Boulder Hi & Boulder Lo

Behind Pager's house is a lilac garden that Travis created in 1999 in memory of Grandma. Here is Pager standing in the lilac garden in May 2006:

Note Bill's sugarhouse in the background. The thing in the center of the lilac garden is a potash kettle.

The subject of this post is the small building next to the lilac garden. Here are two better photos of the building. The first was taken in June 2000 when the lilac garden was young (and the sun was shining), and the second was taken yesterday (in the rain):


This building has an interesting history. It is currently used for storage. I can remember when we raised chickens in it. During World War II it sat on the hill above the Boyden Farm — Pager says it was intended to be a place where someone could stay to guard the electric power line from saboteurs, but it was never manned. Originally, however, this little building was a tourist cabin at the Big Spring in Smugglers Notch:

The Big Spring is still there, but without any sign or buildings (only a small parking lot). It is opposite the beginning of the Hell Brook Trail. In the 1930s there was a tourist attraction here called Boulder Cabin, and it included tourist cabins. The building behind Pager's house is one of the tourist cabins.

Pager talks about two tourist cabins: Boulder-Hi and Boulder-Lo. But apparently there was also Boulder-Ette and Boulder-Ite as well as a main building named Boulder Cabin. Here is an advertisement that was reprinted by the Cambridge Historical Society in 2006:

The advertisement does not say so, but Pager says the tourist attraction included a stocked trout pond fed by the Big Spring. Overnight guests could catch their dinner and have it cooked for them. (Confirmed in this book, p. 52.)

Boulder Cabin was run by Pearl Shafer and her husband. Before this area of Smugglers Notch was added to the Mount Mansfield State Forest in 1940, it was owned by L.S. Morse, a Cambridge lumberman and mill owner. Pearl was Mr. Morse's daughter. (The area where Smugglers Notch Resort is located was known as Morses Mill. The building now housing the restaurant Stella Notte was a boarding house for the sawmill workers.)

Here is a slightly damaged photo of two of the four tourist cabins at the Big Spring:

On the left is Boulder-Ite, and on the right is Boulder-Lo. Alas, we don't know which one of the four tourist cabins is the one behind Pager's house.

On the back of the building are these 1949 Vermont license plates:

Pager says the cabin came to the farm from the hill near Boydens in 1946.

International Thanksgiving

On the day after Thanksgiving, we again had an "International Thanksgiving" dinner, as we did in 2007 and 2006. Chalene, Edna and Congcong prepared a spread that looked as good as it tasted:

From top to bottom — Korean scallion pancakes by Chalene (oval plate), Japanese shrimp tempura by Congcong and Chalene (round plate), Ma Po tofu by Chalene (round bowl):

Seafood noodles by Congcong (heart shaped dish):

Chinese steamed pork buns by Edna (top left) and eggplant and sweet potato and shrimp tempura (large plate in center):

Tamagoyaki (sweet omelette) by Chalene (large plate at top left—this is something that Japanese mothers often make for their children in school lunch boxes), mushroom tempura (small plate at top right), and Ma Po tofu (bowl):

For dessert (no photos) we had crepes by Emily with Japanese/Chinese red bean paste by Edna, manjar (aka dulce de leche) by Emily, Nutella, maple syrup and ice cream. Note that dessert included favorite repeats from prior years—crepes (Marion) and manjar (Camila).

Thanks, Chalene, Congcong, Edna and Emily, for a delicious feast!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all! All three children were home, and Emily brought three friends from Middlebury: Chalene, Congcong and Edna.


This was Chalene's third year at our house for Thanksgiving, Congcong's second, and Edna's first.

Last year we were in New Zealand. Click here for Thanksgiving 2007. I had not started the blog in 2006.

If it hadn't been for the war...

The previous post about Freeman Dyson relates to something else I've been thinking about recently.

I am currently listening to "Biology: The Science of Life," a set of lectures from The Teaching Company. (Highly recommended. Biology is much more fascinating than I had realized.)

