How Whiteface got its name — the pale scar of a great landslide that lays the mountain's bare rock open to the sky.
You're climbing a mountain called Whiteface, and it's worth knowing how it came by that name — because it's written right on the mountain's own face, for anyone to read.
Look at Whiteface from a distance sometime — from down by the lakes, or across the valley — and you'll see it: a great pale scar running down the upper slopes, a patch where the dark green forest just stops and the bare, light-colored rock shows through, like a streak of white on the mountain's cheek. That's the whiteface. That's the name, right there.
And here's how it got there. Every so often, on a steep mountain like this, after a long soaking rain or a heavy melt, the whole thin skin of soil and trees on a slope lets go all at once — a landslide, a great slab of the mountainside sliding away and taking the forest with it, right down to the naked bedrock. And this mountain has thrown some big ones over the years. Where the slide tears the green away, it leaves that pale scar of bare anorthosite rock, gleaming in the sun — and on Whiteface, the scars are big enough and old enough that they gave the whole mountain its name.
The Native people saw it too, and had their own names for the white-faced peak. So the mountain is, quite literally, telling you its own story: it's a mountain that sheds its skin, now and again, in great tearing slides, and wears the pale scars where it did. A face of white stone, watching over the High Peaks. Now go on up and stand on it.
Photo: Glens Falls Toy Co. · Public domain
