that which rolls

I command it.

I was going to write a post about my trip to the Finger Lakes National Forest. It would sound something like this.

It rained a bit but then it was sunny then it rained then it was sunny. We rode our bikes and had a nice time. Sadly there was no water supply at Blueberry Patch campground, but Brian is a miracle worker with dinner and he made some great food without us having to actually seek out a store and buy more water than what we had.

Really what I want to say is that this place is a great place to have a long relaxing day or weekend on a bike. You can camp at Blueberry Patch Campground if you’re a few people or at Potomac Group Campground if you’re a heap of people. FLNF and the surrounding area is mostly dirt roads and a few badly paved roads but if you’re just cruising around it doesn’t really matter much. There is almost no car traffic at all because it’s in the middle of nowhere. There are some hills but there’s a lot of gentle terrain too. If you get tired of the bucolic landscape you can head down toward the lake for a wine tour… though getting back to your campsite might be a bit rough after a lot of wine tasting. The campgrounds are very primitive… if you can’t get by without a daily shower, you might camp near Ithaca (about 1/2 hour away by car) at Buttermilk Falls or Treman Park–these both have showers & great swimming holes too.

There are some multi-use trails that you’re allowed to ride your bike on but when we were there, it had rained so much that there were long stretches of pure mud which pushed my li’l hybrid bike to the very edge of it’s ability. I ended up walking it a lot because it’s hard to stay upright when you’re bike comes to an unplanned dead stop. They’re cool trails, but be warned, they’re not like the Erie Canal Path. The roads are just like the Erie Canal Path but 5 times as wide with hills and a few cars.

It’s worth a trip out there.

More photos of the area.

This year’s vacation was good. We modified our original plans a bit in the face of the weather but had a good time overall. Brian picked me up after work on Wednesday with the car all packed and the shopping all done. All I had to do was get in and go.

Day 1 (Wednesday): Getting There

Day 2 (Thursday): Crane Mountain and Sharp Bridge

Day 3 (Friday): Three Brothers

Day 4 (Saturday): Mt. Snow & Roostercomb

Day 5 (Sunday): Pitch it within and without with pitch

Day 6 (Monday): Catamount & Calamari

Day 7 (Tuesday): Phelps

Day 8 (Wednesday): Despair

Day 9 (Thursday): Blueberry Patch

Day 10 (Friday): Biking around the Finger Lakes National Forest

Day 11 (Saturday): Enfield Glen

Vacation Photos

We arrived at Blueberry Patch campground in the Finger Lakes National Forest early Thursday afternoon. It was a pretty nice day. We set up our tent and the tarp and settled down to read for a while.

Soon after that it began to rain (heavily) yet again. We hung out under the tarp for a while and decided to go to Ithaca and wander. The rain stopped almost as soon as we got there. While we were in Ithaca my mom sent a text message to say that there was flooding at home, the pond was filling with muddy runoff and the first floor of the barn was flooding too. No damage was being done though.

We made it back to camp around 5. Brian made a great potato soup. It was a mix, but he added bacon (the unrefrigerated kind), canned potatoes, and some frozen peas we picked up when we were in Ithaca.

As soon as dinner was over, it started pouring again. The wind was whipping and blowing cold rain on to us under the tarp. A pool of water began creeping toward the tent but luckily it’s dry state was not compromised. We half thought about packing it in but also felt too lazy to do all that work. We crawled into the tent and hoped for the best.

We woke up in the hotel on Thursday, ate breakfast, and headed to Putnam Pond. Our plan was to explore the Pharaoh Lakes Wilderness Area for the next few days before heading home. By the time we arrived it was pouring heavily again. I got a camp map with all the available sites marked and we cruised around the campground trying to choose all the while wondering if it would ever stop raining. We pulled in to site 2 and just sat in the car and stared at the site.

I had a plan…

Set up the tarp. Set up the tent under the tarp, throw our stuff into the tent, and then move it to whatever location would be best. Instead of leaping to action, we just sat in the car and stared out at the rain. We knew rain was predicted rain for the next three days and I guess we had just gotten fed up with the weather. If it hadn’t been raining & we got set up and then it started raining, it might have been different.

We ended up driving home. Our hope was that the weather pattern would be different a few hours west & we could spend the last few days of our vacation in the Finger Lakes National Forest. By the time we got close we decided to just head home for the night and go to FLNF on Thursday.

