(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange recently visited a pond in New Hampshire with a very inappropriate name.
(LANGE) Lonesome Lake. There can’t be too many places as misnamed as this one. It may have suited 130 years ago, when the author W.C. Prime had a cabin here. But it’s only a mile from and 900 feet above the Franconia Notch Parkway. On days like this one, the trail is a constant stream of families, young couples, and elderly climbers with hiking poles and sweat bands.
At twenty acres, Lonesome Lake is a small pond. During the Victorian Era, all kinds of features assumed Alpine proportions: lumps became mountains and old beaver ponds attained lakehood.
A beaver pond is what it was, till the loggers stripped these mountainsides 100 years ago and built a dam at the outlet. After that rotted, someone hauled cement up here and built a concrete weir that keeps the water level constant.
To geologists, Lonesome Lake is a tarn – a shallow basin scooped out by a continental ice sheet about 50,000 years ago. A contact between two granites runs through the pond basin: to the east, Conway Granite, visible in the cliffs of Cannon Mountain and the face of the late, lamented Old Man of the Mountain; to the west and uphill, Kinsman quartz monzonite, laced with large crystals of potash feldspar.
Most New Hampshire waters are acidic by nature, and not conducive to the growth of vegetable or larval life so important to fish species, especially native brook trout. Acid rain has made them even more so. Some former native trout waters have become toxic to these sensitive fish. Not so Lonesome Lake. It’s surrounded by acidic black bogs with soil so low in nutrients that the insectivorous plant sundew thrives here. But the pond’s tributary stream rises high on the Kinsman monzonite formation, and the feldspar in the formation releases calcium silicate, a buffering agent. So brook trout have thrived here since the end of the last Ice Age. In 1946 the state began stocking it with fingerlings, and it’s supposed to be good fishing.
The Appalachian Mountain Club operates a 46-person-capacity hut up here, advertised as a "family hut," and the dozens of kids here bear that out. The hut crew is engagingly good-humored and creative, and the cooking beats the usual undergraduate productions by a mile. Last night we had roast turkey, corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry sauce – all carried up here by crew members, who make the trip down to the Notch every day
I fell asleep by 9:30 last night – woke up at three. I stepped out onto the porch. A brilliant moon hung over the Notch and flooded Franconia Ridge with silver. I saw the Milky Way for the first time in months, and realized how polluted our skies have become. Venus hung like the great landing light of an approaching airliner. It was lovely to see things the way they used to be, even if for only a moment.
This is Willem Lange up in Franconia Notch, and I gotta get back to work.