Take a good look at all this deep green forest around you, because I'm about to tell you it's a lie — or near enough. Pull up a seat, friend. A hundred and some years ago, a man very nearly erased it.
His name was James Everell Henry — J.E. Henry, they called him, and the newspapers called him the Lumber King. He came into these mountains in the eighteen nineties and he built the town of Lincoln, right where you started this drive, as his own private lumber empire. And he cut. Lord, how he cut. Henry did not believe in leaving a tree standing — he was famous for saying he never saw a tree that didn't look better cut down. He laid his own railroad, the East Branch and Lincoln, up into the Pemigewasset wilderness you passed, and his crews stripped those mountains to the bone — every stick, up every slope, until the country you'd have seen from this road was not green at all. It was a gray desert of stumps and dried tree-tops, miles of it, horizon to horizon.
And then it burned. The dry logging slash — the branches and tops left behind — caught fire again and again, great fires that ran for miles and burned the very soil down to the rock, so nothing could grow back at all. The rivers ran black with ash and mud. People came up on the new railroads to see the White Mountains they'd heard were so beautiful, and what they found was devastation. And that, friend — that horror — is what finally moved a nation to act. The outrage over what was done to these mountains helped pass a law, the Weeks Act of nineteen eleven, that let the government buy up ruined land and let it heal — and that is how the White Mountain National Forest you are driving through right now was born, out of a wasteland. So every tree you see, every splash of October color — it's all second growth, all a comeback from bare rock and ash. This whole gorgeous forest is a ghost forest that came back to life. Remember that when it flames up gold around you.