Higher Learning | Knowledge & Wisdom

Useful stuff from 83 years of Yankee: 

How familiar are you with the geology, history, literature, and folklore of New England’s best-known mountains? To find out, take the following test, based on Into the Mountains by Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow (Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 1995).

1. This Vermont mountain was called by the Abenaki “Moze-o-de-be-wadso,” meaning “mountain with a head like a moose.”

2. Herman Melville dedicated one of his novels to this peak, which he could see from his window while he wrote much of Moby-Dick.

3. From a telescope in a hotel atop this Massachusetts peak, visitors could read the numbers on clock towers in Hartford, Connecticut, 30 miles away.

4. The distinctive profile of this mountain appears on Vermont’s official coat of arms.

5. The highest point in Massachusetts east of the Berkshires, this mountain was renamed Mount Adams in honor of the election of John Quincy Adams—four disappointing years later, it was restored to its original name.

6. At the foot of this peak, the only major mountain in New England that is entirely privately owned, was a tavern in which the Green Mountain Boys caroused.

7. The newspaper Among the Clouds was published on this summit from 1877 until World War I.

8. A forest fire in 1907 burned 35,000 acres on this, the second-most-climbed peak in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

9. A single determined man was largely responsible for buying, preserving, and giving this mountain to the state of Maine.

10. This New Hampshire peak was supposedly cursed by the Indian for whom it is named.

—Adapted from “Climb Every Mountain,” by Geoffrey Elan, July 1996

1. Mount Mansfield; 2. Mount Greylock; 3. Mount Holyoke; 4. Camel’s Hump; 5. Mount Wachusett; 6. Mount Equinox; 7. Mount Washington; 8. Mount Lafayette; 9. Mount Katahdin; 10. Mount Chocorua