Leather Boots and Double Bits

I stride across the front porch of Limmer’s Barn, noticing planks worn to the bone by decades of customers, coming and going.  Like a ship’s deck, or a New England dance floor, endless footfalls have stripped the paint away. My steps echo their own hollow thud as I reach for the wooden door in front of me and give it a yank. 

Inside, the smells of bootmaking smother me - smells I never knew before my years of trailwork.  I take in the rich scent of leather and the tangy smell of the grease that gets rubbed into my boots before each trip to the White Mountains.   Another smell saturates the barn today, strong enough to make me grow woozy. I inhale deeply . . .

“If you smell sweet, that’s the glue,” Pete Limmer says from the back of the shop.  I inhale again, and sweetness described the smell perfectly.  I salivate at the scent.  “Sometimes people will come in here just to smell the place,” Pete tells me.  I ask him about the other smells of his shop and he replies, “Sweat and Love.” 

Shelves rise from floor to ceiling around me, lined with boots the way a library’s walls are lined with books.  Heels facing me, black, smooth and rounded.  On my right, rows of boots await repair, each one with their own stories from miles of trail.  Further inside, more shelves line the shop, with boots in various stages of construction.  There are tracings of feet on paper, rough-carved wooden molds, and cuttings of leather resembling a boot with no bottom.  At my side, a wooden bench and a single stool provide customers with a place to sit while being fitted. 

Photographs cover the walls, sharing the journeys of this shop’s most loyal customers.  In the pictures I see hikers, trailbuilders, and mountaineers grinning with the world’s mountain ranges in the background.  The photos show the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Andes.  There are Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, reaching Katahdin, and I find a few photos of the AMC Trail Crew - trailworkers standing shoulder to shoulder on the Great Gulf Bridge.  I look at them, holding their double-bit axes high, with a sense of relevance and pride, for I am a part of this crew.  Their muscle is thick, their workpants are tattered, and their boots are Limmers.

“Yeah it’s a pretty good boot isn’t it?  They’re a little heavy, but my grandfather designed a good boot,” Pete says. 

Pete’s grandfather built Tyrolean walking shoes in the Bavarian Alps a century ago, then brought his family to the United States in 1925, setting up a shoemaking shop in Jamaica Plain, of Boston.  In that shop, Pete’s grandfather taught Peter Sr. his Bavarian style of bootbuilding.  He found a market in adventurers heading north to New Hampshire’s White Mountains, needing hiking boots.  The Limmers even shaped the New England ski industry through its most glorious years, receiving the first U.S. patent for a ski boot in 1939.  During one ski trip, the family was struck with how the White Mountains reminded them of their home in the Bavarian Alps, and in 1951 the Jamaica Plain shop moved to Intervale, NH.  It was here in the Limmer barn that Pete Jr. learned his trade.

Pete wears a dark blue apron with the thickness of an old canvas tent.  His stout body pushes against it, and I notice the strength in his arms.  In his ear, a single ring of gold loops through the lobe.  He seems part blacksmith, part pirate, and since I know no other bootmakers, I decide they are all ancient blacksmith pirates, wearing Limmers.  His grizzled beard protrudes slightly over his t-shirt.   Pete invites me back into the shop, so he can keep working while we talk.

“I do about one hundred and fifty pairs of boots each year.  Knock on wood, but this year I haven’t had one return.  It’s nice to know that after thirty-five years I am getting better at it,” Pete says, with equal parts humor and seriousness. 

As I consider the math – thirty five years, one hundred fifty pair per year, more than ten thousand boots -- he reaches for a tool from his bench and focuses on the half-built boot before him.   The tool is a large pair of pliers, but with a hammerhead on the pliers' backside.  With a flick of his wrist, he puts it to work – pinching, stretching, and tapping twice with each pull of the leather.  I have never seen this odd combination of tools before.  Pinch, stretch, tap, tap, around the entire base of the boot.

“Lasting pinchers,” Pete says, pausing from the boot on his bench and showing me the tool.  He begins working again. His hands do not work in a blur, but steady, continuous movements that are precise, and allow the tool to do the work.  His forearms resemble the rippled trunk of a hop hornbeam, understory tree of the New England forest.  The skin bulges with the muscular movements beneath.

In Forest and Crag, White Mountain historians Laura and Guy Waterman write:

"A special niche was carved out in Northeastern hiking by an Austrian bootmaker who emigrated to Intervale, New Hampshire, within sight of Mount Washington, where he set up a family business producing limited numbers of custom-made hiking boots.  Three generations of Peter Limmer & Sons churned out an unchanging, fashionless, colorless (black) product, winning a degree of loyalty among Northeastern hikers that is perhaps without parallel in the annals of the outfitting business. 

Limmer boots were the uniform of White Mountain hikers from the 1950s on, even when demand outpaced the family's ability to produce them so that the waiting period for a new pair ran as high as three-and-a-half years.”

