NCT 2: Solar Power

Schroon Lake to Old Forge, NY

The day broke bright and early in Schroon Lake, and I woke at 7am to sunlight streaming through the window. Yes! The forecast had called for nice weather but I didn't quite believe it, and now I was looking out at my first sunny hiking day in over a year. It'd been so long since I'd experienced summer.

I'd noticed some inflammation in my left ankle the night before, but I'd chalked it up to the roadwalk and left it alone to rest. It was more serious than I'd thought, however. A tight pain stiffened my heel as I stood to get out of bed, and my stride was more of a mincing hobble. My ankle was so fat that the lateral malleolus was nearly invisible, just one smooth line from my outer foot to my calf. Hmmm. Stretching it carefully, I could feel that the pain was localized to my heel stirrup, so I diagnosed it as peroneal tendonitis. I'm not a doctor, but I know where my peroneal tendon is and “-itis” means swollen, which it very much was. I explained this to Constantine as I taped it up and was treated to many jokes about swelling in other areas. After downing an Aleve and a donut, the pain settled down to a manageable ache and we began our roadwalk at the leisurely hour of 9am.

I was stepping well and feeling cheerful as we passed through Schroon Lake proper. We hadn't had a chance to do laundry at the motel, so I'd washed my only non-holey pair of Darn Toughs in the sink and was enjoying the sensation of clean-ish toes. It'd been so cold that my sun shirt was still perfectly clean, so I didn't even stink. We passed more picture-perfect historical houses, and waved to a cute old couple on their cute pink porch. “I love seeing old people in love!” I told Constantine. “That'll be us one day, holding hands, drinking our coffee in the sun. They've been married for like sixty years and they still can't get enough of each other.”

Soon enough, we were through the town and up a short stretch of highway, where we turned onto a long dirt road. The houses here were a little more run-down than the properties in town, but they gave off a wholesome American vibe of hard work and make-do. It was the kind of working class community that every politician wishes they were from.

The sun gave us energy and put a lively spring in every step, tendonitis notwithstanding. Around one o'clock, I spotted a turn-off road to a public boat launch and we took a relaxing long lunch by the lake. “I love the sun!” Constantine shouted to the birds.

“You really are solar-powered, babe,” I told him. “You just soak it up like a cat.” The sun made everything better. Restored by Oreo cookies and pleasant weather, we bounced down the road and through the tiny hamlets of Irishtown, Olmsteadville and Igena, all the way to the end of our road walk at North Creek. A nine-year-old kid said hi as she passed us on her bike. I asked her how she was doing and she said “Awesome!” I felt awesome too.

It was here that we realized the NCT maps weren't quite accurate in this section. The red line had us walking directly over the top of a gravel highway embankment and through a random field to a ski area. I got a little nervous, and I couldn't tell why. Constantine wanted to scout up the highway for a connecting road to the parking lot, but I was suddenly seized with worry that the FKT wouldn't count our attempt if we didn't follow the route exactly. “It’s obviously not ground-truthed,” he said. “The NCTA just drew a straight line on a computer. They don't expect us to follow a route that's impossible.” Still, my anxiety about the GPS tracker wouldn't let me listen to common sense, so we bushwhacked up through the thistles and found ourselves at the top of a melted municipal snow dump. The gravel embankment was hiding a giant unstable pile of road salt, and we cussed the trail up and down as we scrambled across it to the actual road we were meant to follow. A woman sitting in a red Prius gave us a strange look and drove away.

At the entrance to the closed ski area, I sat and ate a protein bar, feeling silly. Of course this section hadn't been ground-truthed; the trail we were supposed to take was clearly marked with a dotted line on our maps, and the red line from the NCTA map paralleled it twenty feet to the east. Clearly, they had just popped the location data into some glitchy mapping software and called it a day - nobody in their right mind would bushwhack through alders twenty feet from a designated trail.

