#pack monadnock

[brookemmphotos-blog]

View of Pack Monadnock from Temple Mountain.

2017

[oh-cean-waves]

Pack Monadnock, NH

[stanleydaiquiri-blog]

the hike w/ @freckldbitch

[haleybucks]

[persephonemag]

This Weekend Open Thread is Back From the Woods

This Weekend Open Thread is Back From the Woods

Look at the pretty pictures I took last week in New Hampshire. (more…)

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[americanguide]

PACK MONADNOCK, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Stone, and a fault line furrowed in it. Dust laid down there, windborne, rainborne, mote by mote. Then a little lichen, a little moss. Soon enough, the highbush blueberry appears, the paper birch, the red spruce. And now the whole Wapack ridge purrs as the wind rises, and shadows raise fur where light had once cut edges. The granite domes of some New Hampshire hills are just now being colonized, sixteen thousand years after a glacier ran a cold hand backward over this cat’s arched spine and razed it clean. No deep roots on this mountain. No living thing comes to stay, up here or anywhere. (Thoreau, seeing these “Peterboro hills” from the south, said, “We look at a condition which we have not reached.”) Those that know the place best are only visitors: the ten thousand hawks that migrate past each fall—dangling from clouds, effortless, some South America-bound. They will not stop here, but are drawn to the invisible updrafts off the ridge. The people below, drawn to the scarcely more visible hawks, stand shoulder to shoulder on the peak of the mountain—visitors, too, asking the sky overhead to perform again its one great sleight of hand: Something-out-of-Nothing.  Only old Jack-be-nimble, the ever-restive, ever-quickening eye, sliding down distances, mounting by orders of magnitude, is wholly at home. Footloose and fancy-free on marionette strings, it needs no perch or nest or place to preen its wings, nor furrow for planting, nor soft beech wood on which to grave itself and grow. It need not ever reach its one far-off condition. Whatever the shape on which it lights, it gives an animate name. 

Images by Jon Creamer, Text by Henry Walters

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Jon Creamer is a teacher and photographer, currently on sabbatical from the Groton School in Groton, MA, based in Providence, RI between his travels. More of his work can be seen at his website and on tumblr at years-of-indiscretion.tumblr.com.

Henry Walters lives at the end of a long dirt road in southern New Hampshire. In the fall he spends around 600 hours on Pack Monadnock, watching and counting migratory birds. You can find his writing about these hours at www.hawkcount.org.