Last weekend avid bushwhacker Steve Mason stopped by the store and showed me pictures of an amazing climb he and Gavin Brown made up a steep gully that splits the huge rock slab on the SW side of Mount Willey. The gully, which looks like a classic eroded dike, can be readily seen from nearby points to the west. After concluding their roped ascent of the 45-degree gully, they bushwhacked through dense scrub to the summit of Mount Willey, just beating the rain that moved in around lunchtime.
Though the gully climb is way out of my league, Steve's report inspired me to head out to the SW flank of Mount Willey and bushwhack to two talus slopes with sweeping views over the eastern Pemigewasset Wilderness. Years ago I made a couple of trips to the lowest elevation talus slope on this side of Willey, but the ones I was aiming for are two to three hundred feet higher and promised wider views.
Before heading up the Kedron Flume Trail, I poked around the site of the infamous Willey Slide that fell on August 28, 1826, taking the lives of the Samuel Willey family and their hired hands.
Nearly two centuries later, the track of the Willey Slide is completely revegetated, but its course can still be discerned when looking up from the floor of the Notch. From this angle looking across Willey Pond it is seen as a dark line above the left side of the large building.
Tradition holds that these rocks, marked by a sign, "Willey Boulders," were what split the slide above the Willey's house, leaving it undamaged. It is possible that the Willey family left the house in an attempt to reach a "refuge hut" they had built after witnessing two earlier, smaller slides. "This strange action of the slide in the sparing of the house and the destruction of its 9 inmates when all might have been saved had they but remained inside, gives to the story a most peculiar pathos," wrote Rev. Guy Roberts in his 1923 booklet, The Willey Slide: Its History, Legend and Romance.
The jumbled track of the Willey Slide just above the Willey House site.
In his Geologic Summary for the Surficial Geologic Map of the Crawford Notch 7.5 minute quadrangle, geologist Brian Fowler noted that "Deposits above the house site display many of the surficial features typical of such debris avalanches including levees, chutes. and lineal boulder trains. all oriented parallel to the direction of downslope movement . It seems the home of the unfortunate Willey Family lay between two debris levees that channeled debris to either side of the house." The small ridge-like formations known as debris flow levees are indeed prominent alongside the slide track in the area above the Willey House site.
After lounging for a long spell on my rock seat, I made the short scramble up to the top of the open rocks.
After some weaving I worked out a passable route around and up to a point on the western edge of the talus.
From a big flat-topped boulder I found a view south to the Nancy Range...
A winter view of the SW face of Mount Willey taken from frozen Ethan Pond. The gully ascended by Steve Mason and Gavin Brown is right-center on the large slab to the right. The slide-like strip I visited is towards the left, with a rounded bottom, and the wide talus slope is in the center of the picture.
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