Thank you for visiting this selection of stories submitted in support of AMC's comments to the America's Great Outdoors (AGO) Initiative. From Maine to Fire Island, NY on water and on foot, our members make the most of our natural resources every day. May these stories inspire you to get outside today.
Click here to return to AMC's AGO webpage for more information.
NOTE: The following stories are presented just as they were submitted. Some of the stories describe trail names and access points. AMC encourages you to check out a guide or map before heading out to recreate these adventures just in case conditions have changed since these stories were written.
Fire Island, NY
I have been volunteering at the AMC's Fire Island cabin for over 30 years. Why? Because I - like many others - love the ocean, the bay, the beach, the dunes, the birds, the salt air. I love canoeing and kayaking along the bay shore, hiking to the lighthouse and to the Sunken Forest, swimming in the ocean and the bay, watching the sunsets over the bay and the sunrises over the ocean, everything. We are fortunate to have a place on a barrier beach island, so close to New York City. The journey there, crossing the 6 mile bay by ferry, moves me to another more peaceful world, where life goes barefoot, surrounded by sky, and without roads or cars. The island is a gift of the last ice age. When the last glacier retreated, it left sandy rubble - Cape Cod's arm, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, Block Island and Long Island - at its southernmost edge. Parts of Fire Island are preserved as National Seashore.AMC works at preservation too, offering conservations programs at the cabin and participating in community beach restoration and cleanup efforts. To many AMC members, summer = Fire Island.
- Bonnie Mairs, New York/North Jersey Chapter, AMC
The Day of Three Mountains - Mount Lafayette: More Than a Favorite
In October 2009, I was at the end of my proverbial rope. After investing in a Master’s program in international relations, I couldn’t have gotten any farther from anyone’s conception of success or progress. Jobless and living under my mother’s roof, I was wretched even when I knew I should be grateful. In the same room in the same house on the same street in the same town in the same state in the same region where I had grown up, I felt my horizons being shaved down to a point that closely resembled nothing.
My mother’s recent interest in hiking intensified directly in proportion to the deepening of my discontent. She would leave for hours, giving me plenty of privacy to pity myself. After a point, she started inviting me out. I always refused, sometimes harshly. On one particular October night, she was more persistent than usual. I gave in. I learned about Mount Lafayette in a subsequent conversation with a friend. “It’s right off 93 North,” he added, promoting the fact that the site was a straight shot from our Massachusetts location. Shuddering away images of the Rockingham Mall and the NH Liquor Store, I replied that I would give it a go the next day with my mom. “No! You’ll kill her! It’s pretty intense,” he warned. Of course, this made me more hell bent on going, not out of any ill will towards my mother, but because I wanted to go big if I was going to go at all.
I told Mom about Lafayette. Unfurling a map like a general before battle, she tapped her pen on the peak. “This is over five-thousand feet, Jia. Impossible.” Summoning my best Mike Ditka voice, I shouted that I’d seen her run over giant shards of onyx in the lava flows in Big Hawai’i! I’d witnessed her hike Tamalpais in Marin County on a hot, dry day and be the only one to come out of it cramp-free! This was cake! If she couldn’t do this, she couldn’t do anything!! When she refused to budge, I shrugged and said coldly, “Well then, just drop me off at the trailhead on the way to your smaller mountain, please. I’ll hike it myself.” Taking her muteness as agreement, I went to bed with a sneer on my face. Having spent several years in California, I had inherited a fatal West Coast snobbery about the “hills” of New England, even if I had never hiked enough to assume this attitude with any authority. Also, I knew my mother. There was no way she would let me go by myself. And this was how I tricked her into realizing her stunning capabilities.
The morning of October 21st was a month after the equinox, but seemed like the very first day of fall. At 6 a.m., there was a hint of frost and smoke in the air. All our senses were alive during the two hour drive to the Franconia Notch State Park Parkway. As she flipped a music tape, my mother mumbled, “Well, now that we’re going there anyway, I’ll just start the hike and see how I feel.” A smile tickled the corners of my mouth. I knew that the inner maniac was stirring inside her, and that there was no turning back.
