Let me give you an idea of the laidbackedness level of this trip. On previous trips I’d wake up before dawn and immediately begin packing things in my tent because we needed to have the kayaks packed and ready to hit the water at zero dark thirty, if not earlier. On this trip we all generally lounged in our sleeping backs for hours, waiting out the chilly mornings (morning temps in the 30's!), and on the last day I had to negotiate to get people to agree to leave before 11 AM (to the group’s credit, we wound up beating our agreed upon 10:30 AM departure time by half an hour).
But the trip always starts with the journey to get there, so let me start there. Since Rob’s health concerns caused him to drop out, this year’s trip wound up being just four of us: Tall Tom, Béla, Jen and me. Jen lives in upstate NY, which left three of us driving up from the DC area. I didn’t want to ride up together with the three of us, three kayaks, and all of our gear in one car, and Béla always likes to carpool with someone, so I volunteered that he and Tom should drive together while I drove up by myself.
Also, I had an ulterior motive. For quite a while now I’ve been on the lookout for a lighter weight kayak. Back last year I almost bought one of Joey Schott’s ultralight Petrel kayaks, but I just never got comfortable with the idea of buying some garage kayak builder’s bespoke kayak - plus, I found the Petrel uncomfortable when I test paddled it. More recently I’d become interested in kayaks from a company called Stellar, and I’d noticed someone up in Yonkers, NY selling a Stellar for a very nice price. I made arrangements to take a look at the boat on my way upstate, and I wound up buying it! Also, since I was in the New York City area, I picked up some bagels for our group. Tom and I had discussed this idea before the trip. He left the bagel buying to me, probably a defensive move to avoid giving me an opening to complain about the poor quality of the bagels he (or anyone else) had brought.
Both the Béla/Tall Tom team and I had decided to split the 9+ hour drive up into two days, though we took different routes. I knew I'd be on my own Friday night and my idea was to overnight in some cool Hudson River Valley town. My initial thought had been Woodstock, but it’s ten miles out of the way, so instead I stopped in Saugerties, which sits right off the Thruway. If last year’s stop in Escanaba, MI gave us a window into the hollowing out of small town America, Saugerties is an example of how big NYC money can turn small towns into hipster playgrounds. The Hudson River Valley region has long been a convenient getaway from New York City, a trend which was turbocharged by flight from the city to the outlands during the pandemic. I pulled into town on a Friday evening, and the place was hopping. While Escanaba had a total of two rundown restaurants (actually, I seem to remember that dinner in Escanaba wound up being surprisingly tasty!), in Saugerties I had so many to choose from that I could barely make up my mind - organic bowls! Pizza! American! BBQ! Locavore this and locavore that! I strolled the streets (decorated with painted dog statues which were apparently up for auction as some kind of fundraiser) past the bookstore, poked my head into the free concert in an old barn, admired the well scrubbed vintage buildings, and finally chose to eat at a small, hip restaurant with a guitarist playing.
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| The town of Saugerties |
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| Dinner spot |
While I ate I thumbed through my phone, looking for places to stay. Unfortunately, all my available choices seemed to fit into one of two categories: low-end chain motels just off the highway which had really terrible reviews, or very expensive B&B's. I was eating the bar and told the bartender of my predicament. He confirmed that the local chain motels were awful (his sister had stayed at them while her house was being rebuilt after a fire) and suggested I go to Kingston instead. Problem was, Kingston was twenty minutes back towards where I had come from. Heading north, the next place with a decent selection of hotels was 45 minutes away in Albany. Fortunately it was only 7 PM, and even though after an Impossible Burger and a beer I was really looking to settle in for the night, I instead got in the car and drove to Albany. I had blindly entered "Hampton Inn, Albany" into my GPS, which took me to a downtown hotel where their parking garage couldn't accommodate my car with kayaks on the roof (kayaks plural because I had brought one from home just in case my Yonkers kayak purchase hadn't gone through). The woman at the front desk suggested their more suburban property nearby in East Greenbush. So, I got back into the car yet again, but for only a ten minute drive. The hotel in East Greenbush was lovely - newly renovated, and they even upgraded me to a suite. I had a perfect night's sleep.
Day 1: Saturday 9/5
In the morning I availed myself of the hotel breakfast, including of course the Belgian waffle, then took the new kayak off the car to make some adjustments: I moved the seat forward a notch and transferred over my painter line and paddle park thingy from the other kayak. We were going to be "glamping" with the ability to bring coolers, so I stopped at a nearby Target for some fresh food: yogurt, carrots, etc. On the way out of the Target parking lot one of my hood loops (loops of webbing attached under the hood of the car which give you a place to secure a bow line from the kayak) failed with a loud pop - the webbing just tore right through - requiring me to stop and do a field repair, which fortunately held together for the rest of the trip. Other than that, the drive to Lake Placid, the groups' meeting place, was uneventful, if rainy.
