Mount Greylock’s summit is the highest point in Massachusetts and the focal point of the state’s first wilderness park, an unusual natural environment shaped by humankind into both a recreational park and a place of remembrance. Rising above the summit is the state’s official monument to its fallen soldiers, the 1932 War Memorial Tower, set amid Massachusetts’ only subalpine forest and dramatic schist outcrops in a landscape designed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. The summit preserves traces of ancient mountain-building, Ice Age forests, and historic cultural resources. On clear days, views extend as far as 90 miles, and below the tower stands the CCC-built Thunderbolt Ski Shelter, long used by skiers on the Thunderbolt Ski Trail. Bascom Lodge, a rustic post-and-beam building mostly built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from stone quarried on-site, provides food and accommodations, and it and other summit structures are part of the Mount Greylock Summit National Register Historic District. High winds, deep snow, and bitter cold have stunted and shaped the summit’s trees into a rare boreal forest found nowhere else in the state, an ecosystem once threatened by logging and farming and now considered at risk from shorter, drier, warmer winters associated with climate change.

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Photo: Michael Herrick

Adams, Massachusetts · USA