Mount Everett

Mount Everett is the highest summit of the southern Taconic Mountains, rising about 2,000 feet above its eastern footings in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Its upper dome is noted for wide views and an unusual forest of stunted pitch pine and oak. The Appalachian Trail traverses Mount Everett, which prior to the 20th century was called "Dome of the Taconics." Measured at 2,602 feet (793 meters) above sea level, Everett dominates much local scenery of the upper Housatonic Valley.

Mount Everett is the highest summit of the southern Taconic Mountains, rising about 2,000 feet above its eastern footings in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Its upper dome is noted for wide views and an unusual forest of stunted pitch pine and oak. The Appalachian Trail traverses Mount Everett, which prior to the 20th century was called "Dome of the Taconics." Measured at 2,602 feet (793 meters) above sea level, Everett dominates much local scenery of the upper Housatonic Valley. ==Geography== Mount Everett helps divide the watersheds of the Hudson and Housatonic rivers. Its eastern slopes share a larger escarpment with Mount Race and Bear Mountain plus several related summits. This escarpment rises from an elevation around in Sheffield's Housatonic Valley at a mean angle of about 20 degrees, although its higher reaches are markedly steeper. Everett's more gentle, western slopes begin in a valley occupied by the township of Mount Washington, where the valley floor elevations average about . A seasonal auto road approaching from the west climbs past Guilder Pond and continues nearly to Everett's summit, but its upper reaches have been long closed to automobiles. The summit area features an open forest of stunted pitch pine and scrub oak. A 40-foot fire tower was on the summit from 1970 until 2003 named "Mt. Washington Fire Tower" after the local township. Earlier towers stood there beginning in 1915. About halfway down the eastern slopes are Race Brook Falls with a source near the gap between Mount Everett and Mount Race. Much of the mountain is land administered by Mount Washington State Forest and the contiguous Mount Everett State Reservation, which had about 10,000 visitors annually as of a 2005 state estimate. Significant other portions of Everett's slopes are privately held. ==Geology== Mount Everett is part of the much larger Taconic Allochthon, a rock structure that migrated about from the east to its present location, where it arrived via low-angle thrust faulting. More narrowly, rocks of the upper mountain are within the "Everett Formation," a term first used by geologist E-An Zen in mapping and studying the allochthon during the 1960s. Zen modified the term "Everett Schist" (coined in 1893 by William Herbert Hobbs) "in order to include rocks of different metamorphic grades." The formation extends intermittently throughout the highlands of the southern Taconics, with metamorphic grades increasing to the west. Everett Formation rocks are principally olive-gray to green, blue-quartz pebble metagraywacke and quartzite of Ordovician and older age. Everett's lower slopes are part of the Stockbridge Formation, which is generally limestone. Following extensive fieldwork, Zen and his colleague J.H. Hartshorn produced a geologic map of the local Quadrangle in 1966. Prior to this, studies of the immediate area began in the 1840s with Edward Hitchcock and included extensive work in 1870s by James Dana as well as by Hobbs in 1890s. ==Historical nomenclature== ==Thoreau visit== Henry David Thoreau visited Guilder Pond and "likely" the top of Everett in 1844, according to regional historian Bernard A. Drew. During their several-day stay in the region around Bash Bish Falls, Thoreau was with his companion William Ellery Channing II (1817-1901). Both Thoreau and Channing had read florid descriptions of the falls in Edward Hitchcock's geological survey of Massachusetts (1841). Channing confirmed this itinerary in an annotation of his copy of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, "Thoreau also mentioned passing a 'silent gray tarn … high up the side of a mountain, Bald Mountain' — Guilder Pond, no doubt," Drew has offered. ==References== Massachusetts Trail Guide (2004). Boston: Appalachian Mountain Club. ==External links and further reading== "History and Dynamics of a Ridgetop Pitch Pine Community, Mount Everett, Massachusetts." Harvard Forest Paper No. 25 *"The Taconic Controversy: What Forces Make a Range?" Appalachia: Vol. 73: No. 1 Article 5; available at Dartmouth EDU digital commons: [https://digitalcommons.dartmouth.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1389&context=appalachia "Massachusetts Forest Reserve Long Term Monitoring Mount Washington Forest Reserve" 2009 *"On the Geological Structure of the Mount Washington Mass of the Taconic Range" Hobbs, Wm, 1893 [https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/606222 A credible but uncertain claim that Henry David Thoreau visited Mount Everett *"Book of the Berkshires" 1886, by Clark W. Bryan (see segment Dome of the Taconics page 147-150) [https://archive.org/details/bookofberkshired00bry/page/146/mode/2up?view=theater&q=dome Interactive map showing conserved properties (user must adjust scale and turn on the correct "layers" for public and private lands) *"Mount Washington State Forest Trail Map" (includes Everett Reservation) [https://www.mass.gov/doc/mt-washington-state-forest-trail-map/download

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