The next morning we rowed across the lake and took the Bartlett trail,
ascending Haystack, some five thousand feet high, just to get an
appetite for dinner; our guide encouraging us on the way by saying
that there never had been more than twenty people before "on that air
peak." In fact, there was no trail, and in some places it was so steep
that we were compelled to go up on all fours; or as Scott puts it more
elegantly in the "Lady of the Lake":
"The foot was fain
Assistance from the hand to gain."
The view from the summit well repaid the toil. We saw Slide Mountain,
near by to the north, and Whiteface far beyond, perhaps twenty-five
miles distant; northeast, the Gothics; east, Saw-teeth, Mt. Colvin,
Mt. Dix, and the lakes of the Ausable. To the southeast, Skylight;
northwest, Tahawas, still foolishly styled on some of our maps,
Mt. Marcy. The descent of Haystack was as easy as Virgil's famous
"Descensus Averni." We went down in just twenty minutes. The one
that reached the bottom first simply possessed better adaptation for
rolling.
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