Green Mountain from Eagle Lake

10971  

Green Mountain from Eagle Lake

Illustration by William Henry Hyde and Harry Fenn, Engraved by Dakin, for Mrs. Burton Harrison's Novel, "Bar Harbor Days".

"From Trenton Point we took by boat a tent and simple camp “outfit” to where Bar Harbor now stands; tied the boat in the bushes about where steamboat wharf is; and went some days exploring the island of Mount Desert, then very little known. We camped for the most of the time on Green Mountain, where boy-fashion, we amused ourselves by starting boulders down the steep to hear them crash into the woods below. Thence we went to Eagle Lake, built a raft and with our shelter tent managed to sail the length of it; but near the end of the voyage there came a stout wind, and the waves broke the raft to pieces, so that we lost our effects and had to swim ashore, and make our way ignominiously to our boat and back to our boarding-place.

This trifling bit of a camp journey in Mount Desert [in 1860] was a great event in my life, for it brought my feet for the first time upon a mountain top. It is true that the height was trifling, - but a matter of fifteen hundred feet or so, - and I had seen greater elevations in the distance; but the way to experience a mountain is to climb it with a pack on your back; you then sense its mass in a way that sight does not enable you to do. I have never had this sense of mass so borne in upon me as in this climbing of Green Mountain…" - “The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler [Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906)] with a Supplementary Memoir by his Wife [Sophia Penn (Page) Shaler],” Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909, p. 134.

Eagle Lake

Acadia National Park, HCTPR

ME

USA

1887