I'm only a few lectures into the course, but one name that keeps coming up over and over again is Francis Crick. Freeman Dyson tells a story about Francis Crick at the end of the online article that was the subject of the previous post:

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Briefly, both Dyson and Crick were British physicists. They met for the first time in 1945, before World War II ended. Dyson was 21. Crick was 28, and had spent his 20s working for the British government in the war effort. Crick was depressed, because the war effort had taken six years out of his physics career. For a scientist, one's 20s are often a period of high productivity that sets the foundation for one's professional career.

At the time Freeman Dyson thought: "How sad. Such a bright chap. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would probably have been quite a good scientist."

But Francis Crick didn't give up. And he didn't return to physics, either. He changed disciplines to biology. Together with James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA just eight years after the end of World War II. (Nobel prize 1962.) Francis Crick continued to make many important discoveries in biology until his death in 2004.

Freeman Dyson in his own words

I've mentioned Freeman Dyson a couple of times recently — in the previous post and last March. Here is Freeman Dyson in his own words (August 8, 2007):

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

He first talks about the importance of heretics. Feynman would have agreed.

Then he talks about three heresies:

1. "All the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated." Dyson does an excellent job of briefly describing all the various aspects of global warming, from polar ice to topsoil.

2. "The wet Sahara." Dyson says the Sahara was wet 6,000 years ago; that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide might bring back such a climate; and that this might be a good thing. In this part of the paper, he writes about the philosophical differences between naturalists and humanists.

3. The third heresy is not about global warming. It is about global dominance. "The United States has less than a century left of its turn as top nation." He has some good thoughts for today's young people.

Freeman Dyson begins this paper with a story about the famous astronomer Tommy Gold, and he concludes with a story about the famous biologist Francis Crick. It is a good read, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

The CRU hack - so what?

Background here.

So "the CRU hack" might have been the work of a whistleblower, not a hacker. So what? Was there any wrongdoing to blow the whistle on?

You can find lots of discussion on this issue all over the Internet. (Here's one place to start. Here's another.) I don't see any evidence of wrongdoing in the sense of outright fabrication of data. But there is plenty of reason to wonder if there is wrongdoing in the sense of groupthink and cherry-picking of data (maybe even suppressing data) to support a particular point of view.

As just one example, this 2008 e-mail exchange between Dr. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU, and Dr. Michael Mann about deleting e-mails, if true, is troubling:

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[The reference to "AR4" means the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC, released in 2007. The reference to "CA" means the Climate Audit blog.] Any request to delete e-mails on a particular subject, especially at a time when the organization is responding to FOIA requests, is troubling. (Note that the subject of the e-mail is "IPCC & FOI.")

Whether or not any of this is illegal, I leave to others. But I think a strong case can be made that it is bad science. That's the root of the controversy: is the science of climate change good science or bad science? What is science, anyway?

It is clear that the scientists at CRU and RealClimate are human, with egos and emotions. They aren't always nice. Consider this quote from the first post on RealClimate in response to this incident:

It’s obvious that the noise-generating components of the blogosphere will generate a lot of noise about this. but it’s important to remember that science doesn’t work because people are polite at all times. Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person. QED isn’t powerful because Feynman was respectful of other people around him.

True enough. But it's interesting that they would mention Feynman, an authority on scientific integrity. That's what this is about at bottom. See especially Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement speech titled "Cargo Cult Science." Feynman said that scientific integrity requires

utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards....If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it.

Feynman wasn't talking about deliberate attempts to fool others. He was talking about the very human tendency to fool oneself: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

Do the e-mails in "the CRU hack" reveal "a kind of leaning over backwards" to consider other points of view? No, just the opposite. If true, they reveal a concerted effort to stamp out other points of view. This is bad science. What "the CRU hack" makes us wonder is this: are the establishment scientists involved in climate change fooling themselves?

Feynman is dead, so we can't ask him what he thinks about the state of climate science. But a one-time colleague, Freeman Dyson, with views similar to Feynman's about scientific integrity, has lately turned his formidable intellect to climate science. His view? "Lousy science."

UPDATE 12/03/09: Today's Wall Street Journal has a letter to the editor with most of the above Feynman quotes. It's nice to know that Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" speech has not been forgotten.

