The Most Villainous, Breakneck Route, chapter 8: Forbidden Zone

From where we sit having lunch, it looks like a skier could pick his way quite nicely off the top of Monroe’s northeast slope. On pleasant July evenings after dinner, hut guests go up Monroe summit to watch the sunset over the Vermont Green Mountains.

Mt. Monroe - Photo by Phil Ostroski

Today, what’s left for snow up there is enticing.
A bit of a side hill, but there is a precise line down through the rocks, about a 300’ drop, and just shouting distance away. Below the peak, a couple skiers have made the half-mile shuffle across a plateau called Monroe Flats toward Oakes Gulf and the top of a run called “Double Barrel”. DB’s twin grooves are about 80’ apart and are narrow and steep, dropping about 800’ vertical feet onto the floor of Oakes Gulf.  A rare alpine plant, Potentilla robbinsiana grows there, so I hope they tread lightly. Nearby, another popular Oakes ski run drops in from the “flats” at the old location of the Dry River hiking trail. The trail has a new location away from the rare plants.


Oakes Gulf is Mt. Washington’s only south-facing ravine. This cirque-de-soleil was named for William Oakes, a Harvard trained lawyer whose early abandonment of that career led to a life as a distinguished botanist. He was fastidious in his collecting and cataloging of New England flora, especially from the White Mountains. Oakes made many trips to the Presidential Range collecting specimens with his good friend, the famous White Mountain guide, Ethan Allen Crawford. The botanist is best remembered for his florid, descriptive narratives in the book White Mountain Scenery published in 1848, now out of print. The original publication contained detailed pictures by some of that period’s best landscape painters and lithographers.  A 1970 reproduction of the work by the New Hampshire Publishing Company helped rekindle an interest in Oakes. Mr. Oakes came to a very unceremonious end when he drowned, having fallen overboard while riding the ferry between East Boston and Boston.

Potentilla robbinsiana, which grows along the rim of the great botanist’s namesake, is commonly called dwarf cinquefoil. It has five leaflets (cinquefoil) and a tiny, yellow blossom. Dwarf cinquefoil is the rarest alpine plant in New England and received endangered species protection in 1980. At the height of the plant’s protection period, the Forest Service surrounded the remaining plants on Monroe Flats with a stone wall and the enclave became known as the “Forbidden Zone”. 

 photo by Lftgly

Volunteer preservationists watched over the site to help protect the plant from being trampled by hikers.

As a result of protection and a successful reintroduction program, Potentilla robbinsiana was taken off the endangered list in 2002. At last count there were over 4,500 plants in and around the Monroe Flats “viewing garden”.

How the Potentilla robinsianna got its name lends credence to the interconnectedness of all things, especially in the province of White Mountain place names.

To keep order in the plant kingdom, eighteenth century botanists began to use the binomial naming convention that is still used today. In its simplest form, the convention requires a two-part name. The genus, also called the generic name, comes first and is always capitalized. For dwarf cinquefoil the genus is Potentilla. Potens is latin for strong, as in strong medicine, perhaps derived from dwarf cinquefoil's medicinal properties. The second name is specific, always in lower case, and usually given for the plant’s discoverer or a place where it grows. In this instance, robbinsiana, for James Robbins.

A full scientific name also includes the family name (Rosaceae) which in some way relates potentilla to all the other Roses:  Axl Rose, Rose Marie, and all the English Roses that old ladies fuss over in their tea gardens. Next a citation is given for who named the plant (Oakes), and lastly one for the guy who first published that name (Per Rydberg). Potentilla robinsianna; Rosaceae; Oakes ex Rydb. The name has stuck.

What's in a name? That which we call a robbinsiana by any other name would smell the same, but languish from an uncertain pedigree. In Oakes’s time, there was no governance of the code of rules for naming plants, so the lineage of dwarf cinquefoil is as foggy as the alpine meadows it inhabits. Depending on whom you talk to, it was James Nuttall or James Robbins who discovered the dwarf cinquefoil. Oakes's name credits Mr. Robbins as the plant's discoverer.

Cronyism among the early scientists who roamed the hills was rampant. When Oakes named a famous ravine for his fellow botanist, Professor Edward Tuckerman, Tuckerman in turn named a flower for his friend Oakes. Oakesia comrade is commonly known as brown crowberry.

Oakes reportedly named a couple of peaks in the Presidential Range as well: Mt. Jackson for his friend, physician and geologist, Charles Thomas Jackson, and Mt. Clay for Henry Clay, author of the Missouri Compromise.

For better or for worse, there is no naming convention for mountains. Popular acceptance of local, commonly used names usually eliminates any need for their governance. There are sixteen summits in eleven different states all named Mount Washington. Washington State (of course) has four of them. Because of their outstanding character, some mountains may have more names than a phonebook. There are sixteen variants of New Hampshire's Mount Washington cited by the United States Board of Geographic Names; from Agiochook to White Hill. Historians still cannot agree if the peak was named for a general or a president.

People and mountain names alike are destined to suffer from muddled governance.  In 2003 the New Hampshire state legislature decreed Mount Clay "shall hereafter be called and known as Mount Reagan", after President Ronald Reagan. The U.S. Board of Geographical Names did not accept the state's name change, so depending on your allegiance, it’s Mount Clay or Mount Reagan. For the same reason, some people still call Alaska’s Denali, Mt. McKinley.

In 1972 that same New Hampshire legislative body renamed Mt. Pleasant for Dwight Eisenhower, our 34th president. I suppose it's only appropriate that Clay and Pleasant now have names that fit their undeniable position in the Presidential Range. Unlike Mounts Reagan and Eisenhower, Oakes's Mount Charles Jackson  has always enjoyed the name and position of a president, despite it’s questionable pedigree.   Semper-Viridis jacksonia; Presidentialacea; Oakes ex USGS
chapter 9: Touring a Lunar Landscape