The Crawford Path:
Abel, Ethan, and the P. Robbinsiana
Dec 2018
In the summer of 1819, Abel Crawford. “patriarch of the hills” and his son Ethan, the “White Mountain Giant,” built a trail up through dense woods and across the largest alpine tundra in the United States, and over one of the few colonies of the tiny yellow flowered Robbins’ cinquefoil (USDA, 2014,Dickerman, 2009). The low, almost stemless tuft of a plant grew plentifully in minute shelters of fine sandy loams and organic debris caught by stones on the treeless and frigid fellfield just southwest of Mount Washington on New Hampshire’s southern Presidential range. Almost all, 95 percent, of the world’s Robbins’cinquefoil grew at 5000 feet through winters vying for the coldest weather and highest winds on earth. And these tiny plants mostly grew on only one acre of the desolate rock-strewn flats. If it weren’t for its deep tap root and rocky protection, winds might have blown it off the ridge to warmer, moister environs, uninhabitable to this tenacious flower (Graber, 1980). For the Robbins’ cinquefoil its limited habitat defined an uncompromising boundary, an edge it could not cross over.
A decade later, in 1829, botanist James Robbins hiked Crawford’s Path and looked down—unlike Ethan who kept his eyes on clearing the bush and guiding his tourists first, and later developed botanical interests when botanists requested his help in collecting specimens. (We know these nuggets because of Lucy, Ethan’s wife and biographer, who like other “ladies” was encouraged “give up all thoughts” of the ascent but who, nevertheless ascended more than once and offered to guide groups when her husband was away. It seems she was eager to free herself from tending home and hotel) (Crawford, 1886).
It must have been June when flowering bursts forth on the otherwise muted tundra that Robbins named his little plant the Potentilla robbinsiana, identifying it as belonging to the genus potentilla, or cinquefoil (Graber, 1980, Pease, 1917). Potens, in Latin, means powerful. Botanists recognized its scarcity and over the next century and a half, thanks to Abel’s path and guidance, collected 850 specimens (USDA, n.d.)
In the 1970s, forest service research scientist, Raymond Graber, found the patch of Robbins’ cinquefoil was not surviving (Associated Press, 1983). The powerful little plant was collected and trampled almost to extinction. The increasing multitudes hiking the spectacular Crawford’s Path were destroying this “thing of beauty” wrote Graber. This tough variety of cinquefoil measuring only two to four centimeters in diameter and individually surviving a relatively long plant life up to 30, had “struggled for tens of thousands of years” to maintain its small claim on the land. But now it had become one of the world’s rarest plants (Graber, 1980, Oakes ex Rydb., n.d.). Only 1801 existing individual plants grew on the tundra southwest of Mount Washington prompting the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to add Robbins’ cinquefoil to the endangered species list (USDA, n.d.) Few reasons explained its near extinction.
Graber had noticed the seeds of the high alpine flower seldomly traveled more than a few centimeters from the mother, resulting in plant clusters and making it difficult for the plant to reestablish “if eliminated from some part of their natural habitat.” Beyond removal from or destruction of habitat, only frost heaves caused the long-lived Robbins’ cinquefoil’s death, not animals, insects, or disease (Graber, 1980).
In the same issue of Rhodora, the botany journal in which Graber’s findings were published, Garrett Crow and Irene Storks decried both hikers and the Crawford Path:
“The greatest threat to the population comes not from naturalists wishing to see this rare endemic (although, admittedly far too many specimens have been collected by our botanical forefathers) but from the cumulative effect of trampling by hikers over the years. Presently the Crawford Path…passes right through the fragile alpine fellfield…Often hikers unknowingly wander across the critical site to reach an outcrop which affords a magnificent view from the upper rim of Oakes Gulf” (Crow, Storks 1980)
Unlike the trail up, where edges are clear, on the ridgeline if you’re not paying attention it’s difficult to tell path from edge from all the rest. Humans, unlike alpine cinquefoils, are likely to act unbounded especially when they feel the thrill and “freedom” of adventure. They wobble on rocks to seek out views and tiny rare plants that would prefer to be left alone. Human adventurer entitlement.