The CRU hack

Private e-mails between scientists at a major climate change research center, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England, were published on the Internet a few days ago. Here are several articles about the incident:

New York Times: Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute

Christian Science Monitor: Hacked climate emails: conspiracy or tempest in a teapot?

Washington Post: In the trenches on climate change, hostility among foes

For more background and perspective, I recommend two blogs that represent polar opposite views about climate science:

RealClimate, run by Dr. Gavin Schmidt. Dr. Schmidt is a climatologist who works for NASA (but the blog is not affiliated with NASA). A number of leading U.S. climatologists contribute to RealClimate.

Climate Audit, run by Steven McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining businessman with a background in mathematics. (Mirror site for high traffic situations)

Scientists at the CRU and RealClimate are major contributors to the reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC reports are said to represent the scientific establishment's consensus view on climate change. IPCC reports are used by policy makers around the world to justify major government controls and programs such as the cap and trade legislation currently being debated in the U.S. Congress.

Mr. McIntyre, on the other hand, asks skeptical questions about the "consensus" view of climate change.

Many of the "hacked" e-mails are between scientists at the CRU and RealClimate. And many of those e-mails are about Steve McIntyre and a handful of other scientists who ask inconvenient questions about the science of climate change.

A good place to begin to understand the controversy is with the famous (or infamous) hockey stick graph:

Dr. Michael Mann and two colleagues developed the original hockey stick graph. Dr. Mann is a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University and a contributor to the RealClimate blog. The graph shows that temperatures have risen dramatically in recent years (the hockey stick shape). This graph was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC report.

Steve McIntyre began his blog in 2003 to question the data and methodology behind the hockey stick graph. He has continued to question the data and methodology of published articles on climate change. A recurring theme of the Climate Audit blog has been the reluctance of establishment scientists to release for public scrutiny the data and methodology behind their published articles.

And now we are getting to something about "the CRU hack" that I think the newspaper articles above missed. I titled this post "The CRU hack" because that is the title of the first post on RealClimate responding to this event. And the word "hack" is used in all the newspaper articles I cited above. But it is not at all clear that this event was a hack.

On his blog, Steve McIntyre writes about recently asking the CRU to release certain data under the U.K.'s Freedom of Information Act. The CRU refused, citing contractual agreements that prevent disclosure. Mr. McIntyre appealed this decision. On Nov. 13, the CRU refused his appeal. Days later, "the CRU hack" was anonymously released to the public in a file titled "FOIA.zip" and accompanied by this message:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.

This could have been the work not of a hacker but of a whistleblower.

More thoughts here.

A Man and His Horse

Recently I read to Pager a story about Morgan horses from this book. I mentioned to Pager that he must have had some horses on the farm that had Morgan blood in them, and he said yes. I asked if he remembered any of their names, and he said no. But after a few minutes he said that he remembered a horse named Beauty that he'd had as a young man. I said that was a nice name. He said she was a nice horse.

And then he said something that surprised me: "There's something between a man and a horse that you can't put into words."

I was surprised because I'd never heard Pager be this sentimental about a horse before. And I was also surprised because one doesn't hear this much any more. Maybe about a woman and a horse, but not so much about a man and a horse. (At least not in the east.) In my previous post I wrote about changes during Pager's lifetime. But here's one I missed—the use of horses has changed from almost exclusively by men to almost exclusively by women. I don't know why that should be, but it just is.

It turns out that Pager has a photo album about Beauty. Here's the first page (click on photos to enlarge):

The writing says: "Boots, born September 1936, purchased April 2, 1937, from C.J. Munn, Johnson, Vermont, priced at $65, named Beauty, nicknamed Boots while being used with Black Beauty." Black Beauty was another horse on the farm; the album has a photo of the two horses working together "haying at Gomo's."

Here is a photo of Pager holding Boots in front of the farmhouse in 1937 soon after she was purchased:

On the porch are Pager's parents, Mabell (normally spelled Mabelle?) and Kinsley, Pager's sister Elizabeth (mostly hidden), and a boarder named Edson Cook. Pager was 22 or 23 at the time.

