Labor Day Weekend Adventures

Johnsburg --

Sarah elected to get off on the right foot on her first weekend back in medical school, by staying home and studying while Dave and Calvin took off for the Adirondacks for the long Labor Day weekend. Grandma Evelyn showed up and dropped off Isabel on Saturday afternoon, stuck around for an extra hour or two to let Dave get some trail-clearing done, and got some tasty peach cobbler in return... but after that, Dave was on his own for a couple of days. Outnumbered!

All things considered, he did OK. Brunch on Sunday morning was cleverly pre-arranged, with Kerry Leigh and kids Hannah, Zachary, and Krishna showing up and bringing along a good part of the actual food, including blueberry pancake batter and the eggs for the all-important omelettes. But the fried potatoes and sausages were fairly well-received, too.

Theoretically the brunch was supposed to be a prelude to a trip to the Cavelings, a little-known group of small water-carved caves in the surface limestone at the base of Crane Mountain, on a small flat corner of state land toward the north end. But I hadn't been on most of those trails for nearly a decade and had no idea what condition they were in, and Krishna's legs are still pretty short -- seems like he's about half Calvin's size, though he's just as mobile. So suddenly a two-mile bushwhack seemed overambitious, and we settled for the Pine Ridge horse-trail loop instead.

This was still a triple-A Authentic Adirondack Adventure, with a short bushwhack past the Great Hemlocks to the horse trail, and a stop for a snack in superlative sunny breezy weather at the top of Pine Ridge. After which we completed the loop down the Putnam mail trail without any noticeable difficulties. The sphagnum slopes were fairly dry, but still green and inviting for anyone in need of a short rest.

At the iron bridge there was almost no water flow -- not nearly enough for Poohsticks -- partly because of the drought, and partly because the beavers upstream were catching just about all of the flow in their dams. They're in the process of re-converting the old beaver meadows below the barn into an active beaver empire again, and right along the road below the cabin are several newly flooded ponds, with beaver-chewed alder stumps sticking out of the water. At this rate the brush problem will be much reduced for the next decade: dozens of young white pines that Dave was starting to worry about coming up in the old meadows now have their roots underwater and are looking decidedly sickly already. (Pictures of the Empire are from the previous week, when Sarah took her camera out for purposes of artistic appreciation in Grandma Evelyn's Hornbeck boat.)

Saw a few newts on the cabin trail in the mornings, and wandering box turtle in the parking lot on Labor Day. It has been the best year for monarch butterflies -- apparently the caterpillars we saw on the milkweed a month ago have successfully made their transformation and will soon be on their way to Mexico, or whatever their improbable destination is these days (we didn't ask them).

But the highlight of the weekend was on Labor Day, when we had made no prior social arrangements and the trip to the Cavelings was still beckoning. Calvin and Isabel were ready to try it, so we started out behind the cabin, re-clearing the old trail over to the Sandhill, which was suffering from a decade of neglect and littered with the detritus of several storms. Slowly but surely we worked our way up to the high point below the Crane Mountain cliffs, on the boundary between the old Hewitt and Putnam properties (now Jim Tarry's and Greenes', respectively).

The results of the survey were pleasantly surprising: where ten years ago the blackberry brambles and downed branches from lumbering made travelling difficult, the underbrush had grown up into trees and shaded out most of the difficult vegetation, and it was mostly a matter of threading through saplings and throwing occasional blowdown out of the way.

Getting to the Cavelings was a near thing, though -- touch and go for the last half mile. The trip was a democratic affair, and it required fairly relentless campaigning on Dave's part to make sure that there was never a point at which both Isabel _and_ Calvin wanted to turn back before the objective was reached. Gummy-bear bribes worked well for the first hour and a half; when they started to run out, some quick work produced an Elevator Tree that kept both kids busy while Dave ran ahead and cleared a good length of the trail ahead, to reduce resistance both for outbound travel and for the trip back.

(An Elevator Tree is a slender sapling growing near some climbable high point, providing a quick trip back to ground level for anyone putting their full weight on it.)

To make a long story short -- Calvin was only starting to get tired when we looked up and found the Elephant looming over us -- a mammoth house-sized boulder fallen from the Crane Mountain cliffs a quarter mile uphill, that split into several parallel fragments like a loaf of sliced bread. You can walk between two of the fragments and come out the other side -- or climb up a good distance by putting your back against one face and your feet against the other. There's also a dry overhang full of wind-blown leaves at the north end, a possible destination for some future camping trip.

Just below the Elephant is a natural stone bridge with a hole in the middle, which you can jump into and down a sandy slope into a wide overhang with a water-carved limestone floor -- which Isabel immediately christened the "Gnome King's Palace": she's been reading the second book in the Oz series lately. There are other minor wonders upstream from there, but it seemed prudent to save some sights for a return trip.

Eventually it was time to tackle the hike back to the cabin. Calvin was fairly well out of Gummi Bear energy by this point and was drooping a bit, pining for a nap... but we threaded our way back through the network of logging trails without too much difficulty -- depending on whether you classify Dave sometimes carrying both Calvin and Isabel simultaneously as "difficult". Calvin still fits in the packbasket Dave was carrying, so that was nice for a while, until the novelty wore off and it turned out to be a bit too cramped for comfort.

The last apples and water in the packbasket apparently provided enough blood sugar for a final surge, anyway, since both Calvin and Isabel finished the trip in good spirits -- racing each other back along the newly cleared trail to the cabin, in fact. And we can all testify to the interesting fact that a long walk makes the same old food back home taste ten times as good, when you get back to it --