Graber wrote,
“The nearly barren P. robbinsiana habitat is open and offers no natural obstacle to the hiker who wishes to step off the trail to rest, or to the group of hikers who prefer to walk abreast. A plant may be crushed in the process, but even more damaging is the shifting and dislodging of the stony pavement that occurs as the hikers walk along. The abrasion and churning caused by the hiker’s footsteps can eliminate the protected spaces between the individual stones…these minute sheltered spots are nurseries for the newly germinated P. robbinsiana and it is only here that they can become established. When the stony pavement is disturbed by hikers, the soil between the tones loosens and is soon blown or washed away. Once this precious bit of soil is lost, there is little or no chance of establishing and nurturing a seedling until the soil is replaced by natural processes. The hiker travel zone is widening and further destruction of the P. robbinsiana will likely occur” (Graber, 1980).
In winter, when the edges blur into white continuity, damage increases.Humans can’t see where they’re stepping, each footprint off the trail compacting soil and crushing the slowly regenerating alpine and sub-alpine plant life underneath a pile of snow. (Larsen, 2016).
Graber went to work researching, documenting, and saving the endangered cinquefoil. He collected seeds, germinated them, and replanted 18 three to five-centimeter plants close to and further away from the habitat surrounding the path. The plants failed or did poorly everywhere except the “barren stony sites, where conditions were most similar to those of the natural colony” (Graber, 1980), “This world isn't overly endowed with things of beauty” Graber wrote (AP, 1983).To save Robbins’ cinquefoil from extinction he felt the only solution was to move a half a mile section of Crawford’s Path.
Almost as patriarchal as Abel and as mighty as Ethan, a hefty organizational team went to work to save the “dwarf cinquefoil”. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Appalachian Mountain Club, The Forest Service, University of New Hampshire, and the New England Wildlife Society joined forces to relocate the trail, close off areas in which Robbins’ cinquefoil grew, educate the public, save and germinate seeds, and research the cinquefoil’s genetics, reproductive biology, and the soil dynamics of its habitat. By 2002 the Robbins cinquefoil had rebounded so well that it was removed from the endangered species list. By 2006 the population of Robbins’ cinquefoil grew to 4,831 flowering plants (USDA, n.d.).
Two times in the fall of 2018, I stuffed my backpack with my camera, a notebook, a hat, extra socks, mittens, nuts, apples and cheese, lots of chocolate, tea, and hot cocoa and made my way up the Crawford Path. Its history as the oldest continuously maintained trail in the United States was predominant in my mind. I didn’t know about Robbins’ cinquefoil, nor about the White Mountain alpine and subalpine plant communities and the 63 species comprising them which were threatened or endangered (Sperduto, Kimball, 2011). I read the precautionary signs at the trailhead. They created a mental image of edges not to cross, but the information didn’t penetrate deeply nor stay vivid in my mind. The signs gave rational but not intimate reasons to care. I didn’t know the story.
Up on the ridgeline, the maroon tufts of diapensia shrubland, the swath of deep red Labrador tea heath, the fine grasses of Bigelow’s sedge meadows bending softly, and a trailside mountain avens caught my eye—all considered “critically imperiled” by the state yet I didn’t know their names nor their scarcity. A few times, I guiltily trampled off the trail to avoid melting snow puddles. I was less concerned about the necessity of edges and more about what I might experience, what I might find, and cold wet feet. Thinking only from my perspective as adventurer, explorer, documentarian, and graduate student, I might as well have been one of Crawford’s tourists or botanists. I craved the feeling of “oneness” with the wind ravaged alpine world yet knew nothing of what it took for any more-than human species to survive here. I was absorbed in the hunt, rather than feeling part of a limitless patchwork quilt, each mountaintop species stitched together with delicate threads, partners in community survival (Kheel, 2008).
When I shed my imperialist adventurer mind and become community member, I am awed and humbled by the plant strategies for survival on the ridge of the Presidential range, an environment mimicking the Arctic tundra. They are creative and feisty, employing guerilla tactics to withstand the assault of weather. That is my human view. To them the weather is just fine, thank you. There’s no better place to survive. It’s the humans who are fragile. And it’s the humans, not the weather, that threatens alpine life.