The album has many pictures of Boots being trained or ridden, and of Boots pulling something such as a sleigh or a gathering tub of sap. But most of the photos are of Boots with young women. Boots was a chick magnet! There are six different single young women in the pictures, not counting Pager's sister Elizabeth. Here is a photo of Mother's sister, Evelyn Gould, in 1942:

And here are several photos of Mother (Lois Gould), probably about the same time:

Pager called her Pat (and she called him Put). The caption says: "Boots and Pat, let it go at that." Put and Pat were married on June 16, 1946.

Changes in Pager's Lifetime

I've been remiss about posting birthday celebrations. Pager's 95th birthday was on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. We celebrated at his house the day before, which was Labor Day.

I've been thinking about the changes that Pager has seen in his lifetime. (Pager is fond of noting that Europeans discovered this part of the world only 400 years ago, and he's been around for almost a quarter of that time.) The photo below is four years old (11/6/05) but it shows Pager listening to Laura's iPod Nano. Now there's some change!

Modern electronics like the iPod Nano and computers (including blogs) would not be possible without quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and relativity were the two major scientific developments of the 20th century. Both got started in the decade just before Pager was born, with major papers in both areas by Einstein in 1905.

What else was going on in the world when Pager was born on September 8, 1914? The Germans had just invaded Belgium and France the month before, starting World War I. But that didn't directly affect Pager. Let's consider how the world looked to Pager.

When Pager was a boy, the most advanced method of transportation available to him at home on the farm was a horse & buggy. If he rode in the buggy to Cambridge village, two miles away, he could board a steam train. No cars or tractors. Certainly no commercial airplanes. No radio or TV, and certainly no computers. No electricity! Artificial light was by candle or lantern. Pager's parents did have a telephone at the farm. In fact, they had to use the telephone on the day he was born. It was a difficult birth, and he might not have made it into the world if the telephone had not been available to call a doctor. Of course, the telephone technology was different from today. Not many people today remember the crank telephone.

Here are a few milestones in communications and transportation in the years before Pager was born:

- steam engines (first commercial steam railroad 1830)
- telegraph (1844)
- telephone (1876)
- internal combustion engines (1876)
- radio (1902)
- propeller airplanes (Wright Brothers—1903)
- automobiles (first widely available car—Model T—1908)

Other major developments, that we now take for granted, did not come until later—in the 1930s. The first major television broadcast was the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Jet airplanes were first flown by the Germans in 1939. In 1936 the British mathematician Alan Turing proposed his concept of universal computation, the so-called Turing machine, which eventually led to the computer that we know today.

The first car at the Putnam farm, a Model T, came in 1921, when Pager was 6 or 7. Electricity did not come to the farm until 1941, when Pager was 26 or 27. The first tractor on the farm was in 1943—a "Doodle Bug," really an old Model A truck that had been modified for field work. Until that time, all field work was done with horses. Pager was the one who introduced tractors to the farm. No doubt his father couldn't understand why horses weren't perfectly adequate.

If I make a list of the biggest changes that Pager has seen, I come up with the following: cars; tractors; electricity; modern telephone; radio; TV; computers; the Internet; jet airplanes; putting a man on the Moon in 1969; space probes to all of the planets; 15 million dead in World War I—at the time the worst war the world had ever seen, but soon to be eclipsed by 50 million dead in World War II; 25-50 million dead in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919; the right to vote for women in 1920; the atomic bomb; nuclear energy; refrigeration; antibiotics; biotechnology; the rise of the carbon-based economy (soon to fall?); the rise and fall of communism (another 25-50 million dead).

Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments on what you think are the biggest changes that Pager has seen in his lifetime.

UPDATE 11/27/09: Here's something I forgot to mention—Vermont is much more wooded now than it was when Pager was born. In 1910, Vermont was 70% cropland and pastureland. In 2002 it was only 11% cropland and pastureland, with most of the rest being woods (some is cities, villages and roads). Source: Census of Agriculture. I wrote about this for work here and here (first comment).