After a minute or two, we found the trailhead at the wrong end of a cul-de-sac and set off up the steep, poorly maintained ski trail. It would have approached a bushwhack were it not for the frequent New York Department of Conservation signage. Every time we lost the faint track, we could look up and find a blue circle proclaiming XC SKI. The sunshine that had been our companion all day was deserting us. A chill breeze was in the air, and the gathering clouds had a foreboding hue. Portions of the trail were flooded out by swamps, and the brushy uphill was slow going. With no buds on the trees and the ground covered by last year's leaves, I had the disorienting illusion that it was actually autumn. I kept having to remind myself that the calendar said May 5th, since the temperature and light said Late September. My good mood was fading with the sunshine, and the Aleve had worn off. Suddenly I was cold and in pain and growing desperate for camp.

We thought we could find a place to sleep where the topo lines mellowed out, just three miles away by our estimate. It was a little short of where we'd wanted to camp, but whatever, we'd left town late. Three miles was only one more hour of hiking, and I could do one more hour. I sucked up my whiny mood and pushed, forging ahead through blowdown and thorny snags. An hour passed. The flattish spot on the map was a sodden, rotten swamp, and the ground was humped and heaving - an old clearcut. No camp here. I couldn't help it. I started to cry a little, quietly to myself, not because of any specific pain so much as from the disappointment of not getting to stop quite yet. The high point of the trail was only a mile and a half away. We could see where the tops of the trees gave way to open sky, and yet I couldn't contain my despair. I was hungry and tired and my ankle hurt, and my inner toddler didn't wanna! I let myself spiral a little with this petulant mood. The sun wasn't our friend anymore, and we hadn't gone far enough, and everyone could tell that we were lazy because of the tracker, and they'd all hate me for slowing Constantine down, and there probably wouldn't even be a place to camp at the top and we'd just have to keep hiking forever and ever and ever! I stamped my good foot and pouted and felt how ridiculous my toddler-self was being, then reined her in with my adult mind and got on with hiking the last mile. You don't have to like it, I told myself. You just have to do it.

We made camp at the top of the rise just as the rain began spitting down, and I felt better after curling into bed with a pot of noodles. We fell asleep to the sound of a steadily growing storm.

The next morning dawned cold and miserable, and we groaned as we forced ourselves up to greet the clammy day. It was all mist and clouds and swampy bullshit, and I didn't have high hopes for the quality of the trail. We had about twenty miles of singletrack before we'd join another dirt road near the town of Speculator, and it looked as if we'd be wet the entire way. My expectations held correct for the first hour, but I was pleasantly surprised when we left the XC ski route at a junction and joined a connector trail. It was groomed to day-hiker standards, with all the blowdown cleared away and enough signage to orient even the most clueless city dweller. The sun gained strength and pushed away the drizzling clouds, and I was once again marching along happily to the music of birds. It felt like a Disneyland version of trail, and not in a bad way. By “Disneyland”, I mean that it felt like what I imagine normal people picture when you say you're going hiking for five months - crunching leaves, gentle hills, and the scent of pine. I could hear the echoes of Boy Scout songs lingering between the trees. We took lunch on the bank of a babbling brook. I mean that to sound like a cliché - it was the cliché made real, a postcard image of the peaceful Adirondack woods. And it was woods, not a forest; it had the cultivated feel of a landscape manifested and cared for by humans, a symbiosis of environment and design.

It was too good to be true, and after lunch we turned away from the manicured path. Fifteen miles from any trailhead, this side trail was too far for any day-hiker to go, and there were plenty of long loop trails in the area for anyone wanting a challenge. We were on our own in dense brush, the sun abandoning us once again as the rain clouds regrouped and fought it away. The NY Conservation signage was plentiful, a small mercy, but this trail hadn't been maintained in years and it showed. Like the XC ski trail from yesterday, the round red signs were all that distinguished it from a pure bushwhack.