Because these alpine species often don’t regularly reproduce from seed, they spread vegetatively, growing low and fitting into niches. Shrubs such as diapensia hug the ground or grow in narrow, soil catching crevices in rock, forming small cushions and mats often only a few inches tall. Shrub leaves are leathery, small, thick and sometimes covered with hairs or curled at the edges. Sedges, grasses, and rushes sprout in tufts not fields. Most plants stockpile relatively large amounts of carbohydrates and nutrients in their roots, capitalizing on them during the short growing season. Producing extra anthocyanin which elevates solar radiation uptake and increases leaf temperatures, they can photosynthesize efficiently when the light is low and the air is frigid (Sperduto, Kimball, 2011).
But even as I might imagine myself to be a member connected to these alpine beings, there is a place for edges and physical boundaries delineating the edge which I should carenot to cross. Erecting boundaries to prevent human hegemonic excursion into and over fragile worlds is an act of care. Without the caring of Forest Service scientists like Raymond Graber who observed the “trampling [of] the small P. robbinsiana”, the little flower might not have survived (Graber, 1980).
Then again, without Abel and Ethan and all the humans like me who find thrill and expansiveness from the feat of surmounting great summits, Robbins’ cinquefoil would be unnamed and doing well—that is, if it weren’t susceptible to global warming, acid deposition and atmospheric pollution as so many alpine plants and lichen are (USDA, 2005). For biotic mountaintop communities, global warming creates a devastating precipice beyond which is nothing. Arctic-Alpine plants, which once had continuous distribution around the borders of the ice sheets, have retreated to bogs and mountain tops (Graber, 1980). There is no further habitat to which they can ascend.
While cinquefoils can survive quite well without humans and paths they create, paths are a means for human enlightenment, or at least nascent self-awareness, of anthropogenic destructive forces generated far from the path. If a path helps a human understand that a species is endangered because of fellow bi-ped activity hundreds or thousands of miles away, perhaps the human will return home inspired to lighten his or her impact. But first, caring borne from connection.Can we empathize with a being which has dendritic tendrils reaching into and affixing it to the ground, not legs and feet which tread upon it?
Our “most important connection with the natural world,” is “our capacity for empathy and care” (Kheel,2008). It feels redundant to proclaim yet again that we humans rely on the natural environment for our lives (while we destroy it daily), but it is one very good argument to elicit a response of care. But abstract arguments which should feel critically important don’t change behaviors or inspire caring. While we strive to understand the “larger scientific stories of evolutionary and ecological processes” we must never “lose sight of the individual beings who exist within these larger narratives” (Kheel, 2008). Caring and connection grow from good stories and direct experience, a mental world of feeling-infused images, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds—maybe just about one very small yellow flower.
It helps to become friends with indefatigable tiny plants that survive tens of thousands of years in the severest of climates only to perish rapidly at the hands and feet of the human species. Friendship provides us with wonder and takes away our righteousness to trample, to collect, and to observe complacently.
The Abenaki people avoided mountain summits where they believed great spirits dwelled—Robbins cinquefoil among them (Howe, 2000). They called Mount Washington “Agiocochook” translated as “home of the great spirit” and respected a physical boundary between themselves and the habitat of these beings. Just like the cinquefoil, habitat defined boundary and maintained a physical divide between spirit and human. In June 1642, when Darby Field made his first ascent of Agiocochook, he might have passed the bright yellow flowers of the little cinquefoil but it seems he was more concerned to convince Passaconaway, the Abenaki chief, that the Europeans were more powerful than the great mountaintop spirit, a tactic that helped the colonists expand northward, appropriating tribal lands (Howe, 2000, Johnson, 2006, Crawford, 1886).
It seems the Abenaki knew how to visit the alpine tundra. “Visiting is not an easy practice,” Donna Haraway writes. “It demands the ability…to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond—and to do all this politely!” (Haraway, 2016).
Curiosity may lead to stories found in old botanical journals which, with the potent sensory experience of intimate contact, the growing web of imagination about a place and its inhabitants, resulting in humility and a grasping that we are members in, not adventurers on, may lead to real care. But first we must visit with a sense of edges, of boundaries.