The empty parkway brought us to a closed visitor center in the blue light of morning. A man was busily blowing leaves on the premises, but stopped his machine when we waved to him. Thankfully, he knew the area like the back of his hand. He told us to take the slightly less arduous Falling Water path on our ascent and walk along the ridge to find the Green Leaf and Old Bridle Path trails for a descent that wouldn’t be a slippery slide of terror. We did exactly as he said, and thanked him the whole way.
Crunchy, dried leaves lined the rocky path. We started seeing water oozing out of earth, but nothing too wet or wild. The obstacles snuck up on us bit by bit, though. Very soon, I found myself in the ridiculous situation of trying to step around a jagged, protruding rock over a gushing plume of water by balancing on a perfectly round, mossy, water-splashed boulder. My mother, who had somehow made it around the corner without poles, was shaking a twig at me. It seemed really unwise, but I grabbed the twig and jumped over to where she was before I pulled her down with me.
With that sketchy event behind us, we savored the air as it grew fresher, cooler, and most of all, quieter. Our hearts beat in our ears as we stared through the trees at the height we were attaining over the tremendous Franconia Notch valley. As the flora became dominated by delightful pines, the path narrowed into what appeared to be a steep tunnel completely and totally closed off with ice. I doubled over in despair, cursing as the puffy, monogrammed L.L. Bean backpack I’d used in junior high smacked me in the back of the head. I told myself that I would assent to turning back at the first hint of my mother’s misgivings. However, when I stood back upright again, I saw her clinging like a spider to the solid ice and scrambling upwards like a monkey. With terror and hilarity coursing through my veins, I followed. Mother still knew best, or at least gave off that impression when it counted.
The incline relaxed at the alpine zone, and we reached a sloping expanse of dwarf pines leaning in one direction like seagrass in a wave. A tingly mist swirled dramatically about, and we donned our down jackets for what I envisioned was the final ascent over a bald cap to a single, climactic peak. However, the simple destination I had pictured never arrived, because we delivered instead to a ridge armored like a dinosaur’s back and pitted with fresh snow and slush. As we passed piles of wishing rocks, I suddenly understood that we were going to visit the tops of three mountains. The drastic combination of landscape and weather up there was surreal, transporting me to a composite of places where I have never been but always wanted to see: Tibet! Iceland! Scotland, Peru, Mars!
The first summit was Haystack at 4,780 feet, from which we had to traipse downhill before going back up. The crow-black cragginess of Mt. Lincoln rewarded us with humbling, otherworldly vistas from 5,089 feet in the thin air, where we stopped just short of falling off the sheer face into the center of the earth! After paying due respect to the wind-whipped, hard-won summit of Mt. Lafayette itself, we collapsed upon a hospitable patch of springy red grass on a hill that sheltered us from the cold. Laughing through bites of half frozen hot dogs and bagels without cream cheese (“I forgot,” Mom said sheepishly), we surmised that it was twenty degrees Fahrenheit without taking the wind chill into account. Yet, we felt invincible. Maybe it was because we were still heated from the exertion of the hike. Maybe we were high on life. Maybe the mountain was bewitching. Whatever it was, I was so happy right then; just me and my mother with all of our petty galaxies away.
Even as my feet grew numb and my face started stinging, I had tremendous desire to curl up in a ball and nap on the kind, velvety ground. Later, I found out that nature writer Guy Waters did just this when he deliberately made this sacred place his last hike in the year 2000. A Natural Death, an article by Rob Buchanan in Outside Magazine during the June after Waterman’s suicide cited that “Lafayette was the first mountain Waterman climbed when, as a New Yorker in his mid thirties, burning out on the corporate world, he began to rediscover his childhood passion for the outdoors.” As an eerie coincidence, Lafayette and its companions were a first for us, serving as a wake-up call to us two individuals in two completely different situations—one, that of a mother who had just hit her 60th birthday and reflected upon her 11th year of widowhood; the other, that of a daughter in her late 20s, clueless of what lay ahead. What we learned was how everything else turns to white noise in the celebration of health and existence itself.
