Mount Greylock Massachusetts has much to boast about. Boston was the cradle of the American Revolution, Cambridge has the country’s mostopinionated zip code, basketball was invented in Springfield and Marshmallow Fluff in Somerville. But for sheer beauty and artistry per square foot, it’s hard to beat the top of Mount Greylock, way out in the northwest corner of the state. First came the writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne climbed the mountain several times, describing Greylock and its surroundings in American Notebooks and his short story “Ethan Brand.” He may have inspired his Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau to summit as well, which he did alone one afternoon in July 1844. Thoreau spent a chilly night in the lee of a wooden observatory at the top, awaking at daybreak to “an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth…it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra-firma perchance of my future life.” (Coming as it did a couple of years after the death of his beloved older brother John [from lockjaw] and a few months after he’d set fire to several hundred acres of woods near his family’s home while trying to cook a fish chowder, some scholars think this climb gave the 27-year-old Thoreau the confidence to take on his experiment in rugged living at Walden Pond the next year.) Herman Melville loved Greylock too. Gazing at its snowy hump from his study in Pittsfield, some say he saw the white whale that made him famous. He climbed it in style in 1851, with 11 companions and a picnic basket full of brandied fruit, Champagne, port, cognac, and Jamaican rum. It must have been a fine time, as he dedicated Pierre, published the following year, to “Greylock’s most excellent majesty…my own…sovereign lord and king.” Engineers, architects, and builders came next. Though Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “a serious mountain,” Greylock is hardly towering. At 3,491 feet, it’s only about half as tall as Mount Washington, New England’s highest, and it was a tempting project to make the summit accessible to visitors of all kinds--literati, scientists, and casual tourists. In 1830, students from nearby Williams College, directed by President Edward Dorr Griffin, cut a trail up the mountain’s west side and constructed “Griffin’s Tower,” a meteorological observatory. (Thoreau slept in its larger successor, built by students in 1841.) A modest summit house opened in 1875, followed by a carriage road in 1885, built by a group of local businessmen who had just purchased 400 acres on the mountaintop. Concerned about rampant logging and its accompanying soil erosion, they hoped to create a tourist destination. When the venture failed, they turned the land over to the Commonwealth, stipulating that the state buy additional acreage around the summit. In 1898, Greylock became Massachusetts’ first wilderness state park. In 1932, Pittsfield architect Joseph McArthur Vance designed Bascom Lodge, a handsome new summit structure in the Arts and Crafts style; it was finished by 1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), using stone and red spruce from the mountain. Vance also designed the rustic Thunderbolt Ski Shelter, situated a few hundred yards down from the summit and so named for a backcountry downhill trail, which hosted its first race in 1935 and is still in use today. The shelter is open as well, and its distinctive four-hearth central chimney continues to warm skiers and hikers sheltering from the elements (the Appalachian Trail passes over the top of Greylock). The third mountaintop building is 1933’s Massachusetts Veterans War Memorial Tower, a 93-foot-tall graceful sweep of Quincy granite designed by the Boston firm Maginnis & Walsh, which also designed many churches in and around Boston, as well as Boston College’s much-admired Gasson Hall. Though currently under repair, its beacon when lit can be seen from 70 miles away. Taken together with the iconic CCC buildings and the cultural history of the mountain, the tower is part of the Mount Greylock Summit Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. The CCC crew must have missed some of the mountain’s red spruce, as a few patches of old-growth timber remain, particularly in the Hopper, a glacial cirque that gets its name from its resemblance to an old-fashioned miller’s hopper. There, some of the trees are 350 years old, one specimen is 120 feet tall, and the entire area is a National Natural Landmark. Looking out over the Hopper from the summit is a sublime experience, with or without Thoreau’s ocean of mist. Greylock rises steeply for a New England mountain, and almost 2,700 feet from its base. On a clear day, one can see into five states, taking in the forest-covered, eon-softened contours of the landscape below. Beyond the Hopper, due west, is the Taconic Range, with the Berkshire Hills south, and the southern end of Vermont’s Green Mountains to the north and New Hampshire’s Whites to the northeast. The weather can change quickly, however. One afternoon, a group witnessed a cloud pass directly through the dining room of Bascom Lodge. Yet it’s not all history and natural beauty on top of old Greylock these days. Enter the innkeepers. Seven years ago, up from New York City came three partners in search of a restaurant to open in the Berkshires. John Dudek was a pastry chef in Manhattan, his brother Peter a sculptor and Hunter College professor of art, and Brad Parsons a textile designer and colorist for Kravet, the highend home furnishings company. After a deal fell through in Pittsfield, they heard that Bascom Lodge was available through the state’s Historic Curatorship Program, through which historic buildings are renovated and maintained by private parties in exchange for a long-term lease. It was a place the Dudeks knew well--they were born and raised at the foot of the mountain, in Adams. “When we took over,” says John, “the place was in pretty rough shape and had been empty for the two years Greylock’s access roads were being repaired.” The team has brought its artistry to the old building, renovating the lobby and most of the nine bedrooms, updating the electrical system, and redoing the entire kitchen, from which John and his staff bring forth meals prepared with locally sourced ingredients. Parsons has lent his touch to the furnishings, responding to the building’s Arts and Crafts character with furniture from Stickley, William Morris wallpaper from Zofany, and handmade lighting fixtures from California’s Mica Lamp Company. Bascom Lodge accommodates 34 overnight guests, from May to October, and the dining room is open to the general public. The lodge is also home to a wide variety of programs and events, from yoga, photography, writing, and art workshops to a jazz festival. While there’s no record of Thoreau’s feelings about yoga, and Melville didn’t know from jazz, it’s a safe bet both men would approve of the ongoing vitality atop this most excellent mountain. It is a spot, as Thoreau wrote, “cut off from the trivial places we name Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York…a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.”