Willem's Yankee Notebook - August 18, 2006 - Lonesome Lake

LONESOME LAKE ISN'T ALL THAT LONESOME

LONESOME LAKE, NH It's likely there aren't too many places in the world as misnamed as this one. It may have suited 130 years ago, when the then-well-known author W.C. Prime had a cabin here. But situated as it is, only a little more than a mile from the Franconia Notch Parkway and 900 feet above it, it's one of the prime destinations in the White Mountains. On an August day like this one, cool and clear, the trail is an almost constant stream of families, young couples, and elderly climbers with hiking poles and sweat bands.

Even the appellation, "lake," is a misnomer. At twenty acres, Lonesome Lake is a small pond. But during the Victorian Era, when romantic Bostonians flocked to these mountains, all kinds of features assumed Alpine proportions: lumps became mountains, shoulders became crags, and old beaver ponds attained lakehood.

A beaver bog is what it was, until the loggers came along about 100 years ago and stripped these mountainsides. They built a log dam at the outlet and raised the bog to pond status. Years later, after the log dam had rotted, someone hauled cement up here and built a concrete weir, which is now augmented courtesy of the Appalachian Mountain Club by a pressure-treated dam that keeps the water level constant. You can also see signs where beavers, still very much around, have been trying to augment it still further.

To geologists, Lonesome Lake is a glacial tarn a shimmering sheet of water lying in a shallow basin scooped by the continental ice sheet out of two plutonic granites that formed about 160 million years ago, at the beginning of the Jurassic Period. A contact between them runs through the pond basin: to the east, running down into the Notch, Conway Granite, which is visible in the cliffs of Cannon Mountain and was the rock of the late, lamented Old Man of the Mountain; to the west and uphill, Kinsman quartz monzonite, laced with large crystals of potash feldspar. The contact between the two granites is indistinguishable to casual hikers, but one of the formations makes an important difference in this pond.

As many fishermen know, most New Hampshire waters in areas of granite bedrock are acidic by nature, and not conducive to the growth of vegetable or larval life that are so important to fish species, especially native brook trout. The recent introduction of acid rain has made them even more so. Some former native trout ponds and streams have become toxic to these sensitive fish. Not so Lonesome Lake. It's surrounded by acidic black bogs with soil so low in nutrients that the insectivorous plant sundew thrives here, attracting, capturing, and digesting unwary flies. Yet the water of the pond is only mildly acidic. Its tributary stream rises high up on the Kinsman monzonite formation, and the feldspar in the formation releases calcium silicate, a buffering agent. So brook trout have thrived here since the end of the last Ice Age. In 1946 the state began stocking it with fingerlings, and it's supposed to be good fishing.

You couldn't prove it by my experience here yesterday. It was a bit sunny for fly-fishing, but I gave it a whirl. No luck over by the dam, and my back cast was threatening passing hikers, anyway, so I trudged on the plank bridges over to the inlet. It was full of fingerlings and juvenile trout that scooted away like lightning at my approach; but when I waded out into the pond up to my knees, the gravel of the inlet bottom gave way to sucky, smelly mud. Once or twice I thought I was going down out of sight, just like a bad guy in a jungle movie. I got out of there, and on the way back to the hut, stepped off the boardwalk and went face first and three feet deep into a really foul-smelling black mire. The guys with me thought it was pretty funny, and snapped photos as I rinsed off in the pond back at the swimming dock, fouling the clear water all around me.

The Appalachian Mountain Club operates a 46-person-capacity hut up here for hikers. It advertises it as a "family hut," and the dozens of kids here bear that out. The hut crew, the usual galaxy of Ivy Leaguers, is engagingly good-humored and creative, and the cooking beats the usual undergraduate productions by a mile. Last night we had roast turkey, corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce all carried up here by the four crew members who make the trip down to the Notch every day. They also implored us to carry out every bit of trash we generate. What we don't, they have to. There are no more hidden dumps up here.

After supper last night, I felt like bed. But I knew that, whenever I kipped out, I'd be awake six hours later. The kids were skylarking everywhere and making a lot of noise and a couple of very young ones were weeping petulantly in their bunks, anyway; so I hung on till 9:30 and then tucked in with a headlight and [ital] High Huts of the White Mountains. [ital]

At three I woke up and decided on a trip up the hill to the men's head. Moonlight flooded in through the screen door; I wouldn't need the headlight. I stepped out onto the porch.

A brilliant horned moon hung over the Notch and flooded Franconia Ridge and Mount Lafayette with silver light. Almost directly overhead, I saw the Milky Way for the first time in months, and realized how light-polluted the skies over the Upper Valley have become. It wasn't my usual time of night for outdoor sky-viewing, and I had a really hard time identifying the unfamiliar locations of the constellations, even the Great Bear. Venus, though, hung like the landing light of an approaching airliner, just above the ridge to the east. Somebody else was on the porch, too, looking at the same sky. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us needed to.