A rock crevice provides another singular habitat. A crevice can hold water, collect organic matter, and provide an anchorage for plants. A multitude of crawling animalsants, centipedes, beetles, and moreuse it for a thoroughfare. Snails find its moist shadows attractive, and its narrow confines spell safety from predatory birds. Ferns, too delicate even for moss mats, grow profusely in the deeper, wider splits. On beds of fir needles in larger crevices we kept finding signs of mammalsdroppings, hair, nests, and burrows. Major cracks, often linked, form a labyrinth where mice and shrews and larger animals can run. Here is protection for their young and security during hibernation through the long winters. Mosses, lichens, mites, ants, beetles, rodents: Barren rock ledges? Hardly! Every depression or crevice was a secure niche in which life could take hold and survive. STANDING ON THE CLIFFS, looking out over wooded hills, I wondered who gazed upon this panorama centuries and millennia ago. The rock ledges have remained exposed since the retreat of the last great glacier, its melting heights tumbling as slush and frigid water into tumultuous rivers far below. Falcons flew here soon thereafter. Insects and lichens prospered. And red squirrels and bears and finally men came to roam these heights. Recently, on the cliffs, a young woman climbed past me with a companion, both, I suspected, from the city. “Lord!” she said, not irreverently. “What a place! I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody will believe me, and I don’t even have a camera.” I hope that visitor may read this: What is written and pictured here is partly done for her. For myself, I cannot believe that my memories of Wheeler Mountain can ever be misted over by other sights, other days.
