Returning to the Source of the Brook

Burroughs Award-winning, Cape Cod naturalist, John Hay spent childhood summers at "The Fells" his family's summer home on Lake Sunapee. Hay was fond of hiking in the forests of New Hampshire. His book In The Company of Light retraces a hike to reach the hidden headwater springs of Beech Brook, water supply for his boyhood home at The Fells. The spring lies hidden off-trail, deep in the interior of the Forest Society’s 720-acre Hay Forest Reservation located adjacent to The Fells. Forest Society Senior Education Director Dave Anderson recently guided 15 people on a hike to reach the source of Beech Brook and then a bushwhack to the summit of Sunset Hill, ancestral Hay family summer picnic grounds.

John Hay's chapter "The Source of the Brook" recounts the same hike Dave and John Hay had shared from Lake Sunapee to reach the brook's headwater springs:

"Past the spring, down a narrow fringe of sandy beach bordering the (Lake Sunapee) shore, is the outlet of the brook that used to provide water for our house, built by my grandparents late in the nineteenth century... the brook that had served the practical needs of our family for many years was on the fringe of cultivation. We passed over it many timnes where a bridge covered the road leading to the farm, but in many respects it was unexplored territory, steeped in its own light and darkness, like a wonderful grove of tall, white pines that lined the road.

As children, my sister Adele and I played on the small beach near the outlet of the brook, but seldom explored it. Perhaps we were held back by parental warnings. But I sensed a dark magic there, and unknown spirits in the woodlands beyond it. Huge, moss-covered boulders, dark pools where water insects twitched and skated over a surface half lit by filtered sunlight, shallow streambeds with stepping-stones for crossing, unnamed birds in overhanging branches...

I had no notion of where those waters originated. Perhaps I was not encouraged to ask... for all I knew, the source of the brook was in some distant mountain I might never climb...

The brook descends the westward facing slopes of Sunset HIll, so named by my grandparents, who used to ride or walk up to the summit, a brow of sloping granite, surrounded by a fringe of low trees. Dark green mountains rolled out westward with the fires of the sun; and the shores of the sparkling lake far below them were all that showed any signs of habitation. Who could resist the promise of such a world? The watershed of the brook comprises some 320 acres of a 675-acre tract given by my father, Clarenece Leonard Hay, the the Society for the Protection of NH Forests in 1960. The brook is their central artery...

... Then we came on what we had set out to find. Under the brow of a steep slope not far from the summit, where the brook and its moss-covered rocks went no further, was a wide light green circle on the ground, covered with water-loving plants. The ever-flowing waters seeped out of this spring to be carried down, century after century, trickling through a far-reaching network of roots, and asociated fungi, feeling their way through the soil to a great wilderness lake.

The brook has guarded all the secrets of the forest, as well as its own origins, which lie at an unknown depth in the bedrock of this minor mountain. I once unconciously drank of its waters, and for much of my life I had been far removed from it, but now I had come home, to the center, the waiting heart, which was not ours to claim alone...

We can easily turn ourselves into outsiders, blinded by the tormented world we have made four ourselves, but we are incapable of replacing the truth. I once peered in at an early age and sensed the magic in that brook, but I was never fully aware of how much promise it carried with it. This time, I remembered my father, a sensitive and generous man, who knew that we can never tell the land what it is meant to contain; you have to wait for it to tell you."

The 3.7 miles loop hike and gained 550 feet to the 1800 foot elevation at the summit of Sunset Hill. Along the brook, we visited an active beaver pond, found fresh moose tracks, listened to the evening song chorus: ovenbird warbler, wood thrush, hermit thrush. Along the ridge above the headwaters springs, we found the grove of bear-clawed beech trees at the heart of the 157-acre ecological reserve comprising 22% of the Hay Reservation. We posed for a group photo at the summit of Sunset Hill and then hiked the Sunset Hill Trail back to the Gate House at the John Hay Estate at The Fells.

The program was co-sponsored by the Society for the Protection of NH forests and the John Hay Estate at The Fells.

• Find out more about Hay Reservation and upcoming programs here.