Jim is glad to have visitors call upon him at his mountain-top
resort, and to encourage such he has made an excellent trail to the
nearest point on Long Lake, about three miles, and has marked it with
signs to point the way up the mountain. Jim will lend you his
field-glass, name the points of interest in view, make coffee for
you, if you bring the makings, and discuss with you the latest
political questions, philosophy or religion.
[Illustration: Jim in his Look-out Tower]
In a book entitled, "The Adirondack, or Life in the Woods," published
in 1849, J. T. Headley, the author, writes about his visit to the top
of Owl's Head Mountain, with his guide, Mitchell Sabattis, an Indian,
and the first settler on Long Lake. Headley says that in returning
they "lost their way and were fourteen hours without food." He
describes the view from the top of Owl's Head as follows:
"It looks off on a prospect that would make your heart stand still in
your bosom. Look away toward that distant horizon! In its broad sweep
round the heavens, it takes in nearly four hundred miles, while
between slumbers an ocean but it is an ocean of tree tops. Conceive,
if you can, this vast expanse stretching on and spreading away, till
the bright green becomes shaded into a deep black, with not a sound
to break the solitude, and not a hand's breadth of land in view
throughout the whole. It is a vast forest-ocean, with mountain ridges
for billows, rolling smoothly and gently on like the subsiding swell
of a storm. I stand on the edge of a precipice which throws its naked
wall far down to the tops of the fir trees below, and look off on
this surpassing wild and strange spectacle. The life that villages,
and towns, and cultivated fields give to a landscape is not here,
neither is there the barrenness and savageness of the view from
Tahawus. It is all vegetation--luxuriant, gigantic vegetation; but
man has had no hand in it. It stands as the Almighty made it,
majestic and silent, save when the wind or the storm breathes on it,
waking up its myriad low-toned voices, which sing:
'The wild profound eternal bass
In nature's anthem.'
Oh, how still and solemn it slumbers below me; while far away yonder,
to the left, shoots up into the heavens the massive peaks of the
Adirondack chain, mellowed here, by the distance, into beauty. Yet
there is one relief to this vast forest solitude--like gems sleeping
in a moss bed, lakes are everywhere glittering in the bright
sunshine. How calm and trustingly they repose on the bosom of the
wilderness! Thirty-six, a hunter tells me, can be counted from this
summit, though I do not see over twenty. * * * Some of these are from
four to six miles in width, and yet they look like mere pools at this
distance, and in the midst of such a mass of green.
I have gazed on many mountain prospects in this and the old world,
but this view has awakened an entirely new class of emotions."
[Illustration: Jim entertaining a guest on the mountain]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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