We descended into the fog and mist via the Green Leaf trail, encouraging a couple struggling up the steepness that the leaf blower had warned us about. Halfway down, the graphite blue, ice-fringed Eagle Lake quenched our eyes at a meadow of russet colored swamp grass and decaying trees. We stretched our legs at the adjacent AMC hut before continuing on Old Bridle Path, which put us through one last pine-fronded ice luge before treating us to wide open views of the surrounding mountainsides.
No sooner did we stumble back out into the parking lot that an imposing darkness blanketed the region. The air was still balmy, hinting that the temperature had hit the high seventies while we were freezing our toes up on top. We felt that we had traveled through time and space, seen our pasts and futures all at once, and made a choice of sorts. For both of us, the choice was to be one of lifestyle and attitude. My mother now hikes an average of three times per week, whether with AMC, a Korean trekking club, or friends she has met along the way. Less than a year after our epic journey, she is almost halfway to completing the 48 White Mountains over 4000 feet in elevation. She looks younger than ever and is stronger than ever, and has gone from meditating about the latter half of her life planning new hikes. I finally got a job and ended up in Manhattan. Though accounting represents almost the polar opposite of my life interests and passions, I’ve learned how to make my own satisfaction by literally coming back down to Earth.
So, America’s Great Outdoors Initiative really hits home within the context of this story. The policy strikes me as tantamount to the establishment of the National Park System in its potential to shape our nation’s prideful character, one person at a time. Before Mt. Lafayette,
I had fallen to my knees at the feet of the Pacific redwoods, felt all the breath pulled out of me by the profundity of the Grand Canyon, and been hypnotized by the lava flows of the Big Island of Hawai’i. But I was luckiest to discover the pristine and surreal kingdom rising up out of a nearby state that I had inadvertently dismissed as a cold wasteland of tax-free strip malls and congested ski resorts. Serendipity led us to the beauty and the bounty of our local environs. May the Initiative reach those who may not be so fortunate, so that they, too, can attain levels of realization and peace limited only by how far they wish to trudge on their own two feet.
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Jia H Jung, New York, NY
Baxter State Park
As a long-time (10+ years) Boy Scout leader, and 'Camping Guru', I'm always looking for places to bring the boys camping that are within decent driving range, and reasonable cost. For me, the best combination is Baxter State Park, Maine. In the past 4 years, I've taken 9 camping trips out there. All have been different, and all have been wonderful. Baxter is so much more than just climbing Katahdin (which I've done 4 times and counting). Many mountain hikes other than Katahdin, great flatland hiking, some of the last wild Brook Trout fishing left in the U.S., lake fishing and canoeing, the Appalachian Trail, and great camping in tents, Adirondack shelters, and even a few cabins. Plus Moose, Deer, Bear, Eagle, and many other wild animal viewing. The Rangers are the best, and the trail crew must be some of the hardest workers in the U.S. Definitely an A+++ experience.
- Jim Rausch, Ellsworth, Maine
Old Speck Mountain, Grafton State Park, Maine
It’s a macho hike/climb to be sure for we over 60 folks, but it’s worth the challenge. Stay on route 26 from Portland and stop in Bethel at the Crossroads Diner where you will feel the welcoming rural Maine ambiance and casualness. Continue on for five miles, make the left at the Bear River Trading Post and head twelve miles to the parking area at Grafton State Park. Voila. Welcome to the AT.
Three point eight miles to the summit of Old Speck sounds like a piece of cake, but not so fast my friend. This part of the Appalachian Trail (AT) has a 2700-foot vertical gain. My mountain math hopes we’ll make it in two hours. On this late July Monday, my friend Paul and I begin the vertical almost immediately, climbing 950 feet in the first 35 minutes. The trail is rock strewn, almost entirely tree covered with the occasional overlook. The balsams give a fragrant smell to the forest and the mushrooms give a fairy-like feel to the hike. Fact is, we do only see fit people hiking this trail and introduce ourselves every chance we get with “Where are you from?” which gets the ball rolling.
