An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

This is additional information related to my Saranacs trip report, published in two installments:  Part I  and Part II . A few additional thoughts: The era of handheld Garmin GPS receivers seems to be over. Before the trip I got out my Garmin and not only did it seem like very antique technology with a tiny little screen and a poky user interface, it wouldn't even reliably turn on anymore! Newer models with larger screens cost hundreds of dollars. Because I'm leery of keeping my phone on deck, I decided to try using my old iPhone as a GPS. I found and app called Avenza maps which will display a georeferenced PDF map. It also allow me to add my own waypoint files, so I can mark up the map with waypoints for features such as campsites and launch locations. With all of this stored on the unit, no cellular connection is required. It worked great - for three minutes. It turns out that my old phone is set to automatically lock after three minutes, and for whatever reason there's ...

This is Part II of a trip Report. Part I can be found here . Thursday Dear reader, are you confused because Part I of this trip report referenced so many different lakes? Upper Saranac, Lower Saranac, Middle Saranac, Sidewise Left-Handed Saranac? Well just to warn you, this entry mentions several additional lakes, two ponds, and a river. Here's a very simplified diagram of the layout of the Saranac chain of lakes (some additional lakes and ponds in the chain are not shown, since they didn't play into our route): Fig. 1: The Saranac Lakes for Dummies To recap, we started our trip at the South Creek Launch at the bottom of Middle Saranac Lake and spent a few days on that lake. At this point in the trip we are heading through the Saranac River into Lower Saranac Lake. Paddling the lakes Repositioning days are tough: you have to break camp, pack the kayaks, paddle a loaded kayak to a new destination, and then unpack the kayaks and make camp again. Sometimes, as in this trip, you al...

Friday-Saturday When you read about the great expeditions, you hear about the difficulties they encountered - freezing winters, insurmountable mountains, but you never hear about where they parked the car. Lewis and Clark started their expedition in St. Louis with 35 men - where did they leave their cars for two and a half years? Likewise Shackleton: when his lifeboats reached South Georgia Island after harrowing survival in the Antarctic, did he still have his parking stub? Yeah, it's all about the parking. Or at least it seemed so as we headed north for our Adirondack trip. When I had drafted the itinerary for our Saranac trip, my vision was to park the cars once and travel strictly by water from there for the full week of our trip. The challenge was that I came across vague references to a 24 hour parking limit at the only boat launch on Middle Saranac Lake. So back in July I called the office which administers the campsites on the lakes to ask about parking and got an answer al...