif. The new chandeliers in the dining room have an Arts and Crafts influence (they were fluorescent before) and the new furniture is made by Stickley. 

One corner of the lodge has a quiet library, with its own fireplace, where people can relax and read books, mostly about nature, the environment, wildlife, and local history. And along these lines, the partners have made the lodge a center for stimulating discussions on a wide variety of subjects.
Each week they bring in a guest lecturer from an area gallery, museum, or college, or a prominent local writer or artist. They explore some aspect of the culture, ecology, or literature of the Berkshires. “So far this year we’ve had everyone from journalists to beekeepers, conservationists to historians,” says Peter Dudek, director of Pittsfield’s Storefront Artist Project and teacher of sculpture at Hunter College in New York. “These freewheeling discussions, along with our occasional arts exhibitions, have given a new dimension to the summit experience and made the lodge a far more compelling place to visit.”

At the base of the mountain, on the Lanesborough side where Rockwell Road starts its run to the summit, the Department of Conservation and Recreation runs a Visitors Center where travelers can stop to get trail maps, talk to experienced staff, use the facilities, review exhibits, and park their cars while they hike.

At the end of the day, Gillman comes to his office in the Visitors Center to gather his things before heading home. As Mount Greylock’s Visitors Services supervisor, Gillman spends his time helping people “experience” the mountain: walk the trails, hear the birds, smell the evergreens, and get a good lungful of fresh air. “There’s a lot more to Greylock,” he says, “than zipping to the top, looking around, and dashing back to town. For me, enjoying the mountain, like enjoying life, is all about the journey, not the destination.” [OCTOBER 2009]

Frequent contributor to Berkshire Living, Peter McLaughlin first climbed Mount Greylock sixty-two years ago when he attended the Jesuit summer camp at Cranwell in Lenox, Mass. “It’s gotten much higher since then.”

THE GOODS

Mount Greylock Visitors Center
30 Rockwell Rd.
Lanesborough, Mass.
Hours until Oct 12; open daily 9-7
After Oct 12, all winter, 9-4:30
413.499.4262

Bascom Lodge
Mount Greylock Summit
Open through Nov 26 (if weather doesn’t close the road)
413.743.1591

Most Excellent Majesty: A History of Mount Greylock
By Deborah Burns, Lauren R. Stevens, and Leah Katzelnick
New edition, 2009, Illustrated
Available at area book and outdoors shops and Bascom Lodge
Published by Berkshire Natural Resources Council

SIDEBAR

Assault on the Summit

From the time Europeans first saw Mount Greylock, someone has tried to make money exploiting it. In the late 1800s, the Derosia Brothers from Adams hauled people to the top in horse-drawn wagons for a fee. It was a bone-jarring journey that took four hours each way. Intrepid tourists willingly suffered the ride for the view from the summit.

By the late 1800s, rapacious loggers had virtually deforested all but the steepest and most inaccessible slopes of Mount Greylock, opening the door to erosion and large-scale landslides. A group of concerned citizens put an end to that just as a new scheme to run a trolley up the mountain took hold. The surveyor’s stakes were already in the ground when this idea collapsed for want of money and practicality.

In 1960, the mountain faced a real threat when the Mount Greylock Commission, an organization that was supposed to protect the property, leased four thousand acres—half of the reservation—for forty years to the Mount Greylock Tramway Authority, which led to plans to run a giant tramway from Adams to the summit that carried two cars, each holding 104 people. After a time, the public began to wonder why it took four thousand acres to run cables up the mountain. Soon it was clear enough. The authority actually planned to establish a highly commercial, $5.5-million ski area with four chairlifts, eleven miles of trails, restaurants, cocktail lounges, a dance terrace, a swimming pool, motels, riding stables, and an amusement park on Mount Greylock. It took six years of legal battles, but the Greylock Protective Association finally got this plan tossed out, and Greylock got its four thousand acres back.

In the 1970s, another group got so far as to build a golf course and some buildings on the east slope of Mount Greylock; some overgrown pylons and a golf course that’s been taken over by weeds are all that remain. Next came the big casino challenge when, in 1980, MGM Grand Hotels tried to put a gambling palace in Greylock Glen, but then-Massachusetts-governor Michael Dukakis put an end to that.

The granddaddy of all development deals came along when a Connecticut company, Heritage Greylock, proposed a $260-million, sleek, four-season resort that would be the Vail of the Berkshires, situated on the east side of the mountain in Greylock Glen, with tentacles reaching up into the Greylock Reservation. Heritage Greylock expected to break ground in 1989, but the reenergized Greylock Protective Association, with the help of the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, and other environmental groups, rallied the troops. Their opposition, along with disclosures about Heritage’s shaky financial dealings, killed the project, and once again Mount Greylock dodged the development bullet.

Lauren Stevens, in his recently republished book, Most Excellent Majesty, writes that “Heritage proved to be just another tombstone in the graveyard of development projects for the east side of Mount Greylock.” Now there’s a more moderate plan underway to have the town of Adams itself be the developer of a modest, land-friendly space in Greylock Glen, with campsites, an environmental education center, hiking trails, a rustic lodge, and a natural-setting amphitheater. With the support of the Appalachian Club, the Audubon Society, and other influential groups, it’s an idea that might enhance the Greylock ambiance rather than despoil it.—PMcL