So much for mountain math, two and a half hours later, we arrive at a public fire tower for panoramic views at the 4200-foot summit. On this windy Monday we don sweatshirts for comfort with nary a bug in sight up or down the trail. As with any climb of such elevation gain, it’s the descent that challenges the knees of we 60+ year-old hikers. Again, the trekking sticks brace each descending footstep and make it so that the next morning I would be able to lightly spin on my bicycle with my wife Hannah. That said, my quads would have me gingerly walking down stairs for a couple of days.
On the descent, we hear two hikers joyously talking behind us.
In short order two 22 year olds, “Tetherball” and “Moose” (Appalachian Trail names, male and female respectively) reach us.
As northbound thru-hikers, they left Springer Mountain in Georgia on April first and now hope to reach Mt. Katahdin, the terminus of the AT, in two, maybe three weeks.
Their utter joy and happiness lifts my spirit and reminds me that the world is a beautiful place.
They are living the dream.
Eleventh Commandment of the Trail –
Bring extra energy bars and trail mix on the trail to give to AT hikers.
We learn of the term
trail magic where hikers leave food for AT hikers.
Having learned only one in ten completes the AT, I recommend the DVD Southbounders (
http://www.southbounders.com/) for those intrigued by the AT as I am.
The last 35 minutes of the descent is tough on my knees and worrisome to my left ankle. After five hours of hiking, we play the “How much would you have to be paid to immediately rehike what we just did?” Game. Paul says “$150,” I say “$10,000,” since my knees are begging me to stop. As we reach the parking lot, we spot Moose and Tetherball. She says, “I’d do it for a dollar.” A dollar! Tetherball thinks $20, since that would pay for a week of groceries. Youth! I just love these two.
I have broken my cardinal rule of limiting hikes to three hours with this five-hour marathon, but thanks to the trekking sticks and good company I know I’ve hit the jackpot at Old Speck Mountain Trail. Rating – Excellent, but tough.
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Dan Rothermel, York, Maine
Homily: Canoeing as Spiritual Practice
As I mentioned, I’ve just finished the first week of a three-week canoe trip from Greenville to Saint Francis. I’ve paddled up Moosehead Lake and down the West Branch of the Penobscot to be here with you today. Over the next two weeks, I plan to follow the Mud Pond Carry over to Chamberlain Lake, then head down the Allagash to the Saint John.
Why am I doing this?I’d like to spend a few minutes sharing with you what canoeing means to me. For me, canoeing is much more than a pleasant way to pass a summer day or get some exercise. Canoeing has become an important part of my spirituality, a way in which I find communion with God. For me, canoeing is not just recreation, it is re-creation: following the path of the paddle heals my spirit and nourishes my soul.
When I push off from shore, I leave behind the insistent, self-important clamor of the everyday human world. While I am on the water, no ringing phone will demand my attention; email and errands and chores will wait. Thoreau once said, “The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.” The noise of daily life can drown out the poem of God’s creation.
On a quiet pond or gently flowing stream, I can listen deeply. Winds sigh, birds warble, moose splash as they feed in the shallows. The water’s surface reflects the colors of the sky and the forest’s many shades of green. With each breath I take, the clean air of the woods flows into my lungs and enters my blood.
As I give myself over to full experience of the natural world around me, I am absorbed into my surroundings. My mind quiets. Past and future cease to matter. I surrender to the reality of the present moment in all its timeless perfection. I feel God’s infinite creative energy in the rocks, the water, the wind, the trees—and within myself. To me, this is the meaning of the old verse from the Psalms “Be still, and know that I am God!” [Psalm 46:10] Brief as these moments are, they never truly end—they live on deep within my soul. I can return to them as peaceful oases in the midst of the busy-ness of my daily life.
