‘’The river was a brawling stream, shallow, and roughened by rocks; now we rode on a level with it; now there was a sheer descent down the roadside upon it….Between the mountains there were gorges and defiles that led the imagination away into new scenes of wildness. I have never ridden through such romantic scenery.’’

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the Deerfield River (in southern Vermont and western Massachusetts) in The American Notebooks (1838)