Moosilauke Summit Gamp
ON JULY FOURTH the Moosilauke Summit Camp of the Dartmouth Outing Club will have its seventy-fifth birthday the oldest summit house in the country. Seventy-five years of New England blizzards, battering gales and thunder storms —that is the record which has been indelibly engraved without dedication on the rocks of the sturdy foundation walls. This, and the unwritten record of years of hearty mountain hospitality have combined themselves into an intangible summit personality which imbues the summer climber with the full charm of the mountain.
In iB6O, the "Prospect House," as the Summit Camp was then known, was built by Darius Swain and James Clement, aided by a small construction crew. At night, rather than expose themselves to the harsh winds of the unprotected summit, they camped about a mile below the top, at Cold Spring, on the carriage road. The House was officially opened on July 4th, iB6O with a patriotic oration, and a regiment of exhausted militia, accompanied by a breathless Newbury Brass Band whose performance was considerably impaired by extreme difficulties encountered on the climb. It is said that almost a thousand loyal citizens made merry on the windy mountain top that day, inspired not so much by the dedication speech as by vast quantities of old New England rum hauled up on the carriage road.
The carriage road was abandoned almost twenty-five years ago and has subsequently been reclaimed only by skiers and a buckboard which laboriously hauls the bulk of summer supplies, although two model "T" Fords have managed to negotiate the difficult five miles. The last one made the ascent in 1927.
In 1920 the summit of the mountain, including the house and about eight hundred acres of land was given to the Dartmouth Outing Club by E. K. Woodworth '97, and C. P. Woodworth '07, and has since been run each summer by an undergraduate crew as a non-commercial enterprise, catering to those for whom these mountains have a strong appeal.
Within the last few years numerous improvements have been made on the old house—a stone fireplace and chimney, an electric lighting system, and running water have been added from year to year by the efforts of the hut crew. A telephone line was laboriously installed to facilitate reservations from climbers and to aid with the Forest Service in their fire protection work, but the ravages of nature succeeded in demolishing that useful unit about two years ago.
But the Moosilauke Summit Camp is more than a place for the accommodation of climbers—it is a Dartmouth hut, steeped in Dartmouth tradition, run by an enthusiastic undergraduate crew to whom the College and its activities mean much. This, and the songs and stories around the fire at night while the north wind bangs the shutters against the walls—these things constitute the distinctive assets of the Summit Camp.