But I do not always paddle on quiet waters. Whitewater canoeing teaches me different lessons: lessons of strength and courage and trust. It brings home to me the truth of a verse from Paul’s second letter to Timothy: “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” [2 Timothy 1:7]
Two years ago, I took a five-day course at a paddling school on the Madawaska River in Ontario. My initial relationship with my little twelve-foot-long solo canoe was tenuous at best. On the course’s third day, I was attempting to negotiate a tricky set of rapids when I overturned and my canoe headed on down the river without me. My body plunged head first over a large rock and I found myself trapped in what canoeists call a “sticky hole”. The endless recirculation of water in the hole bobbed me up and down for what seemed like a long time. In truth, it was probably under a minute—but a minute can seem pretty long when you’re trying to catch intermittent breaths through white froth as the current pushes you up to the surface, then sucks you back down again. I’m still not sure exactly how I got myself out—I think I managed to extend my arm into the strong downstream current just beyond the hole, and the rest of my body followed. But the experience left me feeling drained of energy and confidence. I wondered if I was really meant to do whitewater.
Nonetheless, I rejoined my classmates, climbed back in my canoe, and pressed on. The rest of the day passed without further mishap. The following day, I had a choice to make. I could choose to run a particularly challenging rapid known as Staircase, or I could remain ashore and “line” my canoe downstream using a rope. I felt afraid as I weighed what I knew would be a pivotal decision: I could either try to run the rapid, or I could remain in the shadow of my doubts, in a very real sense still trapped in the previous day’s hole. My instructor and I talked about the best line down the rapid and backup plans for rescue if my canoe overturned. At this point, my time spent in the hole became strangely liberating: I had already experienced an outcome I dreaded and worked through it; I believed I could work my way through whatever might happen now. As I pushed out of the quiet eddy above the rapid into the fast-moving current, I asked God for the strength and skill to see me safely through. My nerves were taut as I poured my whole being into navigating the safe channel down the rapid to the sanctuary of the eddy below. My execution was far from perfect, but I did make it. Relief and elation washed through me, and something shifted deep within. I began to look forward to the challenge of the next rapid.
Over the rest of the afternoon, as we proceeded down the river, I felt a growing sense of joy. I realized that I could never “conquer” any river. I needed to learn to work with the forces that God had set in motion, to rely on the river’s strength to complement my own.
The next day was the final day of our course, and we moved on to a set of rapids further downriver to test our newly-acquired skills. On a rapid known as Rifle Chute, I had an experience that has kept me exploring whitewater rivers ever since.
Just before lunch, I descended this rapid for the first time. A fast current pushed the bow of my canoe over the rocks forming the top of the chute; I plunged down into a trough that was perhaps three or four feet deep, then rose to the top of the standing wave that bounded the trough on the other side. I paddled hard and held my course to the left of the current as I dropped sharply downward to the safety of the eddy below. The experience was exhilarating, and after lunch, I eagerly accepted my instructor’s challenge to test the consistency of my skills by running the rapid a second time.
I lined up in what I thought was a perfect position as I headed over the drop. But to my dismay, I quickly realized that something had changed. I had allowed the current to push me toward the center of the river, where I found myself surrounded by roiling turbulence. Water poured into my canoe from all sides, filling it nearly to the gunwales. If I did not change course toward the left—and soon—there would be no way to remain upright. I shifted my weight, but, once again, I found that something had changed: the canoe, laden with water, no longer responded to the movements of my body the way it did when it was empty. I was precariously close to overturning.
At this moment of uncertainty, I felt an absolute calm and total focus I had rarely known before. Time seemed to slow down. The entire universe was reduced to just three elements: my body, my canoe, and the river immediately below and around me. I could see nothing beyond the foaming whitewater. Although the river was roaring in my ears, I heard nothing but deep silence. I readjusted my body, balanced my weight over my left leg, and the canoe tilted leftward. My entire being was filled with one resounding question: Would this edge hold?
I had entered into a state known as kairos. This ancient Greek word signifies time outside of ordinary experience, God’s time, a fragment of eternity that somehow inserts itself into the chronological progression of our lives. I felt complete peace in the midst of the storm raging around me.
