Chaos On Crane and Oooo Sable In The AMR

Busy weekend for me in the Daks.

Seems like I hiked a lot more than 15 miles over 2 days. I shot over 8GB of images over that time (lots of brackets of 16MB images), most in poor lighting and after a few days I've finally made some progress.

Saturday was a great easy hike in the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, which is publicly accessible private land owned by the Au Sable Club.

After leaving a few minutes later than I intended, I met John and Joanne at the parking area a few minutes after 9am and we headed for some of the most spectacular (and most accessible) scenery in the Adirondack lowlands. Lots of waterfalls and chasms, streams and rivers. Just a beautiful place.

We kinda hit the lighting just wrong, and our overcast day turned a bit too sunny for even the usable diffused light provided by cloud cover. It was still very dead out there, as the trees hadn't even begun to bud. It looked like what I affectionately call the skeleton forest. Black flies and bugs were non existent which made the day ever more enjoyable. Great day though and lots of fun to just kick back and talk photography while taking our time, even if we didn't have the best lighting.

My partners left me at about 4:30pm, and I headed about a mile up trail to Wedge Brook and Wedge Brook Falls. I noted a few spots I'd like to hit with better lighting on the way down, and got to the falls. Beautiful place but despite spending an hour playing around I left with nothing that I liked. On the way back I shot a few frames of the East Branch Ausable River and some spring runoffs down the gorge walls.

After a few more shots on Gill Brook and the Ausable River, I got back to the car around 8:30pm and was back home by 10pm.

Sunday, Aim, Caney and I headed for Crane Mountain. Our last trip there in 2000 or 2001 ended in Caney losing his pack around the lake. I listened to Aim and didn't carry snowshoes and the spur trail was covered with 4 feet of snow making the 1 mile hike an incredible post hole fest. Lesson learned from that experience...when in doubt carry snowshoes even in April, and DO NOT PUT THE KEYS IN YOUR DOGS PACK!!!!

The 2008 Crane adventure was quite nice, although covered with blowdown from the uncharacteristic ice storms we had this winter, and the trail was at times poorly marked, lots of route finding, and some bushwhacking to get back. For an easy 3.5 mile hike we ended up hiking about 5 miles and it felt like much more. Overall great day but the black flies were out, and lightly biting at times on the hike up. On the return they mysteriously disappeared.

One disheartening thing about Crane Mountain was the trash situation around the pond. Typically the southern and western Adirondacks seem to suffer more from irresponsible and just downright lazy disgusting people who feel that it's too much effort to carry out the stuff they brought in.

Unfortunately, this attitude is contagious and trash left behind signals to the next user group that it's OK. Then things go out of control and the DEC is forced to make changes that affect everyone.

I'm hoping to organize a work crew to go in and clean this area up. Anyone reading this who is interested should drop me an email. I figure 4 or more people could circle the lake in an afternoon, disperse some of the poorly built campsites and partially burned wood, burn any burnable trash and pack out the many plastic bottles, and bits of broken glass.

To anyone reading this looking for information on campsites (and I know you do because of I see your search strings to get to my site) please have some respect for yourself. Yes for yourself, and pack out what you bring in. Keep in mind that the trash you leave can only end up 2 places, in the forest, or in the pond. And that in either place it will remain there pretty much permanently.

While one bottle, one wrapper, one cigarette butt might seem harmless, the cumulative effects are not. And it's pretty selfish and just plain disrespectful to literally destroy someplace that you, and others that follow you, obviously thought enough off to expend your sweat and energy to hike into.

The 6.5 million acres that forms the Adirondack Forest Preserve might seem inexhaustable, but if enough people carelessly abuse it out of nothing more than laziness, we will be left with nothing but a giant wilderness landfill.

Give a hoot, don't pollute.

technorati tags:Adirondacks, ADK, Daks, Hiking, Camping, Crane Mountain, Crane Mountain Pond, Au Sable Club, Adirondack Mountain Reserve, Adirondack Forest Preserve, park, Ausable River, Rainbow Falls, Gill Brook, Pentax, Limited, K10D

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Whitewater On The Deerfield

Well I admit it. I turned fair weather paddler. The weekend called for hot and rainy conditions and I bailed on our planned trip to Little Tupper.

While we've explored almost every nook and cranny of Little Tupper, I've never been to Round Pound which was "sort of" private till about 2 years ago.

In the end though I had a lot of work the catch up on, so I worked Saturday and we planned on running a river Sunday.

Something easy, no harder than consistent Class II, but more than Class I and riffles.

The Schroon in the Adirondacks looked perfect, especially since we'd need to run a shuttle. Right off the Northway and about a 1 hour drive to the put-in.

As always nothing is simple. The Schroon has no gages except for one at the outlet of Schroon Lake.

It was at 1.90 Friday night before the rain, and I was hoping we'd get poured on all day Saturday.

Well, Saturday it hardly rained. And never very hard.

Saturday night came and I looked at the gage 1.93...Nooooooo!!!!!!

I read that minimum level on that gage should be 2.50ish. So we were way too low and running rapids in scratchy conditions is no fun.

Saturday night at 10pm I'm scrambling to find a place to paddle that both was moderate in difficulty and had some flow to it.

Looking at the American White Water Stream Gage Page and browsing by state it was looking bleak until I saw the Deerfield River running at 1300cfs. Minimum flow to run it is 450cfs and high water is well over 2000. So it was prime conditions.

Sunday morning it was down to 700cfs when we left, and I bet it was closer to 500cfs when we put in, but it was a fun stretch of a bout 6 miles.

The reason we did so little was that our intention was to put in above Dam #2. Problem is the power company doesn't allow access to the road near Dam #2 so paddlers must risk their lives to lower the boats off a loose steep ravine edge down to the water using ropes.

Well my 70lb boat and I decided that I wasn't going to fall into a ravine and so we shortened the trip to the next put-in.

This was the first time I'd paddled the Deerfield and I have to say it's a nice river by Massachusetts standards. It's in many spots out of the way, with few roads crossing it, it's bordered by rocky cliffs with waterfalls pouring down into it, and it's teeming with wildlife.

This really is an excellent river with lots of moderate whitewater below Shelburne. Mostly Class II-III.

We will definitely be back to paddle more of the Deerfield.

technorati tags:Deerfield, River, whitewater, Massachusetts, paddling, paddle, Bardwell, lenticular

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