Mount Monadnock, or Grand Monadnock, is a mountain in the town of Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It is the most prominent mountain peak in southern New Hampshire and is the highest point in Cheshire County. It lies 38 miles (61 km) southwest of Concord and 62 miles (100 km) northwest of Boston. At 3,165 feet (965 m), Mount Monadnock is nearly 1,000 feet (305 m) higher than any other mountain peak within 30 miles (48 km) and rises 2,000 feet (610 m) above the surrounding landscape. Monadnock's bare, isolated, and rocky summit provides expansive views. It is known for being featured in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Mt. Monadnock has long been cited as one of the most frequently climbed mountains in the world. It bears a number of hiking trails, including the 110-mile (180 km) Metacomet-Monadnock Trail and the 50-mile (80 km) Monadnock-Sunapee Greenway. The summit is barren largely because of fires set by early settlers. The first major fire, set in 1800 to clear the lower slopes for pasture, swept through the stands of virgin red spruce on the summit and flanks of the mountain. Between 1810 and 1820, local farmers, who believed that wolves were denning in the blowdowns, set fire to the mountain again. The conflagration raged for weeks, destroying the topsoil and denuding the mountain above 2,000 feet (610 m). The term "monadnock" is used by American geologists to describe any isolated mountain formed from the exposure of a harder rock as a result of the erosion of a softer one once surrounding it (a landform termed "inselberg" ("island-peak") elsewhere in the world).
Name It is thought to derive from either the Abenaki menonadenak (transl. smooth mountain) or menadena (transl. isolated mountain). The term was adopted by early settlers of southern New Hampshire and later by American geologists as an alternative term for an inselberg or isolated mountain. Mount Monadnock is often called Grand Monadnock, to differentiate it from other Vermont and New Hampshire peaks with "Monadnock" in their names. Its official name on federal maps is "Monadnock Mountain".
History
The transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller visited the mountain and wrote fondly of it. Emerson was a frequent visitor, and made the mountain the subject of "Monadnoc", one of his most famous poems. Thoreau visited the mountain four times between 1844 and 1860, and spent a great deal of time observing and cataloging natural phenomena. He is regarded as having written one of the first serious naturalist inventories of the mountain. A bog near the summit of Mount Monadnock and a rocky lookout off the Cliff Walk trail are named after him; another lookout is named after Emerson.
The Halfway House and other structures In 1858, Moses Cudworth of Rindge opened the "Halfway House" hotel on the south side of the mountain, roughly halfway from the base to the summit. The "Toll Road" was built to service it. By that time the popularity of the mountain was booming, and it was not long before Cudworth enlarged the hotel to accommodate 100 guests. On busy summer days, the stables at the Halfway House held as many as 75 horses. The Halfway House became public property when hundreds of residents of the nearby towns formed a coalition to buy the Toll Road and hotel, and worked to prevent a radio tower from being constructed on the summit. After the hotel burned down in 1954, a concession stand operated at the site until 1969. It and the toll road were both closed to public vehicles. Moses Spring, with its source in a hole drilled through a rock behind the site, is one of the few remaining artifacts of the hotel years. The foundations of two water tanks, and the nearby reservoir that fed them, are extant on the hillside above the Old Halfway House. A small firewarden's hut was located on the summit of Mount Monadnock and operated from 1911 to 1948, when it was decommissioned with the advent of modern means of detecting forest fires. The hut was used as a snack bar concession and hikers' shelter until 1969; it was removed in 1972. A small cabin, located farther down the mountain, served as the fire lookout's residence. It, too, has been removed. A private dwelling, 400 feet (120 m) south of the site of the former Halfway House, is the last remaining inholding on the mountain above 1,000 feet (300 m).
Hiking history
The earliest recorded ascent of Mount Monadnock took place in 1725 by Captain Samuel Willard and fourteen rangers under his command who camped at the top and used the summit as a lookout while patrolling for Native Americans. Before the practice came to be frowned upon, many early hikers carved their names in the summit; the earliest such engraving reads "S. Dakin, 1801" and is attributed to a local town clerk. Notable "power hiking" records associated with the mountain include that of Garry Harrington, who hiked to the summit 16 times in a 24-hour period, and Larry Davis, who claimed to have hiked to the summit daily for 2,850 consecutive days (7.8 years). Davis has hiked the mountain over 7,250 times in the past 35 years. Monadnock is often claimed to be the second-most frequently climbed mountain in the world, after Mount Fuji in Japan. Monadnock is climbed by 125,000 hikers yearly, while Mount Fuji sees 200,000-300,000 hikers yearly. However, according to UNESCO, Tai Shan in China receives more than 2 million visitors a year, far surpassing the other two peaks in popularity.
Bio-geography, ecology, and geology
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