George's 2nd Birthday

While looking through Pager's photo albums recently, I found this picture of me on my 2nd birthday:

Also in the photo is Pager (he was "Daddy" then, simply "Dad" later), Grandpa (J. Kinsley Putnam) and Beth. My guess is that what everyone is smiling at is Pager wiggling his ears. Pager had a way of wiggling his ears without moving any other muscles that fascinated us kids.

A few days ago I showed this picture to Pager and explained what I thought was going on. I asked him if he could still wiggle his ears. Instantly, he did! He still can wiggle his ears in a way that I've never seen anyone else do.

At the time of this picture (1957), Pager was 42, Grandpa was 83 and Beth was 9 almost 10. The photo was taken in the kitchen at the farmhouse. Note the blackboard on the wall behind the table. It was used extensively to write notes to family members.

Quebec City - Churches

Quebec City has many churches. We toured two. Notre-Dame de Quebec Cathedral has been located on this site since 1647:


The smaller Notre-Dame-des-Victoires dates back to 1687:


Quebec City is divided into an Upper Town (most of the city) and a Lower Town (next to the river). Notre-Dame de Quebec Cathedral is located in Upper Town, while Notre-Dame-des-Victoires is located in Lower Town.

Quebec City - Statues

Quebec City is full of statues. Here is a bust of Louis XIV:

In the photo above, the church at the left is Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, which was built during his reign. (See this post for more pictures of churches.)

Of course there is a statue of Samuel de Champlain:

The statue of Champlain is in Dufferin Terrace, in front of the Chateau Frontenac. The angle on the above photo is not very good, but it was the only angle that captured the English inscription on the base. Click here for a better angle.

There were also many statues outside of the walled city. All of the statues below are located outside Old Quebec.

The facade of the Parliament Building for the Province of Quebec has many statues (all of the dark spots):

Directly over the main entrance to the Parliament Building, in the center, are statues of Wolfe and Montcalm (close-up).

Below is a statue of Montcalm in front of Loews Hotel le Concorde. Montcalm was mortally wounded in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and died the next day. The statue shows him standing, sword in hand, but with an angel hovering over his shoulder:

Nearby in a park named for her is a statue of Joan of Arc:

Most of the statues in the city were of historical figures, but not all. Just outside our hotel was a statue of the Muses.

Quebec City - Fortifications

Old Quebec is a walled city. It is the only such city in the U.S. or Canada with its fortifications still intact. Our hotel in Place D'Youville was just outside one of the three gates through the wall:

[In the photo above, note the ice skating rink at the left. The pile of snow in front of the gate is from the Zamboni that maintained the skating rink, not from the weather.]

The highest point of land in the city is occupied by the Citadelle, a fort within a fortified city. Construction of the Citadelle was started by the French in the late 1600s but most of the current fort was built by the British in the 1820s to protect against attack from the Americans (which never came). The Citadelle is still an active Canadian military installation, home to the Royal 22e Regiment. Flags at the Citadelle were flying at half-mast because of the recent death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan.

The Citadelle is not imposing from the outside. It does not rise much above the land. Below is the entrance, which is itself reached only by a circuitous route and therefore not visible until you are upon it:

The only way to get inside the Citadelle is on a guided tour (highly recommended). Below is the view from inside the Citadelle at the height of land. Note the Chateau Frontenac in the distance at the right.

The view below is from the same spot (note the Chateau Frontenac again). The general direction of this view is downriver, but of course the English were concerned about possible attacks from either direction. The cannon at the right is pointed upriver, in the general direction of the refinery noted earlier, and when operational it was capable of firing twice as far as that refinery.

Just outside the Citadelle, and therefore also just outside the walls of Old Quebec, is a high plateau known as the Plains of Abraham. Here there are additional fortifications, including this Martello Tower:

The open fields which constitute the "plains" are just to the right of the above photo. Today they are part of the popular Battlefields Park. A pivotal battle was fought here in 1759 during what we call the French and Indian War. Canadian history can be divided into three periods: the French period, the English period, and the Canadian period. The French period ended in the 20 minute Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

Briefly, the British General James Wolfe (only 32 years old) was sent down the St. Lawrence River in May 1759 with about 8,000 men and 50 ships and with orders to take Quebec City. After nearly four months of bombardment and several skirmishes, he had damaged the city but not taken it. In September he hit upon a plan for a small force to climb the cliffs to the Plains of Abraham during the night. The French were not expecting an attack from this direction, and they were defeated. Both Wolfe and the commanding French General, Louis Joseph de Montcalm, were killed, but the British held the field.

