Painting of Bear Pond and Hawk Mountain, by Ethel Dana, ca. 1940

[Journal entry for November 26, 2022, Hawk Mountain, Waterford, Maine] Dallas, Harriet Robinson and I climbed Hawk Mountain in the late afternoon. It is a small but steep granitic knob in western Maine, a little east of Bear Pond. The whole hill is a roche moutonnee, sculpted during the Ice Age, with a gently sloping northern flank but a steep glacially-plucked cliff on the southern. We parked in the Hatch Preserve lot, off of Hawk Mountain Road in Waterford. The day was clear and cold and a thin layer of icy snow coated the ground. Dallas and I wore microspikes, which confer the ability to walk on ice with impunity. Harriet booted it, seeking out the less compacted snow beside the trail, which was less slippery. We all wore orange vests, ours lent to us by Harriet, for it is hunting season. We had no trail map, but took a well-trodden trail that headed southeast and uphill and that we figured would eventually reach the summit. It took us through recently logged woods to an overlook on the southern cliff edge. The view of the woodlands and lakes to the southeast was terrific. Crystal Lake was especially prominent. I then led a bushwhack southeast through the woods along the cliff edge, heading for a second, west facing overlook, photos of which I had seen on the web. Although Harriet expressed some skepticism of my navigation, we soon intersected a heavily travelled trail that took us up to a second, wide granite ledge. It offered a wonderful view of Long Lake and Highland Lake, and Pleasant Mountain far in the distance. Harriet used binoculars to locate her house, built on a prominent ridge in Oxford to the east. Though the view of it was partially blockade by trees, we could also see Bear Pond to the west, and way beyond it on the horizon, snowy Mount Washington. Bear Pond is special to Dallas and me, for the landscape artist Ethel Dana, who was Dallas' great aunt, spent her summers there painting many views of it. We poked around the summit ledges for a while, finding a small fault with slickenslides. The surface of the granite ledges bore scratches, but these seemed to me to be "mechanical" in origin and not glacial striae. Later and lower down on the flank of the mountain, we crossed a ledge that did have clear striae. The sun was getting pretty low on the horizon as we reached our cars. 2:00.