Meditation on a Mountain

Wilmington’s iconic peak

by Annie Stoltie

Whiteface Mountain dominates a swath of northern Adirondack skyline, unmistakable with its slide-gouged pyramid profile, capillary-like ski trails and summit silo. It’s no wonder the peak was the first in the region to be named: Native Americans, homesteaders and explorers alike simply looked to its snowy faces and pale anorthosite scars and knew what to call it.

By the time Verplanck Colvin surveyed the 4,867-foot mountain in 1872, it was already a tourist destination. Wilmington’s Whiteface Mountain House, where the Wilson Farms gas station sits today, advertised horses to haul adventurers to Whiteface’s summit. Photographer Seneca Ray Stoddard described staying at the inn and riding up the mountain in his 1874 The Adirondacks Illustrated. From above, “the mighty, sweeping dome of heaven came down all around and blended with the mountain edges … below, the country lay spread out in the glory of its autumnal dress, its gold and crimson, brown and green, its pearly lakes and threads of silver, its purple hills and mellow distance.…”

 Some five decades later Russell M. L. Carson, in Peaks and People of the Adirondacks, a book that inspired generations of peak-baggers, fretted about a proposed paved path up what he called “the most graceful of all Adirondack peaks.” Carson dreaded the thought of indifferent, unappreciative picnickers “desecrating” Whiteface’s summit as they had, he wrote, atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington when its highway was constructed. He hoped the road would never be built, and that future hikers “who shall attain the summit by strength of leg and sweat of brow, may always find there their inspiration for a prayer of thanks for an untarnished top.”

Artist Rockwell Kent, of Au Sable Forks, also argued to keep the mountain “inviolate” in a 1934 New York Times editorial. “Serene and beautiful, unscarred, unbuilt upon, it is the focal point some part of every day or night for every human eye in view of it.” He was further riled by the plan to memorialize World War I soldiers on Whiteface’s crown: “To put a dead thing on a living mountain—to kill a mountain to commemorate death!”

But the following year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who otherwise would have been grounded, appeared before a thrilled crowd at the road’s crest and dedicated it the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway. Kent went on to paint Adirondack scenes, particularly the view from his Asgaard Farm, depicting an undefiled Whiteface.

Most Adirondackers have their own mountains—Owls Head for Long Lake, Baker for Saranac Lake, Chimney for Indian Lake. But Whiteface, with its stature, easy access and Olympic status, is the peoples’ peak. Even the most casual tourist knows it’s there, and because it’s there locals build their lives around it. Which is why so many of us claim it as our own and edit it, as Kent did, subtracting annoyances or adding drama. It’s why Stoddard waxed rhapsodic and Carson passionately pleaded. The mountain bears the burden of our recreational, philosophical and emotional needs.   

My Whiteface is a reminder of why I stay. Since I came to the Adirondacks I’ve looked to it for reassurance, that a more metropolitan, more happening, more significant setting couldn’t top the peak’s magnificence and the park it symbolizes. At the Wilmington farmhouse I rented in my early years, Whiteface hung in the backyard. Between my day and night jobs I’d sit on my duct-taped pleather sofa and, through the picture window, marvel at the million-dollar view. And an extraordinary southeastern angle was visible from my next place, in Jay’s glen. Back then adirondack life was headquartered at Paleface Lodge, in Jay, where I sat in a soaring A-frame with a glass wall facing the mountain. Night and day Whiteface loomed during a period when restlessness or love or ambition could have lured me away.

Now I live and work too deep in the valley to see it. Sure, it fills the sky during my errands to Wilmington or Lake Placid, and I stop to appreciate the mountain when I can. Like Stoddard I anticipate fall, when the leaves turn and it looks as though Whiteface’s base is on fire, swallowing its snowy summit. It’s that kind of scene that leads me to imagine my children someday leaving, experiencing far-off places with new landscapes. On visits back here, to me, will they see the mountain and know that they’re home?