Down The Trail

At 3,941 feet, Mount Greylock is the highest point in Massachusetts. The lighthouse and observation tower on top – The Veterans War Memorial Tower – was originally meant to be a lighthouse in Boston. The beacon was once the brightest in all of Massachusetts. When lit, it can be seen from Goddard Shelter on The Long Trail.

This is Bascom Lodge – home of rustic overnight accomodations on Mount Greylock. The road to the summit is closed for construction for two years, so the lodge and tower are closed as well. There isn’t even a faucet available for drinking water.

This also means that there’s no people. I have the mountain to myself.

City lights shine under the night sky.

I stay the night inside the Thunderbolt Ski Shelter. It’s a fully enclosed structure intended to be used as emergency shelter only, but nobody may ever know I was here.

For some reason I can’t help but think of ghosts and little green men in this setting.

I have two friends named Gavin and Lou – and take a photo this coincedental graffiti inside the shelter – before going to sleep to the sound of wind in the trees.

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October 22, 2007

This quote along The Applachian Trail is one of my favorite features of Greylock. The summit area features a number of rocks like this, engraved with quotes primarily related to the mountain. Greylock served as inspiration for the likes of Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant , Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Herman Melville. When writing Moby Dick at his home in Pittsfield, Melville would gaze from his window at Greylock covered in snow and envision a great white whale.

Bascom Lodge

inside the Thunderbolt Ski Shelter

There’s nothing left to do but turn down the mountain and into town, where I’ll catch a bus home to Pennsylvania, and resume working for dollars and cents in this crazy world that we all call home.

But first I can lie in the sun on Williamstown’s college green and read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Hike North______________The Long Trail______________Hike South

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