Since I knew we were going to be in Lake Placid Tuesday night I thought it would be a good day to hike something from the Adirondack Lodge. I have lots of memories of hiking Wright, Algonquin, and Marcy as a kid and I guess I’m a bit sentimental in wanting to relive them a bit. I had never done Phelps and it seemed like it was within our abilities, just 8.8 miles round trip. I was also secretly hoping to convince Brian that the Adirondack Lodge isn’t necessarily the Hellmouth. On one of our early vacations, maybe 12 years ago, we went there on the Fourth of July weekend. It was hellishly crowded. A hiking grandma was lost in Indian Pass and the forest rangers were doing a search and rescue. One of the rangers blocked our path and yelled at us for a while because we were wearing jeans and converse and just looked generally inexperienced and unprepared. We thought he was a jerk at the time, but now we see his point. That time we just hiked to the dam and back… and we haven’t been back since.

So we got there around 9 a.m. The parking lot was 1/3 full already. It costs $9 to park now. I let my membership lapse last year… I swear I will remember to pay again soon. Because of all the rain over the past week the whole trail was like hiking up a creek bed. The trails toward Phelps & Marcy seem to be suffering from major erosion problems probably because of the high traffic. Where it wasn’t a creek bed it was a jungle gym of roots. Each step was a calculated decision. We saw lots of people relative to the number we usually see on our out of the way hikes but not nearly as many as I would have expected. Phelps is covered with scrubby pine and herd paths on top but the views are great. It was definitely a worthwhile hike. Someday soon I may convince Brian to climb Wright & Algonquin with me.
Lake Placid was chaos. The entire town is filled wall to wall with confused looking people. It’s not my favorite place to be because of all the people. It’s probably a great place if you’re into shopping. I’m not so much. We got checked in to the hotel (Golden Arrow) which was great though outside of my normal price range! We were on the ground floor on the lake side. We opened our sliding glass doors to a little porch on the lake. After dinner at a place I wouldn’t recommend we picked up some beers and sat outside our hotel room and watched people fall out of their canoes and generally enjoyed the scenery. It was really nice… like we weren’t actually in a chaotic resort town at all. It was a beautiful night out and we decided we’d try camping at Putnam Pond for the next few nights.

I had made a reservation for a hotel in Lake Placid for Tuesday night almost as soon as we got to the mountains. We like to take one day in the middle of our vacation. Stay in a hotel… get good showers, wash our nasty clothes, eat heaps of fancy food, and watch crappy shows on cable. (Dirty Jobs is my favorite.)

So It was Monday. We spent Sunday night in a hotel. ALL of our gear was soaked through as though it had been thrown into a lake with a cinder block tied to it’s leg. We had reservations for the Golden Arrow on Tuesday. The hotel in Plattsburg had no rooms for Monday night. Setting up our tent and sleeping in our wet gear for one night was unappealing & the weather report was calling for rain. We decided to stay at a Best Western in Saranac Lake.

Catamount wasn’t far off our route to Saranc Lake so we stopped to climb that. It was a fun climb & I had forgotten just how many rock scrambles there were. Going up was great fun, though there were a few places where I felt my fear of heights trying to get my attention. About 3 minutes after we reached the summit it started to rain. After enjoying the view for a few minutes we decided we should get going. Those rock scrambles were challenging when they were mostly dry. On the way down in the wet they would be really challenging. I believe I slid on my butt and crabwalked down at least half of the mountain. It was slick in some places and not so slick in others but it was really difficult to tell which was which without actually slipping. We didn’t put on our ponchos because we thought not being able to see our feet would make things even more difficult. I don’t know whether or not this was a good idea. We started to get cold & I started working out my ‘plan’ in case one of us fell and broke something. I was pretty sure if we stopped moving we would get colder and colder and increase our risk of hypothermia. We made it down just fine and our situation was probably not all that dire in reality. We did have a good time & I didn’t get all that cold until we got back into the car.

Waiting in the air conditioning in the hotel while soaking wet almost did give me hypothermia.

We checked in to the hotel, took hot showers to warm up, and I looked out the window and realized it was really sunny. The parking lot was mostly empty so I got the idea to go lay all our wet gear out on the hot blacktop. In just over an hour we had dried almost everything. I wished I hadn’t had the reservations in Lake Placid for the next night. It would have been nice to get back to camping while it was nice out.

After we got everything dry we went to La Belle Ristorante. The food was great, especially the calamari. It wasn’t the cheapest restaurant but I don’t usually find restaurants that I really like in the Adirondacks. I’m sure I will go back to this one.