Pete still makes the custom boots in his New Hampshire workshop – each pair, by hand, takes about six weeks – but the waitlist has grown since the Waterman’s assessment, now to about five years.  To satisfy customer demand, Limmers also offers factory stocked boots, made in the same Bavarian town of his grandfather’s past, on a handshake agreement. 

“I’d have to say if there is one justification for the custom boot, it is the quality of the fit.  What I’m doing right now is pulling all the stretch out of the leather.  When hand-lasting leather, I can differentiate between one piece of leather and the next, so that I can pull it all to the same tensile strength.  A machine wouldn’t be able to do this.  So, in my stock boot, lotta times you can try two ‘r three size nines, and they could feel kind of different.” Pete explains, “With heavier leather, the machine stops pulling at twenty pounds, when it should’ve pulled to twenty-five or thirty pounds.  That boot’ll have a little more volume. I work within two millimeters of a person’s foot shape.  There’s no compromise there, and not a lot of room for error.”

I lean against the old Singer sewing machine, pick up the wooden carving of a foot, and hold it next to my boot, just re-soled.  My most recent week in the Mahoosucs had worn down the Vibram to a useless state.  I took on a badly eroded section of trail on the Mahoosuc Arm.  The trail curved steeply through the conifers, had become gullied, and then widened considerably from hikers avoiding the eroded section.  My goal was to solidify the trail with rock steps.   I spent two days quarrying stone from the surrounding forest leaving the remainder of the week to sculpt the staircase by Friday’s hike out.  I guided each boulder into place with the pick-mattock, building on the step below.  As each stone rested in its place, I pounded and pounded with my boots to drive the stones deep into the soil, watching to detect the slightest quiver.  The result was a winding staircase of stone, spanning five feet and rising twenty steps, in a zone that had previously been an eroded gully of muck.  The finished project portrayed function and beauty – just like a good boot. 

“You know, the most artistic part of it is taking a two dimensional mold and creating its three dimensional shape.  That’s also what takes the longest.”  Pete tells me.

Limmers are reliable.  They last, even when being abused by trailwork.  After a decade of trailbuilding and mountain guiding, I seek a boot that is all leather, has minimal seams, has stitched on soles, and fits well.  At Limmers, each boot is made from a single piece of quality leather, and thus has a single seam – never have I seen another boot match this craftsmanship.  Additionally, that seam is on the instep, above the arch – a place that receives little stress.  Of course, custom boots fit like a dream, but even when buying the stock boots, Pete will spend an hour measuring your feet, trying sizes, showing different lacing techniques, and even re-shaping the leather at pressure points to keep your feet free of blisters. 

“I like what I’m doing, been doing it for thirty-five years.  It comes so naturally now that it is hard for me to put it into words.  So, how many years have you built trail?”

“This is my fourth year with the crew” I say, “We spent early June chopping away fallen trunks and clearing debris from drainages.  It took us three weeks to cover about four hundred miles of trail through the White Mountains, carrying light daypacks, our double-bit axes, and hazel hoes for the drainages.”

“Now that the trails are clear, we begin our longer projects in the backcountry.  The twenty of us will split into four smaller crews to rebuild eroded trail throughout the national forest.  I’ll be leading the crew into Tuckerman’s Ravine to solidify the rockwork ascending the Headwall.”

Thanking Pete, I place my boots, new laces, and Limmer grease under one arm and walk outside, then drive north along Route 16 to Pinkham Notch.

*

Monday morning, my crew makes preparations in Hutton Lodge, the trail crew living quarters and center for operations in Pinkham Notch.  Today it feels like a pre-game locker room, filled with purpose and intensity.  Led Zeppelin riffs sizzle through the air.  Twenty trailworkers hustle to their tasks: mending packs and rain gear with duct tape, inspecting their feet for sores, packing sleeping bags and gear.  Crew Leaders highlight topographic maps and test handheld radios.  The twin toilets, down Hutton’s hallway, flush relentlessly.  A large tub of Limmer grease sits on the crew room table where workers wipe the spruce-scented glop into their boots. 

Downstairs, on ground level, is the crew’s workshop.  Sunlight angles through the windows in the workshop’s garage door, reflecting against rows of metallic shovel heads on hickory handles. Against the wall lean the tools for moving boulders - pick-mattocks and rock bars.  The swept floor and broad, bare workbenches lend a moment of stillness to the room.  Framed above the workshop door are the words of Abraham Lincoln, “If I had five hours to chop a tree, I’d spend the first four sharpening my axe.” 

Outside, workers test double-burner stoves.  The grinding wheel spins against root-axes and clippers, sending a shower of sparks.  A few workers sit with mill-bastard files, sharpening their double-bit axes with a slow precision that risks being forgotten in these times.  Our tools and supplies are lashed to wooden-framed packboards, hundred-pound loads leaning against the stone wall, waiting to be carried.  With a single word - foo – the crew gathers.  We heft our packboards and hike into the ravine for the week. 

