Beyond this low notch the trail leads irregularly upward and eventually comes out on Bare Mountain. The top is bare indeed; even scrub oak is absent from the summit. The long south slope of the Range is clearly visible, and to the west is the Mount Holyoke Hotel where the hike started. The Mount Tom Range, with the Connecticut River at its foot, is just to the left. Due south are the towers of Mount Holyoke College and the cities of Holyoke and Springfield. If the day is clear, the tall buildings of Hartford appear in the far distance. Six hundred feet directly below, the highway goes through the Notch, and across the road is the trap quarry in Notch Mountain, which supplies the crushed stone for the local highways. The face of Notch Mountain lies north of the main line of the Range because the basalt sheet has been displaced northward between fault planes that bound the eminences on either side. The notches utilized by the highway and by the power line are due to facile erosion of the crushed rock along the fault planes. Farther to the east, Mount Norwottock rises to the greatest height in the Range, and the view from its summit is at least the equal of that from Bare Mountain. The Hadley lowland stretches northward between the Pelham Hills on the east and the Berkshire Hills on the west, and protruding above its relatively flat surface are Mount Warner, Mount Sugarloaf and Mount Toby. The Deerfield gorge trenches the western upland just west of Sugarloaf, and on the skyline is Glastenbury far off in Vermont. [Illustration: Fig. 24. _Diagrams showing the stages in development of topography in the vicinity of the Notch._] [Illustration: a. _The New England peneplain stage at the Notch._] [Illustration: b. _The incoherent rocks are removed from the lava flow._] [Illustration: c. _The contours of the cliffs are smoothed out._] The downward trail follows the cliff above the highway. The drop is rapid but not precipitous, and soon the western half of the trail is behind. The east end of the Range, especially beyond Mount Norwottock, is less commonly visited, but it offers much more of the valley’s story. Here the Range is more broken than it is in the western half, and the trail winds through valleys for much of the distance. Long gentle slopes from the west lead to mountain summits, and steep eastern descents take the hiker into the valleys. Plainly the walk is much easier from west to east than in the opposite direction.