NEW - Fall 2009

Wintering with Amasa Ward, 1889-1890; at Hell Gate on the Dead Diamond River by Jack Noon, Moose Country Press(2009) ISBN 1893863-03-4 Paperback, 226 pages, $16.95

Amasa Ward in the 1880's ran a sporting camp for fishermen and hunters at Hell Gate on New Hampshire's Dead Diamond River at a time when native trout were enormous, woodland caribou still roamed the fringes of the watershed, and most of the old-growth red spruce had yet to be cut. The author, in the winter of 2003-2004, set out to relive Amasa Ward's 1889-1890 winter of solitude at Hell Gate by "undertaking a winter's adventure of late middle age and of isolation" there -- and to write about Hell Gate and its past. He had first worked at Hell Gate in 1965, when 28 men in a nearby logging camp were still hauling logs out of the woods, and two years after the last log drive had gone down the Diamonds and into the Magalloway; early in the 1970's he had helped build two log cabins at Hell Gate and had started leading Outward Bound winter camping courses throughout the region; and for several decades had been compiling the history of the watershed of the Diamonds. The account of the challenging winter spent writing in a drafty log cabin where water often froze overnight celebrates an enduring love for a special place, its past all the way back into archeological times, and nearly half a century's worth of friendships made beside the Dead Diamond River.