The edge did hold, and my canoe rode forward out of the foam. I saw the river’s shore below me, and my instructor’s voice penetrated the silence, telling me to “Paddle! Paddle!” The time for contemplation had ended. I was back in ordinary time, and aggressive action was required. I put all my strength into forward strokes that pulled my canoe into the eddy beneath the chute.
When I climbed out of my canoe later that afternoon, I felt immensely grateful for the gifts I had received, for the lessons God had taught me through His river. I knew then—and I know now—that my moment in kairos, in God’s time—just a few seconds long by ordinary reckoning—will never truly end. It is always there, never so far that I cannot find my way back if I try.
- Dr. Wendy Weiger, Greenville Junction, Maine
Perfection - Hermit Island, Maine
Perfection is waking up in the stillness of the almost-morning to the sound of the ocean whispering its way to shore at low tide, rolling over to the crinkle of my down sleeping bag, and falling back to sleep. It is the criss-crossing of seaweeds at low tide and a beach speckled with fragmented razor clams and snails. My brother and I would swim in the ocean here in May until we turned numb and did not start shivering until ten minutes after we got out, if only to prove we could. We would wade knee-deep in tide pools, carefully picking our way over barnacle-encrusted rocks and seaweed slides, overturning slimy stones to see what we could find. The hermit crabs would dash inside their shells at our approaching giantlike fingers, and the rock crabs would huddle in caves and under awnings. Starfish clung to the sides, delighting our fingertips with their subtle roughness. I always sought out the anemones that closed as the water brushed by them slightly faster than usual, and the rare violet sea urchin that dared me to come nearer.
Perfection is in the place, Hermit Island, just north of Freeport, Maine, and my family’s Memorial Day weekend destination. We would pitch our tent on the soft sand and enjoy seaside views from beaches only accessible to campers. I remember the annual walk to Spring Beach, bay-like and hidden between cliffs. One day when I was ten and my brother seven, my parents hastily slid us past a friendly old man there, sunbathing in his birthday suit. We would perch on driftwood and picnic, play catch with Velcro paddles. My dog learned to swim at Spring Beach, following a stick into the water until he realized it was over his head. At night, we would come back, cook lobsters for my brother and father, and hot dogs for my mom and I, and then make s’mores over a campfire while watching the satellites pass and the Milky Way span its eons overhead.
Every morning when I woke up, each time it was low tide, I would scramble down to the beach, comb it up and down, searching for sand dollars (and sand dimes, as I would call the tiny ones). Some years they were abundant and I would come home with bagsful, others it was a struggle to bring home any at all. Once, they were all alive, so after marveling at their unexpectedly furry exterior, I would Frisbee them back where they belonged. My well-trained eye could pick up a sliver of a grayish disk from a distance. I would gently uncover it and slip it into my palm, continuing my way down the beach. By breakfast of oatmeal and hot cocoa cooked on a propane stove, I would bring my treasures to the site triumphantly, constantly adding to my collection. My final year at Hermit Island, I came across a moth in my sand dollar quest. Realizing it was still alive, I carried it with me for the day, blowing gently on it to be sure it remained so. It was gone when I looked for it the next morning. So it goes.
Not even the aquamarine seas of Hawaii can compare to the silent beaches and blue-gray swells of Maine’s coast and Hermit Island. The ospreys there, diving for a catch, and the seagulls swarming the lobster boats in the early morning mist (and taking a stick of butter from your plate when you were not looking in the evening). The thrill of finding anything hidden amidst the churning sand. Pretending a piece of driftwood is a balance beam. Writing your name in the hard wet sand. Removing your shoes the moment you set up camp and not putting them back on until you take it all down. Perfection really is letting your feet feel the rough edges of the rocks and once you reach the top, just standing there and letting the sea breeze and salt spray carry you until you return. Seventeen steps from the tent to the ocean’s edge; I will always run to the shore and let my toes go numb, will always wait until the sun takes its last orange-encased breath before I return to camp.
