Nathaniel Lewis Goodrich: trail builder extraordinaire
By Mike Dickerman
(Second of two parts)
Reprinted from the Plymouth Record Enterprise
If Arthur L. Goodrich, profiled here last week, is considered one of the most instrumental early trail-builders of the Waterville Valley, then his son has to be considered one of the founding fathers of our modern-day White Mountain trail system.
Along with fellow Appalachian Mountain Club members Charles Blood and Paul Jenks, Nathaniel Lewis Goodrich (1880-1957) oversaw the development of a trail system that connected previously constructed local trail networks. This expansion occurred over a two-decade period starting in the early 1900s and included the building of such important footpaths as the Garfield Ridge Trail, the Webster Cliff Trail, the Kinsman Ridge Trail and the Twin Range Trail (or Twinway as it is known today). Over a 15-year period, this work resulted in more than 170 miles being added to AMC’s White Mountain trail system.
Nathaniel Goodrich summered practically all his life in Waterville Valley, first coming to the valley as an infant. Upon Goodrich’s death in 1957, his pal Blood wrote about his early acquaintanceship with Goodrich. “I first met Nat Goodrich in July, 1897, riding on the stage into Waterville. I was an absolute greenhorn in the mountains, while to me he even then seemed a seasoned veteran, for he had spent his summers there since babyhood. For the next twenty years our summer vacations brought us together almost every year, and from him I learned much of my woodcraft.”
Goodrich graduated from Amherst College in 1901, then went on to receive a library science degree at the State Library School in Albany, New York. After working in the New York State Library for several years, he moved on to library positions at the University of West Virginia, the University of Texas, and finally Dartmouth College in Hanover, where he remained the rest of his working days.
During World War I, noted Blood, Goodrich put his innate skill of reading and evaluating maps to good use as he served as a captain of Military Intelligence with the general staff in Washington, D.C.
Goodrich was also a fine skier and mountaineer in his day, taking trips at various times to the Canadian Rockies and to the high peaks of Europe. He penned several ski and climbing related stories for Appalachia over the years, among them “A Ski Holiday in the Alps” (Dec. 1929) and “A Look at the Pyrenees.” (June 1933). Among his mountaineering claims to fame was that he was a member of the four-person team that made the first ascent of 10,270-foot Mount Olive, a peak along the Continental Divide in the Canadian Rockies that straddles the Alberta-British Columbia border. He was also a member of the first team to ice climb Central Gully in Mount Washington’s Huntington Ravine back in Feb. 1927.
In addition to his trail and other mountain-related activities in the Whites and elsewhere, Goodrich was also a fine writer and historian. His book, The Waterville Valley, published in 1952 by The North Country Press of Lunenburg, is one of the most interesting and readable town histories of any White Mountain community.
As a longtime AMC member, Goodrich served at various times as Councillor of Trails, on the Guidebook Committee, the club’s Nomenclature Committee, the Committee on Trails, and the Committee on Hut, Trail and Camp Extensions.
In the June 1918 edition of Appalachia, there appears an article by Goodrich entitled, “The Attractions and Rewards of Trail Making,” which was a paper he’d read the previous December at the annual meeting of the New England Trail Conference. Goodrich waxes almost poetic about the task of first envisioning, then actually cutting a new path.
“Like many greater things, a trail begins at a chance remark. Looking at distant ridges through the haze of the noon-halt pipe–or dreaming over the map in idle winter moments–the word slips out: ‘There ought to be a trail on that ridge.’ Months, or years, later one who heard, and scoffed, summons his friends to help make that trail, his trail, the trail he is surprised no one ever thought of making before,” wrote Goodrich.
“Of trail making there are three stages. There is dreaming the trail, there is prospecting the trail, there is making the trail. Of the first one can say nothing–dreams are fragile, intangible. Prospecting the trail–there lies perhaps the greatest of the joys of trail work. It has a suggestion of the thrill of exploration. No one of us but loves still to play explorer. And here there is just a bit of the real thing to keep the play going.”
Writing in 1923 about his long relationship with Blood and Jenks at the conclusion of his three-year term as AMC Councillor of Trails, Goodrich said, “You doubtless suppose that during the past nine years the Club has had three Councillors of Trails. It is a delusion. There has been but one. Whether Mr. Blood, Mr. Jenks, or myself held that title mattered nothing. We were all on the job, all the nine years. We found the Club spending $500 a year on trails and leave it spending $3000. We added three shelters and rebuilt one. We cleared, mostly with our own hands, fifty-five miles of new trail. Our loot consists of memories of many happy days on the trails, and a few old signs. It was a sort of Triumvirate. Sometimes we called it a dynasty. Dynasties are supposed to be unqualifiedly evil. We consider ourselves an exception..”
Among Goodrich’s other contributions to Appalachia was an article in the December 1930 edition titled “Old Peppersass.” In this piece, Goodrich describes the scene on Mount Washington a year and a half earlier when Old Peppersass, the famed first engine of the Cog Railway, met its demise in a tragic run up the mountain on July 21, 1929. Goodrich was on the mountain that same day, having taken an earlier train to the summit. On his train’s descent, it came across the accident scene, in which one man was killed and another seriously injured. He chose to hike down off the mountain, once it was evident that his train would not be able to continue its journey down to the base station. He was evidently one of the first persons off the mountain that day who’d actually witnessed the accident scene.