Table of contents for Annual Outings Guide 2016 in Adirondack Explorer

Normally I use this Park Perspectives column to profile some of the individuals or events that help form the character of the Adirondacks— not to speak directly to you the readers. But in our last issue I wrote about the changes we have made in the format of the magazine. And in this column I want to announce another landmark change, a more personal one. Early next year, I will retire after more than eight years as publisher of the Explorer. I’m telling you this now, even though that seems a long way in the future, because the Explorer’s board of directors has begun a thorough search to find our next publisher. In upcoming issues, you may notice advertisements encouraging potential applicants to contact us, and I don’t want anyone…

It seemed like a good idea. My daughter Martha and I would paddle across Debar Pond and bushwhack through mostly open woods to the summit of Baldface Mountain where we would have lunch and feast on wide-open views of the northern Adirondacks. The first part of the adventure went according to plan. From the parking area, we carried our lightweight canoes a quarter mile, crossing a wetland on a rotting boardwalk en route to the pond’s north shore. Debar Pond doesn’t see many visitors, so I was surprised to learn that among those who signed the register over the summer were travelers from Russia and Israel. At the put-in, we heard a loon calling. The view was striking. To the southeast, we could see the 2,867-foot summit of Baldface, roughly…

From time to time I’ve played with the idea of putting together a list of quintessential Adirondack adventures. It would include, for example, climbing the Trap Dike on Mount Colden, skiing Mount Marcy on a bluebird day, and scaling the eight-hundred-foot cliff on Wallface. Last summer, I ticked off another adventure on my bucket list: rafting the Hudson Gorge. My friend Mike got me into this one. He arranged a trip with North Creek Rafting Company with the intention of writing an article for the Associated Press. I readily agreed to shoot some photos and video. Our Hudson Gorge outing differed from most in one important respect: instead of riding in rafts, we piloted inflatable kayaks, known as duckies. These vessels are open, like canoes, but as in a kayak,…

“I found myself skiing between columns of spruce and balsam, their green boughs drooping under the weight of snow.” After several long days in the office, I went to bed dreaming of my first backcountry ski trip of the season, a jaunt to High Rock in the Five Ponds Wilderness. Conditions would be perfect. Over the last few days, we had received eight inches of fluffy powder. Then I woke up. Outside, it was twenty-four below zero, according to my Weather Channel app. Like any sensible person, I immediately broadcast this fact to Facebook. A few people suggested I postpone my trip. “I have skied at 20 below, but I was 14 and foolish. Stay home, for god’s sake,” posted a former colleague. But most of my Facebook friends were…

Skating off the beaten track brings a sense of freedom to my soul. No matter how cold it is outside, I will haul my family to frozen ponds to lash skates to their feet. I know the Adirondack chill will be driven out with a few swift glides on the ice. I often go far afield from Saranac Lake in search of places to skate, such as along the shores of Lake Champlain and Lake George, and I always ask people to share their favorite skating spots. More often, though, I am drawn to a stretch of Route 73 between Lake Placid and Keene Valley known for its consistent ice. Our usual spots are the Cascade Lakes, nestled between high cliffs on Cascade and Pitchoff mountains, and Chapel Pond, beneath…

Recently my husband Jeff and I rediscovered our love of mountain biking, and so after I surprised him with a brand-new bike, we started looking for new places to explore. We had already ridden the Kushaqua-Mud Pond Road, a long seasonal road that starts in Onchiota and stretches all the way to Loon Lake, with miles of beautiful riding. When a friend told us about the nearby Kushaqua Conservation Lands Easement Tract, we couldn’t wait to check it out. The 18,989-acre Kushaqua Tract comprises land north and west of the hamlets of Onchiota and Loon Lake, a twenty-minute drive from our house in Saranac Lake. The land is owned by the Lyme Timber Company, but the state purchased a conservation easement with public-recreation rights in 2004. It’s bordered on all…

Carol Fox had visited OK Slip Falls three times—twice in fall, once in winter—but not on the state’s new hiking trail and never with some guy jotting down every word she said. I advised her everything would be fine if she said clever and witty things. Mainly, though, I wanted to get her impressions of the trail and the falls, one of the highest in the Adirondack Park. Of course, she could describe the 250-foot cascade from her earlier trips. “I love how you turn the corner and it’s just there,” she said on our hike in. “You’re at eye level with it.” The state bought OK Slip Falls from the Adirondack Nature Conservancy in 2013, but it didn’t open a trail until this past summer (2014). The conservancy acquired…

Hikers looking for a short climb to a view should check out the new trail up Goodman Mountain south of Tupper Lake. The state Department of Environmental Conservation, with the help of volunteers, created the trail this year and dedicated it to Andrew Goodman, a twenty-year-old civil-rights activist murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi fifty years ago. The slaying of Goodman and two fellow activists—James Chaney and Michael Schwerner—was dramatized in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe. The victims were helping African-Americans register to vote during Freedom Summer. The 1.75-mile trail leads to open bedrock on the summit of the 2,176-foot peak, offering good views to the east, south, and west. For the first 0.75 miles, the trail follows the route of an…

It was nearly a perfect day for a ski tour. The sun was out, and fresh powder covered the trail and coated the branches of evergreens along the way. Kim Martineau was especially happy to be here. “This is one of my favorite trails. It’s just beautiful,” she remarked as we headed into the woods next to the Schroon River. “And you never see people.” Kim and her husband, Ethan Rouen, joined me in early January for an eight-mile round trip from the Sharp Bridge State Campground to Round Pond in the Hammond Pond Wild Forest. Although she and Ethan had hiked the trail in other seasons, neither of them had skied it, and both were curious to see if it would be as satisfying in winter. Round Pond is…