- Nicole Boisvert
Middle Settlement Lake, New York
After hiking over three miles, at about five in the afternoon, we arrived at the northeast shore of a small lake nestled between some mostly conifer covered hills in the western Adirondacks. We headed west along the banks of the lake, passing a beautiful campsite. As we arrived at a second campsite we heard the calling of a loon inviting us to stay, looking we saw the friendly bird about seventy feet from us swimming peacefully. To satisfy the loon we camped at this location, without an inkling of a thought of the act two loons would perform for us the following morning.
Let’s push the clock forward to the following morning, we have just finished breakfast and are sitting by the lake sipping our morning tea. A short way out on the water is a mother loon with a single young one. Mother is diving, in an effort to catch fish for herself and Junior. Junior is just swimming around waiting for Mama to deliver his breakfast. With Mama underwater Junior eventually decides to make a dive of his own, it is probably the first dive for fish in his up to now short life. Seconds later Mama appears on the surface, she rotates her head, flutters to change position, and looks all over but no Junior in sight. She screeches a screech like no other screech ever heard by man or beast. A screech that only a panicky mother loon can make when she is hollering “Junior, Junior, wherefore art thou Junior!” The screech was probably heard by the passengers of a jet on its way from Albany to Toronto at 34,520 feet elevation, and more important, it was heard 40 feet under the water by Junior. Mama screeched a second time, just as Junior surfaced a distance away. The two birds quickly approached each other, while Junior gave psychological comfort to Mama. Everything is peaceful now, mother and child return to quiet existence. The only difference is now Junior has joined his parent in the food gathering operation.
The above story happened at Middle Settlement Lake, a little west of Old Forge, New York. It is a place that appears to be rarely visited. The trail leading to it is muddy and/or partially overgrown in many locations. The lake has beautiful water, and in late July suitable for swimming. Best of all you will probably not see or hear anything human when you visit this place. We camped the night of July 25 at this location. The western Adirondacks are not as high or as challenging as the eastern Adirondack high peak area or the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the western Adirondacks we have seen young beavers starting on a dam, we have seen osprey catching fish that weigh almost too much for him/her to fly away with. To be alone, or for a great wildlife viewing experience, try this area.
- Mike Manes
Cardigan Lodge
My parents met because of the Appalachian Mountain Club and it continued to have an important role all the time I was growing up in New England.
My AMC stories and other wilderness memories are many, varied and wonderful.
They begin with tales from my parents of August Camp and the Inferno Race in Tuckerman's Ravine.
A photo on our wall shows our family white water canoeing and camping in early spring when I was about 2 years old. Then comes memories of the old Pinkham Notch lodge and Joe Dodge, swimming at Ponkapoag, a whole series of special weekends skiing and square dancing at Cardigan during the 1950's, several delightful John Jay Ski Movies in Boston, and listening for Loons on a moonlight night at Natarswi Girl Scout camp near Mount Katahdin.
While I was in high school my parents, a friend and I climbed all the New Hampshire 4000 footers -- finding a bird's nest in a mossy bank that was lined with aluminum strips, purpling at Greenleaf Hut, naming monster sandwiches "Steve's" after the hutmaster at Galehead, rescuing lost hikers in an August snowstorm on Madison, identifying alpine wildflowers with Miriam Underhill near Lake of the Clouds, surviving a thunderstorm at Thunderstorm Junction on Adams, camping at A Moose Campground.
With college my life began to move northward -- maintaining the Appalachian Trail with the Bates Outing Club in Maine, flying in to Baker Lake to begin a trip with Fred and Mary Jane Sawyer on the Saint John River, honeymoon at Acadia National Park.
Although I now live in Nova Scotia, the AMC style of life is deeply imprinted. Walking a beach, canoeing a river, hiking a trail, identifying wildflowers, a cooling dip in a clear lake, cross country or downhill skiing, bird watching, star gazing, square dancing -- these activities are essential to health and happiness. Wherever we go all across North America, we square dance and we search out the National and local parks to explore their unique offerings.
- Dottie Kinraide Welch