The stonework of Tuckerman’s Ravine is glorious, writing itself into the trail like words on a page.  Each boulder quarried from the earth, muscled to the trail, becomes a line.  Each step-stone set into place creates it rhyme.  Once embedded into the tread; staircases, scree walls, waterbars, and bridges form an epic of northeast trailwork that began in the ravine two hundred years ago, and continues today with our labor.

In 1809, there was no rockwork in the ravine; its slopes were inaccessible to all but the most determined.  Colonel George Gibbs, determined, cut the first trail into the ravine, and its name became Gibbs’ path.  Once this trail was cut, a small group of adventurers scrambled up every reachable drainage and ridgeline.  These hearty adventurers were botanists, searching for rare alpine species.  Clad in wool, on hands and knees, they examined every inch of alpine habitat.  Like Gibbs, these botanists of the early 1800s left their names in the mountains – Tuckerman’s Ravine, Boott Spur, Cutler River, Bigelow’s Lawn, Oakes’ Gulf.  I picture each botanist, alone on his namesake, hiking over rocks and squatting to admire Dwarf cinquefoil (Potentilla robbinsiana), Boott’s rattlesnake root (Prenanthes boottii), White Mountain saxifrage (Saxifraga aizoon) or Bigelow’s sedge (Carex bigelowii)

Roughly a century after Gibbs’ efforts, the nation’s first professional trail crew was born, when in 1911, the Appalachian Mountain Club hired one person to maintain their sizeable trail system in the White Mountains.  By 1919, a steady, committed crew had formed, and that crew has led the nation in trail maintenance for nearly a century. 

Reflecting on her seasons of work, one of our crewmembers, Elyse Fenton, wrote in Hammer Struck Music:

I am a trailworker.  I say this not solely as metaphor.  Summers, I work on a trail crew, building and reconstructing trails in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.  This mostly means quarrying rocks and setting boulders in the trail for staircases and drainages, protecting the soil from erosion . . . Like most manual labor, it also means long hours and short pay, and a general public that is, for the most part, unaware of the work involved.

 The same, I think, can be said of writing poetry.  The poet probes, pries up individual words like boulders from the rich soil of language, and sets them in the trail with a precision that belies their startling bulk.

Fenton, and others with trail names like Goat, Young Dave, Peanut, and Slim, labored in the talus fields of Tuckermans.  While rebuilding White Mountain trails, we were aware that we were continuing a tradition of work in the mountains that has been a part of the North Country for centuries.  Botanists, loggers, hikers, trailbuilders – we love the work we do.  Our energy comes from the mud, rock, rain, and sun of the northern forest.  It is endless.

*

Limmer and Sons bootbuilders seem as intrinsically a part of the Mount Washington Valley as hiking and trailbuilding.  And so I was shocked recently, when I saw a ‘For Sale’ sign hanging at the workshop entrance.

“The big happenings right now is the selling of the building.  My cousin and I are heading in different directions.  The ‘and sons’ part of Limmer and Sons is my dad and uncle.  They were brothers, but as the family tree starts getting bigger, the boughs get further and further apart.”  Pete said.  “I’ve been pushing that door open at 8:00 a.m. everyday for thirty-five years.  I always thought I’d be doing it till the day I retired.  I told that to Ken the other day and he says to me, ‘Well Pete, let’s take the fuckin’ door with us!’, and so wherever we wind up going, the door is gonna get plunked down.”  After thought, Pete added, “I called the realtor’s office and told them I’m cutting the door jam out.  Realtor said, ‘yeah, I expected that.”

Before becoming home to Limmer Boots, this pale green barn with red trim and a tin roof had been a carriage house for an inn.  After that, it became a dance hall.  Even with these historical changes, I always imagined it would remain a bootbuilding shop ad infinitum.  But the future for Limmer Boots is uncertain.  Perhaps this is true for many businesses in the North Country.   The roots of the business are strong, but youth often seeks opportunities and adventure elsewhere – as the family tree gets bigger, the boughs get further apart. 

“Unfortunately, it seems like this may be the last generation here because both of my boys have elected to go to college.  My oldest boy, Trevor, is studying CNC machining.  Got a job in Westport and is already making more than me.  He grew up through all the stories of the business.  And he’s got a real good understanding of leather.  The kid’s got it, so it’ll be real interesting to see.”  Pete said.  “Nobody ever pushed me into the business.”

He seems to love his sons, and admires the lives they lead.  He provides them room to make their own decisions, understands they might screw up at times, but will still wrap his muscular arms around them if they ever need it. 

“My youngest boy just found out there’s football and women out there.  You can’t blame him for that.”  Pete says, with a chuckle. 

Limmers are crafted so well, they often outlast the durability of their parts.  My boots are on their third sole, having been worn away by miles of backpacking and years of trailwork in the White Mountains.  So will Limmers even outlast the life of their workshop - the barn nestled in the woods off of Route Sixteen?  With new soles, I know my boots will last a while longer, supporting me for another season of trailwork.  And if they do wear out, I am sure Limmers will still be crafting the finest boots in the Northeast, wherever that door gets plunked down.