Last winter, my daughter Becky and her fiancé, Joe, wanted to climb one of the Saranac Lake 6, so we snowshoed up St. Regis Mountain. Although I like St. Regis—with its marvelous views of ponds and lakes—I am not an enthusiastic snowshoer. I mean, snowshoeing is OK, but I like cross-country skiing a whole lot more. As we walked through the woods, I kept thinking, “This would be a great ski trail.” The terrain is gentle enough that on our way off the mountain we encountered a guy in MicroSpikes running up the mountain. Becky and Joe, though, thoroughly liked the snowshoe trip. “It was a foggy day, but I still enjoyed the view,” Becky emailed me afterward. “I thought the fire tower on top of the mountain was cool,…

The 3,355-foot summit of Loon Lake Mountain offers a wonderful vista that includes the Kushaqua Tract. The 2.8-mile trail rises more than 1,600 feet from County Route 26 to the top of the mountain. From the open ledges, you can see countless other peaks, including Lyon Mountain to the northeast, Whiteface Mountain to the southeast, and Debar Mountain to the northwest. Before the state purchased conservation easements on the Kushaqua Tract, climbing Loon Lake Mountain was problematic. Even though the summit was in the Forest Preserve, most of the lower slopes were on private land owned by International Paper. Since the easement deal, the state has marked a trail to the summit Loon Lake Mountain has a thirty-five-foot fire tower, but it is not open to the public. The bottom…

Some days I need to go hiking. I don’t want an epic outing, just some time in the woods to clear my head, enough of a climb to exercise my body, and a decent view at the top to rejuvenate my spirit. After five particularly soggy days, cooped up inside our smallish house on Chateaugay Lake with four antsy kids—Micah, age eighteen; Dominic and Parker, both sixteen; and Zoe, eleven—and my outdoorsy sweetheart Jack, I needed to climb a mountain before I climbed the walls. The whole family did! The weather forecast was still far from perfect, but when the deluge abated, I ordered everyone to put away Monopoly and put on their hiking boots. We were heading up Debar Mountain. Named for John Debar, a Canadian fur trapper who…

“If it’s worth climbing, it’s worth writing about.” —Grace Hudowalski Shortly after moving to the Adirondacks in 1996, I climbed Giant Mountain. Not only was it my first High Peak, it was the first time I’d climbed anything higher than the hill in the back yard where I grew up. While incredibly rewarding, the hike was harder than I had imagined even though I was a fit, thirty-year-old marathon runner. It was humbling. Nevertheless, like many others before me, I was hooked on the Adirondack Mountains, and I wanted more. That same year Grace Leach Hudowalski celebrated her ninetieth birthday, an occasion covered in the local papers. I’d never heard of Grace or the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, but I was smitten by the photo of her beaming with her birthday cake,…

Sometimes my choice of canoe-camping adventure in the Adirondack Park is based on the lowest chance of family mutiny. My husband Jack and our three teens, Parker, Dom, and Zoe, still reeled from the memory of a 1.25-mile carry around Raquette Falls during a two-nighter down the Raquette River a year ago. Loaded down with heavy boats and an overabundance of unorganized gear, we had grossly underestimated the portage distance and the ferocity of welt-inducing mosquitos. I was loath to ask my clan to ever portage again, but when the opportunity arose to paddle from Hoel Pond to Long Pond in the St. Regis Canoe Area, the desire to introduce my family to this eighteen-thousand-acre, motorboat-free canoeist’s Eden was too great. The St. Regis Canoe Area—the only designated Canoe Area…

Early January, and we had hardly any snow in Saranac Lake. Meanwhile, Tug Hill west of the Adirondacks got clobbered yet again with a lake-effect storm. Upon hearing that the tail end of the storm dumped about six inches of fluffy powder inside the Blue Line near Cranberry Lake, I hopped in my car and drove west. I aimed to do a ski tour I had never done: a fourteen-mile round trip to Burntbridge Pond in the Cranberry Lake Wild Forest. It turned out to be an ideal choice. Despite the fresh snow, there wasn’t much base and thus many hiking trails remained sketchy for skiing. But the route to Burntbridge Pond does not require a lot of snow: it’s flat and smooth, following the bed of a defunct logging…

If you’re a backcountry skier, it’s hard to resist a trail with “ski” in its name. And so upon learning that the Mr. Van Ski Trail had been spruced up, I asked my friend Brian Mann to join me on a trip from Adirondak Loj to the state-owned cross-country-ski center at Mount Van Hoevenberg. The six-mile through trip, we later decided, is not the best way to experience Mr. Van, because the long-awaited downhill from Hi-Notch is all on the wide, groomed superhighways of the ski center rather than on a backwoods trail. I returned to Mr. Van a few weeks later and did a solo round-trip from the Loj to Hi-Notch. It’s 9.4 miles this way—roughly the same length as the popular trip to Avalanche Lake and back. The…

We have had the breath ripped out of us by the beauty of the High Peaks as seen from the tops of mountains and on twisty roads as we sped by in our car, but my wife, Kim, and I wondered if there could be another way to capture the vastness of the hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness where we spend so much of our time. Then we bought a bicycle trailer and packed it with our sleeping bags, a tent, and enough food to feed a peloton. For three days, we huffed-and-puffed up hills, swam in lakes, and hiked on tired legs as we circumnavigated the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks, always with the mountains looming just to our right. The trip, which could be done…