Fishin' Jimmy

Today, Sara and I are heading up to Lonesome Lake Hut for another weekend working as an AMC information volunteer. Sara is going to spend Friday night with me and Charlie will come up and spend Saturday night.

Lonesome Lake hut is the westernmost of the AMC huts in the chain that allows hut to hut hikes through the White Mountains. It is the lowest in elevation and sits in the shadow of Cannon Mountain and has a spectacular view of Franconia Ridge.

There is a trail from the hut named the Fishin' Jimmy trail. The trail was named for a popular story written in 1889 by Annie Trumbull Slosson who was an even more intriguing character than the fictional Fishin' Jimmy. Fishin' Jimmy is a sweet moralistic story about a grizzled old fisherman who finds Christ by stumbling into a church service. He finds the message of Jesus being a fisher of men an appealing one and he becomes a dedicated Christian who loses his life in a rescue on Franconia Ridge. The story is an e-book and is available here.

According to Julie Boardman's fascinating book, When Women and Mountains Meet, Annie Trumbull Slosson was not only the author of eight books during the Local Color Movement but an entomologist of great note who discovered over 3,000 different insects on the bare summit cone of Mt. Washington. Some of the species were given the suffix slossonae after Annie Trumbull Slosson and some were given the suffix washingtonensis in honor of the mountain.

Julie Boardman says that "One of the most fascinating insects on the summit is the White Mountain butterfly (C. semidea), which Slosson referred to as Mount Washington's oldest inhabitant. The butterfly, whose brown and gray mottled wings allow it to blend into the austere surroundings, dates from the glacial period and is only found on the Presidential Range and the very highest summits of mountains in Colorado."

Annie Tumbull Slosson was the sister-in-law and companion of William Prime, an author, art historian and philanthropist of great note. Lonesome Lake was bought in 1876 by William Prime and another man and used as a fishing camp until 1930 when the AMC established the original cabin as Lonesome Lake hut. The present hut is now located on the opposite side of the lake from William Prime's original fishing camp although the spot of the original camp is still obvious.