The Black Dog of the Hanging Hills

The saying on West Peak is old and precise: if you meet the black dog once it is for joy, twice for sorrow, and the third time for death. It makes no sound when it barks and leaves no tracks. What gives it teeth is that a geologist, W. H. C. Pynchon, published an account in 1898 of meeting it twice, then died on the traprock a few years later on a trip where a companion said he had seen it a third time. Several deaths on these cliffs since have been hung on the story. The Hanging Hills are real, steep basalt and genuinely dangerous ground in ice.