College Forester Retires
Robert Scott Monahan '29, recently retired after 23 years as College Forester, is the compleat out-doorsman. He also is, or has been, a writer, a successful politician and legislator, and an expert in the development and management of outdoor recreational facilities, not as separate activities, but as extensions of Bob Monahan, the woodsman, concerned with protecting the natural balance and beauty of the land.
His bent toward the rugged life began early. He climbed Mt. Washington with his father when he was 12, and worked at the Pinkham Notch Camp while still in high school. At Dartmouth he was captain of the cross-country team and chairman of the trips and cabins committee of the Dartmouth Outing Club.
Like all good woodsmen, Bob Monahan has a lot of stories and anecdotes tucked away in a prodigious memory. The events of his own life provide a number of campfire reminiscences as well. One of the earliest goes back to his junior year at Dartmouth when he got credit for what is thought to be the largest one-man mass arrest in New Hampshire history. Just twenty, he was working as a forest guard in the White Mountains when he came across a band of fifty gypsies who were peeling the bark from the beautiful white birches along the bank of the Peabody River. He was so indignant that he arrested them all, ignoring the 50-to-l odds against him.
As a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry, from which he received the degree Master of Forestry in 1931, he got to know the other extreme of forest conditions on a clinical assignment in the wild bottom land of Louisiana, where bears, wolves and cotton-mouth moccasins were constant hazards. Later, in the forestry service, he learned the loneliness of the prolonged patrol when during one three-week trip on horseback, he never encountered another person.
In 1932, he explored the glaciers of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska with the Washburn Expedition, and that same year, helped establish the Mt. Washington Weather Observatory and Radio Research Station. He and two colleagues spent the winter atop the great mountain where the severity of weather conditions make world records (i.e. the 231 mph wind recorded on April 12, 1934) and the experience forms the basis of his book MountWashington Reoccupied. The initial occupation was in 1870-71 when a party of meteorological observers spent the winter on the summit.
At the time of his marriage in 1933 to his childhood sweetheart, Alice Haynes of Phenix, Rhode Island, he was in charge of a CCC camp at Pinkham Notch. Altogether he chalked up over 15 years with the U. S. Forestry Service, filling several assignments in the northeast, New Mexico, Washington, D. C., and California before coming to Dartmouth in 1947 as the first full-time College Forester and Manager of Outing Properties.
The Dartmouth Grant is the largest (26,800 acres) and wildest of the areas for which the College Forester has responsibility. Another of the properties is the Moosilauke area, including the Ravine Lodge built in the late 30's. Now a base camp for climbers, it was once an outstanding ski resort, and its famous downhill run "Hell's Highway" was the site of the first national downhill race. The coming of mechanized ski tows took skiing away from Moosilauke to the Skiway in Lyme and Dartmouth closed the lodge to the public in 1963.
When President Eisenhower visited the Grant in 1955, Bob was his personal guide and a few years later in a tribute to the late Tommy Dent, Bob told the story behind a widely circulated picture of the President which displayed a quite unusual expression. It seems that a few minutes before the press closed in to take informal shots of the President preparing to "break camp," Tommy had given him several carefully tied samples of his favorite trout flies, including the famous Parmachenee Belle. Ike stuffed them in his pocket and forgot about them until, as the shutters started to click, he shoved his hands straight into the fly hooks and his famous grin was broken up by a combination of extreme surprise and mild pain. This was one of the stories Bob recounted in his weekly column "Off Main Street" which appeared in the Hanover Gazette for many years.
Very active in civic affairs on both the state and local level, Bob Monahan represented Hanover in the New Hampshire legislature from 1957 to 1963, including two terms as a representative and two terms as senator, and in 1963 was Republican majority floor leader of the upper house. His activities on behalf of conservation and forest management have extended far beyond Dartmouth and include service in some capacity in innumerable professional organizations.
In speeches before civic groups and testimony to regulatory boards, he has always stressed the enormous importance of New Hampshire forests to the well-being of the whole state. Over twenty years ago, he appeared before the Pollution Board in Concord to oppose some of the irate and shortsighted citizens who wanted to continue to dump untreated sewage into some of the state's finest waters.
Thirty years ago, Bob built his own log cabin on Bear Notch Road in Passaconaway, N. H. While he will continue to serve the College as a consultant on some of its woodland properties, his official retirement may bring him a free weekend to use it.
Bob has two Dartmouth brothers, DeLong H. '24 and Theodore V. '33. His elder son, Bob '59 (Thayer '60), is in British Columbia as technical director of the Powell River plant of MacMillan-Bloedel, largest newsprint manufacturers in the world. Son Dan, also a Yale forestry graduate, is director of natural resources for Concord, Mass.; and daughter Linda (Connecticut College '67) is married to Henry J. Dresch, career officer in the Coast Guard.
College Forester Bob Monahan '29 atDartmouth's Ravine Lodge in Warren.
