True to the pioneer spirit that settled North America, women set out with a determination to experience mountain adventures on this continent. History reveals that they were not following in Henriette’s footsteps but rather preceding her Mont Blanc accomplishment by nearly seventeen years. Particularly in the northeastern region of the United States, several accomplishments by women in many ways rival that of Henriette’s and helped to set the stage for female participation in projects such as the Appalachian Trail and in hiking organizations such as the Appalachian Trail Conference and its maintaining clubs. From the Austin sisters’ summit of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in 1821 to the ascent of Maine’s remote Katahdin by Hannah Keep and Esther Jones in 1848, American women were raising “the glass ceiling” on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Just as the French hailed each successful assent of Mont Blanc, the earliest American adventurers to be considered mountaineers regarded New Hampshire’s Mount Washington with awe and trepidation. (Darby Field took two Abenakis on two superstition-busting treks to the summit in 1642.) Since an ascent by an all-male group of scientists in 1784, Mount Washington has held tenaciously on to its reputation for changeable, severe weather. Manassed Cutler, who offered the most detailed account of the 1784 expedition, agreed with the calculation of Mount Washington’s height as close to ten thousand feet—an over-estimation of nearly four thousand feet. And, at the time, he could list only four peaks in the world higher—Andes, Peak of Teneriffa, Gamoni, and the notorious Mont Blanc. Accordingly, when three young sisters, Eliza, Harriet, and Abigail Austin, visited the guest house of Ethan and Lucy Crawford in New Hampshire’s White Mountains in August 1821, the Crawfords were not quite prepared to welcome this new breed of female adventurer.
After losing their first home in the notch between Mount Webster and Mount Willey in the Presidential Range to a fire in July 1818, Ethan moved a small house to their home site and, over several years, expanded their home to serve as an inn for settlers transporting goods between the upper Connecticut River Valley and the seaport towns of Portland, Maine, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Ethan and Lucy soon found their inn welcoming hundreds of horse-drawn sleighs each week when snow covered the ground, as tradesmen hauled pork, cheese, butter, and other farm products through the notch and on to New England markets. With the notion of further expanding his business by promoting the area’s mountains as a place for outdoor adventure, Ethan and his father, Abel, cut a primitive trail to the summit of nearby Mount Washington.