It is December and Crawford’s Path is sheathed with ice and deep in snow. Winds lash and strip away anything that has not made an agreement with—has sewn into—the communal patchwork. Only the experienced and crazy human traverses it in winter. After October, if not before, Abel and Ethan kept themselves busy with smaller projects, mundane in their imaginations compared to the dream of a path and then a carriage road to Mount Washington. At least, this is how Lucy, who maintained home and hotel in the back woods of New Hampshire while Abel and Ethan bushwhacked and adventured, wrote it in her husband’s “voice” (Crawford, 1886.)
It’s closed for winter, but a road now ascends the mountain, and a cog railway. I could have driven up in half an hour. They terminate at the summit, the craggy outline partially obscured by the concrete visitor center, weather observatory, and monitoring towers. You’d never notice a small flower from a car.
At the end of spring, about mid-June when certain alpine flowers burst open and splash their gray and rocky stage with vibrant yellows, purples, and reds, I’ll be climbing the path again. This time I’ll understand myself to be a member of this community. Patriarch Abel, Ethan the giant, savvy Lucy who may have wished for adventure but instead wrote, Raymond the champion of tiny flowers, and the tenacious Robbins’ cinquefoil, each sewn together in a limitless patchwork spreading through time and settling upon the southern Presidential range, will float in my imagination.
Even if water pooling on the trail threatens to seep into my boots, I’ll take care to note the cairns and diminutive rock walls reminding me to stay on the path. Hopefully, I’ll make another plant friend, dig up its story not its roots, and learn about how it ferociously tackles the human-unfriendly weather. I’ll pay homage to the Crawfords and their gently curving path. I’ll pay homage to the environmentalists who built the edges. And I’ll try to spot the cinquefoil from my human place on the path.
***
References
Associated Press reprinted in New York Times, (1983, September 22). Forest service puts up a wall to save a rare alpine flower.New York Times (1923-Current File), p. B15.Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/22/us/forest-service-puts-up-a-wall-to-save-a-rare-alpine-flower.html
Crawford, L. (1886). The history of the White Mountains, from the first settlement of Upper Coos and Pequaket. B. Thurston & company.
Crow, G., & Storks, I. (1980). Rare and endangered plants of New Hampshire: A phytogeographic viewpoint.Rhodora, 82(829), 173-189.
Dickerman, M. (1999). Mount Washington : Narratives and perspectives. Littleton, N.H.: Bondcliff Books.
Drake, S. (1882). The heart of the White mountains: Their legend and scenery. Harper & brothers.
Graber, R. (1980). The life history and ecology of potentilla robbinsiana. Rhodora, 82(829), 131-140.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental futures). Durham: Duke University Press.
Howe, N. (2000). Not without peril: One hundred and fifty years of misadventure on the Presidential Range of New Hampshire. Boston : Old Saybrook, CT: Appalachian Mountain Club; Distributed by the Globe Pequot Press.
Johnson, C. (2006). This grand & magnificent place : The wilderness heritage of the White Mountains (1st ed., Revisiting New England). Durham, N.H. : Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press ; University Press of New England. (p22)
Kheel, M., & Ruether, R. (2007). Nature Ethics : An Ecofeminist Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Larson, C. L., Reed, S. E., Merenlender, A. M., & Crooks, K. R. (2016). Effects of Recreation on Animals Revealed as Widespread through a Global Systematic Review. PloS one, 11(12), e0167259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167259
Pease, A.S., 1917. Notes on the botanical exploration of the White Mountains, Appalachia 14: 157-178.
Oakes ex Rydb. (n.d.). Potentilla robbinsiana. Retrieved from https://gobotany.newenglandwild.org/species/potentilla/robbinsiana/
Sperduto, D., & Kimball, B. (2011). The nature of New Hampshire: Natural communities of the granite state (1st ed.). Durham, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press.
United States Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service (n.d.) Recovery of Robbins' cinquefoil: A partnership success. Retrieved from https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/Rare_Plants/conservation/success/potentilla_robbinsiana_recovery.shtml
United States Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service (2005). White Mountain National Forest (N.F.), Forest plan revision, Proposed land and resource management plan: Environmental impact statement.
United States Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service (2014, December 31). Research natural area: Alpine gardens. Retrieved from https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/rna/nh/white-mountain/alpine-gardens/
