Innholdsfortegnelse for Annual Outings Guide 2017 i Adirondack Explorer

After writing about the state’s acquisition of the MacIntyre West Tract for the last issue of the Explorer, I was eager to explore it, and Lake Andrew seemed like the logical place to start. In early December, my girlfriend Carol and I hiked the 4.7 miles to the lake and, on the way back, took a side trip to a spectacular view of the Twin Slides on Santanoni Peak. Although the state has yet to mark any trails on the tract, getting to Lake Andrew is pretty straightforward: we followed well-maintained logging roads for four miles and then followed a skid road for the remaining seven-tenths of a mile. The state bought the 5,770-acre tract from the Adirondack Nature Conservancy in 2014 and opened it to the public on October…

When I suggested to my girlfriend Carol that we jog around Cascade Lake in the Pigeon Lake Wilderness, she endorsed the idea without hesitation. Not only is Carol a trail runner, but she also is an avid swimmer. You might say she is a little obsessed. When I mentioned that Cascade Lake has a sandy bottom, I could barely hold her back. I had my own reasons for wanting to visit Cascade Lake. I was just finishing a guidebook for the Explorer called 12 Short Hikes Near Old Forge and wanted to take a few photos for the Cascade Lake chapter. Cascade Lake is not the shortest hike in the book. The trails leading to and circling the lake add up to six miles. Except for a few slight inclines,…

In 1977, the rock singer Meat Loaf released a love song in which he crooned, “I want you. I need you, but there ain’t no way I’m ever gonna love you. So don’t be sad. ’Cause two out of three ain’t bad.” I feel that way about paddling from First Lake in Old Forge to Fourth Lake in Inlet, the first four lakes in the Fulton Lake Chain. This ten-miler almost met our three criteria for a paddle trip: (i) good swimming and fishing opportunities; (ii) island camping because it feels more adventurous, and (iii) getting away from civilization. Number 3 was the question mark as these four lakes are in one of the more heavily populated and visited parts of the Adirondack Park. But how busy could they really…

I once met a man on the Jackrabbit Trail who was skiing to Lake Placid as part of an arduous loop. He had skied from the end of Averyville Road outside the village to Oseetah Lake and across the lake to the village of Saranac Lake, where he followed local trails to the Jackrabbit for the return to Lake Placid. Well, maybe it wasn’t a complete loop. I don’t know how he got from the village of Lake Placid to his starting point on Averyville Road. Anyway, it’s an interesting trip, but I figure most people probably aren’t up for an eighteen-mile ski that includes a mile-and-a-half climb on the Jackrabbit toward the end of the day. Last winter, Carol MacKinnon Fox and I did just a portion of the…

We had been on the trail for nearly eleven hours when the storm hit. We were so close to success, so close to completing the Great Range in a day. The East Coast’s hardest hike (according to Backpacker Magazine, at least) was nearly within our grasp. We were only a half-mile from the summit of Mount Marcy, the last of ten mountains. We felt great: plenty of energy, plenty of food, plenty of water. Way, way, way too much water, as it turned out. Not just a storm. A deluge of monsoon proportions. Biblical proportions. The sort of weather that Ray Bradbury wrote about in his science-fiction short story “The Long Rain,” in which a crew of astronauts crash-land on water-soaked Venus: “It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain,…

My father handed The Gift to me just after I completed the last hike for my book Hiking the Adirondacks in 2009. It was unexpected and unexciting, an old book, its pages sepia brown and its binding slightly frayed. The name—“Robert L. Johnson, Park Commissioner, Albany, N.Y.”—stood out in faded gold under faintly embossed mountains on the dull green cover. “I thought you might enjoy this now that you’ve trekked through so much of the Adirondack Park,” he said, passing the nondescript three-hundred-page tome through my car window as I made notes by the trailhead. “I’ve been saving it for you.” I thanked him for The Gift, a thoughtful gesture, though it would be six years before I realized how thoughtful. I added it indifferently to the excessive pile of…

It was necessary to perform the whole journey on foot, the trail lying through the wildest and most inaccessible forests of the Adirondacks, portions of which were almost unknown. The trail was of the faintest description, only to be followed by the most experienced woodsmen … the hollows, eked out by the runways of wolf and panther. —Alfred Billings Street (1869) With great expectations, my husband Jack and I shouldered our packs at the Elk Lake-Marcy trailhead to begin our ambitious twenty-mile overnighter. Our plan was to hike to the Panther Gorge lean-to, drop our gear, then summit Mount Marcy on the first day (eleven miles) and hike out the second day (nine miles). Adding to the challenge was that the last two-mile stretch on the first day, from the…

