Sometime in the early spring of 2009, my buddy Dave, hit me up with the idea of doing some backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. He wanted to do the whole thing in sections, but he wanted to start in Georgia. He propositioned me with the notion of driving 16 hours, hiking for two days, and then driving (almost) another 16 hours back. I’ve done a lot of crazy things, including a marathon drive from Alabama to Pennsylvania once…once. This is precisely why I wasn’t going to go for his plan. Instead, I offered to take him to the Adirondacks. I hadn’t done any serious hiking there in years, and, in my opinion, bagging all 46 peaks over 4000ft is just as lofty as section-hiking the entire AT.
I began planning in earnest. I laid out a few routes and after some careful decision making, taking into account some of my previous Adirondack adventures, my hiatus from serious backpacking for 2-3 years, and the fact that I didn’t want to re-bag a lot of peaks I’ve already notched in my belt, I decided on an itinerary that would take us over 5-6 High Peaks, only one of which (Mt. Marcy) I had done before.
Things didn't go quite as planned. Dave, hadn't backpacked in a while and admitted this en route to New York. The hardest hike he had ever been on was climbing Mt. Tammany in the Delaware Water Gap, a mere 1200 or so feet, and no where near as steep or as rugged as what we were taking on here in the Adirondacks. OK...not a problem, I’ve dealt with novice backpackers before. This, however, would turn out to be only one of the foibles that we were to encounter on this trek into the High Peaks.
We actually did pretty well on Sunday and made it 4.5 miles to our shelter in about two hours in spite of the muddy and sloppy trails. Dave and I had made a stop at one of my favorite gear stores in the northeast, The Mountaineer, in Keene Valley, prior to getting to the trailhead just up the road. There we stocked up on some supplies we couldn’t buy at home and rented the mandatory bear-proof cans we needed for our hike. In spite of my years of experience, and the Leave-No-Trace Instructors’ certification I hold, the NY State Department of Environment and Conservation does not see it fit to allow me (or anyone camping in the Eastern High Peaks Region) to rig up lines and bags to properly secure provisions from critters, no matter how much of an expert one actually is. I’m sure the fat-cat at the State Assembly who conjured up the idea of mandatory use bear cans has never had to pack and haul one of these damned things several miles into the wilderness. To maximize space and pack for best weight distribution, we didn’t even pack our backpacks before leaving. I knew we would only have to re-pack everything once we acquired the cans. After an hour of going through everything and splitting up the gear and food and paying for parking, Dave and I were off.
Dave and I left the trailhead in Keene Valley and made our way along John’s Brook. The trail was fairly level and offered some good photo opportunities. This would have been great had I not decided to leave my good camera in the car. The weather report for the week said “Rain, Clouds, Thunderstorms…”, so I opted to leave my behemoth digital SLR behind. With probable cloud cover and potentially no sweeping vistas to shoot I didn’t see it worth toting the extra weight. (Maybe without the bear can I would have lugged the extra couple pounds.) I had my cell phone camera, and Dave had a point-and-shoot, we were photographically covered. Then for some reason my cell phone didn’t power down correctly and the battery died in a mere 2 hours while desperately searching for a signal in the New York backcountry. I wasn’t even going to take it, but I wanted to have a camera, now I was left with a useless piece of plastic and silicon. This is the same reason I don’t use a GPS, but at least with a GPS a few AA batteries can put you back in business. Not so with a cell phone that uses a micro-USB jack to recharge. (I also neglected to take my hand-crank/solar cell charging unit, a present that I rarely use because I never take my cell phone.) In spite of the superior photographic equipment we lacked, Dave’s point-and-shoot seemed to suffice and we got a few nice snapshots of the brook, the new footbridge, and our campsite.
We stayed at the Wolfjaws lean-to, a three sided shelter common in the ‘Dacks. There was no view or anything especially scenic at the campsite. An outhouse, called a privy here in the North Country, which had obviously been moved several times over the decades served as our human waste receptacle. A rushing stream, still frigid from the spring thaw served as our water source. If it had been a hot day, I might have been tempted to scour for swimming holes, but not today. A recently fallen fir blocked the access to the stream and we were forced to detour among and around the broken boughs in order to fill our water bottles. This would become a common occurrence while we were encamped there.
Monday’s weather was superb! It was our intent to knock off Upper and Lower Wolfjaw peaks, then make for The Great Range and get Armstrong and Gothics before the end of the day. We made it up to the junction of the Lower Wolfjaw/Upper Wolfjaw trail pretty quickly. It was only 0.5 miles to the top of Lower Wolfjaw. I would have preferred to leave our packs at the bottom of Lower Wolfjaw and retrieve them after we bagged the peak, but with my luck a NYSDEC ranger or some Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) member bestowed with some type of backcountry police power would have spotted the two bags, checked to see that all the food and “smellable” items were secured in the bear cans (which they were not right at this point), and then we would have been issued a ticket or warning. That would have looked great. “Eagle Scout/Leave-No-Trace Instructor/Backcountry Advocate/Outdoor Recreation Department manager cited for wilderness illegalities.”
Getting to the top of Lower Wolfjaw took us an hour! The mud, slick rocks, and scrambling up six-foot rock faces, one after the other, just killed us. We were toting full-packs and my trekking poles were slowing me down. One was bent and I couldn't collapse them down and stash them on my pack in order to free up my hands. Dave wasn’t doing much better. His heavier cotton-based wardrobe and old-school sleeping bag made his pack a bit heavier than it could have been with better gear. Regardless, we got to the top and felt pretty good, but we sucked down a bunch of water. It took us 30 minutes to get back down to the junction and then we started up Upper Wolfjaw.