I got up on Sunday around 5 or 6. On my way back from the bathrooms it started to sprinkle so I crawled back into the tent. I should have been building an ark but instead I went back to sleep.
It was still raining hard when I woke up a few hours later. I felt like we were dry & secure in the tent. I believed I had picked a good spot to set up. It just rained harder & harder. Brian listened to his weather radio & there were flash flood warnings for the day. He looked out of his side of the tent & our tent was surrounded by water. It was probably 3 inches deep all around us. I now think my course of action should have been to just lay there and hope for the water to recede, to try not to disturb the delicate balance of surface tension on the tent. Instead I leapt out of the tent and start digging trenches to redirect the water away from the tent. I guess the minute I got out, the water got in. Our sleeping bags & thermarests and everything… were wet.

It rained all day. At noon I still had hopes that we would be able to salvage things. By 6 it was raining harder than ever. We decided to pack up our soaked stuff and go to a hotel. We ended up in Plattsburg for the night. I was pretty down about it all. I still wish I’d picked a different campsite but rain like that doesn’t happen every day. A few days later we heard that there’d been about 3 inches of rain that day.

On Saturday morning we still hadn’t made any grand plans and decided to climb Mt. Snow and throw in Roostercomb if we still had energy. We hiked up to Mt. Snow from the Roostercomb parking lot on Rt. 73. It was a nice hike. The top of the mountain was covered with blueberries and low scrubby pines. There was a family on the summit picking berries. One of the kids from that group decided they’d had enough and started hiking down without letting anyone know. There was much freaking out and shouting from the family when they realized he was missing. (They found him in about 10 minutes.) It’s a good thing I don’t have kids. I would have a hard time not killing them for doing something like that.

After lounging about for a while eating clif bars and blueberries (blueberries taste way better) we headed over to Roostercomb. Hiking through the vally between the two mountains was humid & damp. I felt like we were walking through the armpit of the mountain. It didn’t smell (except for my smell). I had thought that getting out of the sun & into the shade would be cool and refreshing but it was more like a sauna full of dead leaves.

The trail ascended out of the valley and we were up on Roostercomb in no time. The views were great and we took it all in for a bit but it was starting to sprinkle… big huge icy cold drops of rain. Then it stopped sprinkling & started pouring. We finally pulled out our ponchos and started heading down.

We heard a whistle & both Brian & I thought someone might be lost or hurt… so we were straining to hear where the whistle was coming from. It turned out to be two 9 or 10 year olds, part of a group of folks who were probably attemting their first ever hike. The kids were running way ahead of the family blowing the whistles every 2 minutes and shouting. We passed the rest of the group a little later. They looked too exhausted to smack their kids around but they might have been willing to feed them to bears if the opportunity came up.

It rained for most of our descent but stopped by the time we got to the car. I would reccomend doing Snow & Roostercomb as a loop but I might save it for a week day when there would be a few less people on the mountains.

Woke up on Friday with no specific plans. Decided to climb First Brother from The Garden. I can’t believe I’d never done this hike before. The trail was mostly open rock on that overlooked the valley with great views of all the mountains around Keene Valley. We got to the top of First Brother and still had plenty of energy so we climbed Second Brother and the great views continued. At Second Brother we decided we could do Third Brother. Third brother was tree covered but we did get a good view of Big Slide from a ledge on the east edge. We probably could have done Big Slide without too much trouble, but we were running low on water so we headed back from there.

Almost as soon as we got back in the car it started pouring. We got soaked running from the car into the Keene Valley grocery store to buy drinks and ice.

By the time we got back to camp the rain had passed.

Had breakfast at Friendlies in Johnstown. Wished I’d known of some cool local place but neglected to do any research. While we waited for pancake and egg type products, we decided to head to Sharp Bridge to camp. Last year’s vacation was so perfect that I think I kind of wanted to recreate it.

It was neat seeing the southern part of the Adirondacks. I really don’t know that area at all. It looked like it would be a really nice area for biking. The hills aren’t hellishly steep and the shoulders of… whatever road we were on… were really wide.

View from the top of Crane Mountain.

We stopped on our way to Sharp Bridge and climbed Crane Mountain. It has been one of those mountains that we keep going back to. We backpacked in and camped at Crane pond a few years ago. The weather was really nice though humid and hazy. We saw a stinkhorn swarmed with flies on our way up and lots of what was probably some kind of Amanita possibly (muscaria var. formosa) on the way down. Mushrooms are really really hard to identify accurately and I’m extremely lazy at identifying things. In order to be as accurate as possible, let’s just say, they were cool mushrooms.

We made it to Sharp Bridge in mid-afternoon and set up camp. Almost as soon as we were done I spotted this very well camouflaged beetle that I have not yet identified. We couldn’t find the campground manager to register and we kept missing him for the next couple days. I think we were there for 3 days before I managed to pay for the site. We camped in site 2 down by the creek. Brian made quesadillas and tomato soup for dinner. Mmmm.