Quebec City - Halloween

We were in Quebec City for Halloween, and there were signs of it everywhere...from City Hall:

... to the Joan of Arc Garden in the Battlefields Park on the Plains of Abraham (note the sign):

...to the public restrooms (note the sign):

We had dinner Halloween night at Panache (highly recommended). No Halloween celebrations there, but walking back to our hotel after dinner we saw two guided "Ghost Tours" walking around the city.

Quebec City

Nancy and I went to Quebec City over Halloween weekend. Nancy had been before, years ago, but I had not. (It's my third year in a row taking a foreign trip in the fall!)

Quebec is an old city, having been founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain. They celebrated their quadricentennial a year ago. After spending the winter of 1608-09 in Quebec, Champlain discovered Lake Champlain in 1609 (the same year Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River). The Lake Champlain region celebrated its quadricentennial this year.

Champlain chose the site for the city because it made a good place to defend the interior from attack by sea. Quebec means "where the river narrows." Any military force sailing up the river had to pass close to the city. And the city is located high on a bluff above the river, which gives it a commanding presence over the river and also makes it difficult to attack the city itself. This view looking upriver gives you an idea of the location's command over the St. Lawrence River:

The photo above shows the upper end of the Promenade des Gouverneurs, a delightful walkway. Note the refinery across the river at the left. I'll refer to this in a later post.

We spent most of our time in "Old Quebec," which is now mostly hotels, restaurants, shops, churches and museums. Here is one of the touristy areas (du Petit-Champlain):

The skyline of Quebec City is dominated by the Chateau Frontenac, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway starting in 1893:

Here is another view of the Chateau Frontenac, from the lower end of the Promenade des Gouverneurs mentioned above:

We did not stay at the Chateau Frontenac, but we did take a tour of the hotel. That was one of the highlights of the trip. Behind me in the photo is the lower end of the famous toboggan run on the Dufferin Terrace. Check out this video (not mine).

Visitors from far away and long ago

Margaret and Robbi Porter visited us in early October:

We last saw Margaret in Christchurch, New Zealand last November. And we last saw Robbi, now living in upstate New York, at a Gould sister family reunion at Sand Bar State Park in 1987!

As you can tell from the t-shirts in the photo above ("I survived the Flavor Graveyard"), they visited Ben & Jerry's. They also explored a good deal of Jeffersonville and Smugglers Notch. The covered bridge on the Canyon Road:

And the height of land on VT-108 through Smugglers Notch:

Even though it was just the beginning of foliage season, we had snow on the mountain tops on the day that Margaret and Robbi arrived—October 1st. Seems early for snow. Madonna Mountain on October 2nd:

Margaret and Robbi, we hope you return soon!

Emily Hikes the Long Trail

Emily hiked the Long Trail this summer, becoming the third member of the family to do so. Laura hiked it in 2006, and I hiked it with the Boy Scouts 1997-2001.

Emily and her friend Heather started at the Vermont-Massachusetts border on August 1st:

The first resupply stop, four days later, at VT-11/30 near Manchester:

Emily and Heather hiked through to Camels Hump and then came off the trail so that Emily could attend a wedding among other things. Emily hiked the LT from Camels Hump to the Canadian border in a series of day hikes and short backpacking trips, not necessarily in order (but always northbound). The last section was actually back at Camels Hump. Emily was joined on this hike by her friends Allie and Alex from Middlebury, Brian, Nancy and me. On top of Camels Hump on September 12th:


At the clearing just north of the summit, we celebrated with champagne! Brian left us there and returned to Boston.

The end of the hike, done at last:

Congratulations, Emily!