By the time I got into Lake Placid it was raining fairly hard. I browsed the stores in town for a while, getting fairly soaked in the process. Eventually I ducked into a restaurant and had a lunch consisting of combo of minestrone soup and a turkey sandwich. Coming from the sticky summertime weather of the mid-Atlantic, it was novel to feel chilly and appreciate a warm bowl of soup. After lunch I checked into my hotel. The Best Western wasn't as up to date as the previous night's hotel, but in addition to old school rustic charm, the staff was really friendly. Given that it was cold and rainy, I switched the HVAC from air conditioning to heat, which immediately filled the room with that burnt smell you get when you turn on a heater for the first time in a long time and it burns out whatever junk has accumulated in the system. After blow-drying my shoes and socks (I was wet!) I took a short nap, during which time the storm system blew out of town. When I went to meet Tom and Béla for dinner the rain was gone, replaced by cool, clear air. At dinner I was excited to order trout, a dish I've associated with upstate New York since my days eating at Rudi's Big Indian restaurant in the 80's. As an aside, Rudi's was a somewhat upscale restaurant somehow associated with an ashram in the town of Big Indian in Ulster County, NY.
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| Meeting a new friend in Lake Placid |
Day 2: Sunday 9/6
We had planned our trip to accommodate a couple in the group whose batteries weren't charged to 100% - knowing that they might not be able to paddle much and allowing for quick emergency medical extraction if needed. When faced with planning a trip for participants with health limitations we had originally considered a cabin-based trip rather than camping, but Tall Tom came up with the creative idea of still backcountry camping but renting a motorboat to get us in and out of the campsite rather than strictly depending on human power. This turned out to be a good idea, since it gave us all the opportunity to enjoy the camping part of the experience as well as the paddling; however, it added some complexity, some of which we had planned for and some of which took us by surprise.
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| The very nice marina boy gives us a boat tutorial |
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| I'm on a boat! |
Our plan for getting to our campsite was that Tom and I would pick up the motorboat and motor to the South Creek car-top launch where the whole group would load our gear from our cars into the motorboat (no cramming gear into the kayaks, which is a significant exertion in itself, and no paddling fully loaded boats!). Tom would then take the motorboat to our campsite, while the rest of us paddled our kayaks there. We would come back later for Tom's kayak.
Our challenges started with getting to South Creek. The trip was about 8 miles, a good portion of which was through the narrow Saranac River where we'd be limited to 5 MPH, plus we'd have to traverse a lock between two lakes. So, best case the trip would be an hour to an hour and a half - something I don't think we fully accounted for in our planning. Also, while we knew in advance that we would be on the lake about the same weekend as the Adirondack Canoe Classic, a 90 mile multiday race open to all kinds of paddle craft: canoes, kayaks, guide boats, etc., what we hadn't expected was that we would hit the narrow Saranac River just as the entire 90 Miler race was coming through in the opposite direction. So there I was, a novice motorboat operator trying to navigate a twisty, narrow, shallow river that was swarmed with all manner of canoes and kayaks going the other way. The presence of the racers slowed our progress to a crawl. The racers were friendly but did not make our lives any easier, cutting in front of us willy-nilly through turns as they were intent on making the best time possible. I'm happy to report that I made it through without hitting anyone. I did have to throw the boat into reverse a couple of times as an emergency maneuver when racers cut right in front of us, I hit one rock with the propeller (even though I was in the channel!), and we did get stuck once, but eventually we made it through. When we finally made it into Middle Saranac Lake we first had to hunt around for a bit to find the entrance to South Creek. Both Tom and I knew approximately where it was, but neither of us knew exactly which of the area's many little coves to find it it in. The whole journey wound up taking us something like two hours. Also, a cold rain started falling about the time we hit Middle Saranac Lake, making us pretty uncomfortable. I was shivering by the time we got to South Creek and had to sit in my car and warm up for a while. Fortunately, the rain passed quickly and didn't return for the duration of our trip.
Jen had scouted the South Creek launch a few weeks before our trip and had reported that the water level was pretty low due to a summer-long drought, but it hadn't registered with us that as a result we might have trouble getting the motorboat all the way up the creek to the car-top launch. Sure enough, when Tom and I finally made it to South Creek we ran out of depth a few hundred feet short of the dock. Jen did an impressive job of towing the motorboat with her kayak through a section where the motorboat was still afloat but where it was too shallow for us to use the engine. Unfortunately, even with our kayak tug we ran out of depth before we reached the dock and instead had to land the motorboat alongside the bank just short of a road bridge over the creek - the launch was just on the other side the bridge. From where we landed it was about a quarter of a mile walk to the cars, walking through the woods to the road, crossing the road, then walking down the road on the other side to the driveway which led into the car-top launch. Not exactly ideal for loading gear.