Since the state purchased the Essex Chain Lakes a few years ago, I had been meaning to try out the ski touring in that region. My initial idea was to ski on old logging roads to the Essex Chain, but then I got wind of a new ski trail created by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. In mid-January, my neighbor Tim Peartree and I checked out the 4.2-mile route, and we had a ball. DEC calls the trail the Upper Hudson Ski Loop. At different points, the trail parallels the Goodnow River and the Hudson River. The department regards the trail as “intermediate” in difficulty, but advanced beginners should be able to handle it. Most of trail is easy, but there are a few hills that require more skill.…

Any backcountry skier who has slogged seven and a half miles up Mount Marcy realizes that the old saying “What goes up must come down” has got it backwards. It should be “What comes down must go up.” Yet that’s not always true. Poor Man’s Downhill in Wilmington is the exception to the rule—more than three miles of descent with no uphill. It runs from the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway to Route 86, losing 1,225 feet in elevation. The state Department of Environmental Conservation built the trail as a snowmobile route several years ago, but it doesn’t get a huge amount of use by sledders. When mountain bikers started using it in the non-winter months, they nicknamed it Poor Man’s Downhill, because it became popular with those who couldn’t afford…

My wife Lynne and I pulled into the small parking area on a mild morning in June. We had been here before to hike to Cod Pond in the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, but today we had a different destination: the little-visited Oregon Trail. Before we had donned our day packs, gathered our photo gear, and doused ourselves with a liberal application of bug repellent, the parking lot came to life: not one, but perhaps a dozen white admirals, beautifully decorated butterflies, flitted around us. One fearless individual made a brief landing on my shoulder, boldly flaunting his flashy, outstretched wings just within my peripheral vision. I couldn’t resist snapping a shot of him once he settled back on the ground. With the sun barely poking out of the clouds,…

Carol’s friend Emily wanted to do a big hike, something spectacular. It didn’t take me long to hit on the idea of climbing Algonquin Peak and Iroquois Peak and returning by way of Avalanche Lake. We would go over the summit of the second-highest mountain in the state, follow a mile-long open ridge with breathtaking views, descend a steep but beautiful trail, and scramble along the shore of a lake whose sublimity never fails to astound. The 13.4-mile loop from Adirondak Loj entails roughly 4,300 feet of elevation gain and took us eleven and a half hours. By the end of the day, we were spent but exhilarated. It was just what Emily was looking for. “It pushed me to my limits, and I was grinning ear to ear,” Emily…

Brian Mann and I had been on the water for several hours when we came to a fallen tree stretched across the river. We pulled over to a sandbank to carry our canoes around. “Human footprints,” Brian remarked. “So I guess we’re not Lewis and Clark,” I replied. If we weren’t intrepid explorers, at least we could pretend. For even though we weren’t the very first, we must have been among the first to paddle this stretch of the upper Hudson River after the state purchased the 6,200-acre MacIntyre East tract from the Nature Conservancy in late April, a few weeks before our trip. The state bought MacIntyre East as part of a multi-year deal to add sixty-one thousand acres of former Finch, Pruyn lands to the Forest Preserve. The…

The winter started out promising with a good snowfall in December, but later in the month rains washed away most of the snowpack. We received a bit of light, fluffy powder the week after Christmas, but not enough to make most trails skiable. And so, not for the first time in recent winters, we opted for a ski tour across backcountry ponds. When people think of pond skiing, they usually think of the Seven Carries in the St. Regis Canoe Area. Indeed, Carol Fox and I skied the Seven Carries route on January 2 and found the conditions ideal: a few inches of light snow on top of rock-solid ice, with no slush. We had such a good time that the next day we decided to try the ponds just…

Each year hundreds of people hike to the summit of Rooster Comb for its great views. Far fewer reach the summit by scaling its cliffs, but the mountain has a long and storied rock-climbing history. Whether you hike or climb to the top, the 2,788-foot peak offers a wonderful vista of the lower Great Range, the Brothers, and Johns Brook valley. Rooster Comb is one the trips chosen for the Adirondack Explorer’s new guidebook, 12 Short Hikes Near Keene Valley. Since I planned to hike Rooster Comb for the book, I figured I’d squeeze in a rock climb as well. My neighbor, Tim Peartree, agreed to come along. Our goal was Old Route, a roped climb established by Fritz Wiessner, a legendary rock climber and alpinist, in the summer of…