Four Years of Steps

You've been climbing stone steps all morning — hundreds of them, cut right into the living rock beside the water. I want to tell you about the hands that made them, because it's a piece of history most folks walk right over without a thought. And let me set one thing straight while I'm at it, because you'll hear it told wrong: it was NOT the Civilian Conservation Corps that cut these steps. That's the easy story, and it's false.

The truth is harder and better. Back in eighteen eighty-nine, Colonel Ricketts hired a man named Matt Hirlinger, and Hirlinger brought five men. Six fellows, all told. And those six men built this trail — down through both glens, past every falls — by hand. No machines. No dynamite crews. Six men with hand tools, hammers and drills and bars and their own backs, cutting a staircase into wet cliffs alongside falling water. Picture the danger of it — perched on a mossy ledge over a ninety-foot drop, chipping a step into the rock one blow at a time, the spray soaking you, one slip from the same fall Quinn keeps warning you about.

It took them four years. Four years, from eighteen eighty-nine to eighteen ninety-three, to open this trail. Think of that when your legs are tired: every single step you climb, somebody knelt down over a hundred years ago and carved out of solid rock, by hand, in the mist, so that you could stand where you're standing. Later on, in nineteen forty-seven, after the state took over the park, they went through and rebuilt those steps to make them safe for the crowds that come now. But the line of the trail, the route through the impossible places — that was Hirlinger and his five men, four years of their lives, laid down in stone under your boots. Tip your hat to them as you climb. They earned it, one step at a time.