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| Tom clears the prop one of the many times we fouled it with weeds in shallow water. |
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| Jen tries towing the motorboat - South Creek launch is just past the bridge |
At this point the real snafu began. The pre-agreed plan had been to load all of our gear onto the motorboat at the dock at South Creek, then paddle our (not loaded) kayaks to the campsite. Of course, not being able get the motorboat all the way to the dock threw a monkey wrench into that plan. Because we weren’t going to be needing to fit everything into our kayaks, we had all brought luxuries beyond what would fit in our kayaks and hadn’t packed everything the way you would if you expected to have to squeeze it all into kayak hatches. Also, South Creek has a fairly small parking lot, and the spots were filling up. Consequently, what Jen, Béla and I decided was that Béla and I would take turns temporarily moving our cars to up the road to where we would have a shorter walk to where we had beached the motorboat. While one car and driver were out loading gear, the remaining two people would stay in the parking lot and try and guard the parking space so we didn’t lose it (Tom, of course, was staying with the motorboat). Béla took his car up to the loading spot first (he and Jen had already consolidated their gear into one car during the hours they had waited for us to show up in the motor boat). When Béla got back, I took my car over to the loading point but when I brought my first batch of gear down, the motorboat was gone! For whatever reason, Tom had decided to take off with just Béla and Jen's gear. We had no idea where he had gone and whether he was planning to come back, which left me with a little bit of a dilemma: I could wait in the parking lot for some indefinite period on the chance that Tom was going to come back, I could hit the water with Béla and Jen and paddle to the campsite with hopes of coming back later with the motorboat to retrieve my gear, or I could cram as much of my stuff as possible into my kayak and the three of us could head for the campsite with my stuff. This last option had a few challenges - I had brought a big tent that wasn’t going to fit into a kayak, I hadn’t packed my gear with the idea of needing to put it into a kayak, and I was paddling a brand new kayak that I had never paddled in let alone packed and paddled fully loaded. Nonetheless, it seemed like the only way to ensure that my essential gear and I would make it to the campsite.
So, Béla and Jen wound up waiting around for another 40 minutes or so while I frantically scrambled sort out what among my gear was essential and packable and would fit into my kayak. Fortunately, a lot of my camping gear lives in little dry bags which are amenable to being packed into a kayak and Jen was good enough help me out by strapping my big tent onto the deck of her kayak (Jen has a history of carrying my camping gear). Béla's hatches were already filled with our emergency supply of Adirondack air, so there was no room in them for any of my gear.
With my gear haphazardly crammed into the kayak, the three of us headed out and as we hit the mouth of the creek, there was Tom approaching in the motorboat! He proceeded to give us a hard time for being missing in action for so long and for not having had our radios on to communicate (there is no cell service at the South Creek launch, but Marine VHF radio could possibly have worked). At this point I admit I blew a fuse. I turned my kayak around and told them I'd had enough of the chaos and was going to head home and that the three of them should have a nice week; however, I cooled down by the time I was halfway back up the creek and so I once again turned around and rejoined the group. The good news is that I got some good practice turning my new kayak which, at nearly eighteen feet long isn't particularly easy to turn!
Things settled down after that. Campsites this time of year are first-come, first-served, and we got the exact site we wanted - a sweet spot where we've camped before which has a nice beach to land our varied fleet as well as the luxury of a lean-to shelter. As an aside, when I mentioned our site numbers in my blog entry after my very first trip to the Adirondacks one of my fellow travelers excoriated me for having revealed such valuable information. Apparently, similar to Fight Club, the first rule of Adirondack camping sites is you don't reveal your Adirondack camping sites. I wound up compromising by changing the blog such that the site numbers were expressed as a third order polynomial, an approach which would obscure the site numbers from casual blog readers but I guess still allow those with sufficient math skills to find the roots of the equation to figure it out. So I was amused on this trip when at the parking lot Tom told a number of people we encountered that we were aiming for campsite 63. Doesn't he know such information is highly classified?
Campsite 63 was not only available, it had been stocked with a big load of firewood, meaning we wouldn't have to spend our time foraging in the woods for sticks. It also meant that we really didn't need to have brought a chainsaw (I told you we brought luxuries!).
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| Yes, we had a chainsaw at camp |
We quickly made camp, including Tom taping off a special area in the lean-to as being reserved for my chair, a funny move in response to my complaining about how in our last stay this campsite he and Rob had monopolized the shelter, leaving me no room even for my chair. Jen made a tasty dinner of polenta with spinach and goat cheese, and after a rather chaotic day we all turned in somewhat early.
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| Our fleet finds a home at last |
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| Our campsite |
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