Not a "Pastime for Curious Women"

Edmands' smooth rocks of the Gulfside Trail.
(From: www.legacysailing.com)

In August 2014, I hiked the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. I noticed an interesting phenomenon a mile or two west of Madison Spring Hut on the Gulfside Trail. The rocks on the trail seemed perfectly placed to form a flat surface, as if forming an alpine highway. Compared to most of the other alpine trails on the trip, this piece of trail was easy to walk! It was like an alpine sidewalk. I asked a croo member at the hut what the explanation for this was. Who would have spent the immense amount of time and labor to place all those rocks just so?! I was told that J. Rayner Edmands, a famous trail builder of the early 20th century had laid out the Gulfside Trail. 

In the latest issue of the Appalachian Mountain Club's journal, Appalachia, I encountered more information about Edmands and his beautiful trails. Edmands had a trail-building rival in the Whites: Warren Hart, the Appalachian Mountain Club's Councillor of Trails. From 1909 to 1911, Hart blazed most of the trails now existent in the Great Gulf, a five thousand acre wilderness area enclosed by Mounts Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. Hart and Edmands had widely divergent trail building philosophies. For entertainment's sake, I'll let Hart describe these philosophies. He wrote a newspaper article in a 1909 issue of the Boston Evening Transcript.

Warren Hart (top) on the Six Husbands Trail
in the Great Gulf.
(From: whitemountainsojourn.blogspot.com)

"Unlike most of the paths in the White Mountains, these [Great Gulf] trails have not been cut to avoid obstacles, or to smooth them away as much as possible, they were not designed for the pastime of curious women; and they have not been made like to the superfluous boulevards of piled stone work that a perverted energy has built here and there upon the mountains..." (Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2015, 94-95)

I guess Hart was not a fan of Edmands' work, eh?