What came next was the roughest, nastiest trail I've ever hiked in my life. 1.0 miles took us over 1.5 hours. I was expecting some scrambles and handhold use, but I've never before had to take off my pack, throw it up to the next level of trail, and then chimney climb up between two boulders. This was sick! We made it up but were down to a pint of water each. I had planned on us running short before we made camp that night, but I had also planned that we would be running out of water only a mile or so from day’s end. From previous June escapades in the ‘Dacks (coupled with the very rainy spring we had) I fully expected a few perennial streams would have been flowing as well. Faced with at least three more peaks and three more miles we did some quick math and opted to head back down to the shelter we were at the night before.
Coming down wasn't that great either. It was a long, disheartening down-climb back to the shelter. My knee decided it was a perfect time to pop out after slipping on some rocks, and the descent wasn’t much faster than the hike up. Out of water, muddy, and slightly bloody we staggered back into the Wolfjaws lean-to somewhere after 5:00pm. Thankfully no one else moved in, although we would have welcomed some comely French-Canadian ladies, or, in actuality, anyone who was willing to cook our dinner. Instead our only visitor that night was a local Pine Martin. The furry weasel-like creature must have smelled the canned shrimp I added to the evening fare. That made me think if he smelled it, a bear could have as well. So now I’m all hyped up thinking we were going to have “Close Encounters of the Ursine Kind”. I would have taken a picture, but….well, anyway. Sleep came soon after sunset and sometime in the middle of the night it began to rain. We were supposed to be camping under a tent-fly tonight, six miles or so away. Dave pointed out that he was now glad we ran out of water. The weather wasn't great Tuesday. In fact, it downright sucked. It rained all Monday night and didn't let up until 10am on Tuesday. We had read that there were T-storms likely on Tuesday and with the rain and quagmire-esque trail conditions we opted to head out of the woods. In spite of our self-inflicted physical abuse we felt fine after returning to camp on Monday night, but now the legs and back sure felt a lot worse and it was noticeable on the hike out. We checked out John’s Brook Lodge, also known as JBL, and spent some time there talking to the caretaker.
The lodge is nestled three miles or so into the wilderness and is only accessed by foot or pack-animal. The annual resupply missions to JBL are done mostly by ADK volunteers and by helicopter. Consequentially, the nightly fees to stay in this 100+ year old vestige of the glory-days of early Adirondack expeditions are a pretty penny. Lean-tos and tent sites are also available nearby for a slightly lower fee. JBL is worth a stop and given the fact that we were in no rush to get out we took our time reviewing the collection of Adirondack memorabilia in the JBL historical collection, and had a damned tasty brownie as well.
Dave and I rambled back to the parking lot in Keene Valley, stopping only briefly to dodge around a young, nouveau-hippie woman meditating on one of the footbridges and for a quick reconnaissance of some other lean-tos closer to the trailhead. Then we headed up to the Adirondak Loj, (purposefully misspelled by the builder) rented a lean-to, cleaned ourselves up, and headed into Lake Placid for some beer tasting at the Lake Placid Pub and Brewery. We sampled a few of the offered beers and I took a half-gallon bottle (know to beer snobs like myself as a “growler”) of 46ers India Pale Ale back to camp to accompany dinner. Dave opted for a growler of Ubu Ale. I have had LP Brewery beers before and was hoping the High Peaks Hefe-Wiezen was available. It wasn’t...bummer. We headed back to very quiet campground and proceeded to cook up some beans, rice, and chicken. We polished off most of the beer and decided to call it an evening after we ran out of dirty jokes to tell.Now a day ahead of schedule, we headed over to the Adirondack Wild Center in Tupper Lake on Wednesday and checked out the cool stuff there. Two school groups had just beat us there, and we didn’t get to really enjoy the experience. Watching the otters swim around was neat but the school groups there made it a bit crowded, and I constantly felt like I was going to nail some poor pre-kindergartener with my knee. We stayed for about an hour-and-a-half, still not seeing everything there was to see, and we decided to start the trek home.
We stopped in Queensbury and chowed down on a Loft Burger with double bacon, cheese, onions and mushrooms. The Loft Burger restaurant is strategically located on the corner of Routes 9 and 149 just off the Northway and is a frequent stop of mine either on my way to or from Vermont. While my backcountry cookery is excellent, Dave had to admit that the Loft Burger was perhaps the greatest-worst-for-your-arteries thing he had ever eaten. I have to agree.
All in all, it was the first serious backpacking trip I took in 3 years. I was hoping we would have found better water sources or had taken more water bottles, but I didn't beat myself up and surprisingly I was only moving slow due to the terrain and conditions. We didn't bag all the peaks we planned to, but I got two more that I didn't have before. Dave has since forgotten about his original plans to section-hike the AT and now has his sights set on bagging more High Peaks. Two down and 44 more to go for him, I’m only slightly ahead of his count. Thankfully, the mountains aren’t going anywhere.
For Additional Information See:
The Adirondack Mountain Club, Johns Brook Lodge and the Adirondak Loj:
http://www.adk.org/
The Mountaineer: http://www.mountaineer.com/
The Adirondack Wild Center: http://www.wildcenter.org/
The Lake Placid Pub & Brewery: http://www.lakeplacidpubandbrewery.com/
The Loft Drive-In: (518) 793-2296
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