Despite this, we were feeling pretty good until the NCT threw us another curveball. We were getting fairly close to a trailhead, within three or four miles, and expected that the trail maimtence would improve as we re-entered day-hiker terrain. According to our maps there were no junctions to worry about, but just as as soon as the brush began to open up we spotted the signature blue triangle of an NCT blaze. At first, we were incredibly excited. “Someone's been here! That means it's ground-truthed!” But it hadn’t been. The NCT blazes led us south down a trail that wasn't marked on any of our maps, while the red line jogged north around a lake. The good trail we'd been following closed in on us again, and we were soon fighting brambles and cursing at the rain. We thought this trail might be a more direct route to the trailhead, and allowed ourselves to grow optimistic as it seemed to track a diagonal line straight to the road. Perhaps we were only two miles from the trailhead now? I started to fantasize about the town of Speculator. This trail would open up at any moment, and if it was only two more miles to the road then we could make it there by five o'clock. Maybe there'd even be a pizza place. But as we got closer and closer to the trailhead marked on our maps, the route zigged and zagged pointlessly, an asymptotic approach that only grew longer as we grew more frustrated. The worst part was the not-knowing. “I can't wait till we get to the goddamn - augh! - the goddamn Finger Lakes Trail so we know where we’re - ow! - fucking going!” I snarled, fighting through the prickly branches of a dead pine tree. If I had been expecting this trail to be five or six miles long, I wouldn't have gotten excited about being close to the road, and then I wouldn't be so irritated now.

It was nearly six pm by the time we made it to the road, and we done at least a thirty mile day. I was still struggling with my fear of inadequacy, and we'd planned to camp on forest lands a few miles past Speculator, so that's what I was going to do, dammit. Never mind that we'd added a bunch of unexpected miles to our day, and that the clouds were threatening to unleash more than just a foggy drizzle - I wasn't going to be weak. I pushed hard down the dirt road with barely a sip of water left in my bottles, thirsty and aching and mad. Constantine let me walk it off, and as the day cooled into evening, I slowed and then stopped to rest my ankle at a junction sign. “Young Forest Conservation Easement”. Huh? Constantine caught up to me. We'd been worried about where to camp - we thought there was no public land to sleep on for at least another six miles, and part of my frustration came from knowing I couldn't just stop when I was tired. Having to curtail or push your pace to match up with a legal campsite is exhausting, and I was getting pretty sick of doing math three days in advance just because of some ten-mile stretch of private land. This surprise easement solved our problem for the night, but I was still feeling stubborn about doing our planned miles. “Babe,” Constantine said, trying not to sound exasperated, “we know we can stop here. We don't know exactly how long this road is or how far we'll have to walk after Speculator, and it's already getting windy. This is just how the NCT is. We'll probably have to do this a lot.” Begrudgingly, I agreed to stop early for the night on the closed side road, and he left his pack with me as he jogged back up the road to get water. He'd seen a stream just before the junction, and so I turned away to study the posted easement map. I expected him to be gone a few minutes, but thirty seconds later I heard a whoop of delight. “There's a piped spring!” he hollered. “It's a good one too!” It felt like a sign: we were supposed to camp here. There's a saying in thru-hiking culture, “the trail provides”, and now the trail had provided us with a legal campsite just as the rain was coming in, with good clean water to boot. My stubbornness melted away and I laughed with gratitude as we collected our spring water and found a cosy campsite on the closed road.

Walking into the town of Speculator the next day, we had another good surprise. A familiar looking car was headed down the dead-end road, and Constantine joked that this town was so sleepy that it must be Mark coming to say hi. I squinted at the licence plate. “I think it is Ma-”

“HI!” Mark said, rolling down the window. “Do you guys want breakfast sandwiches? I know you like bacon Magpie, and I got ham for Constantine.” We did want breakfast sandwiches. We wanted them so much! He'd gotten up early just to meet us in town and thought he was going to miss us as we passed through, but that morning was so cold that we lazed around in our tent until 7am. The timing was perfect. My breakfast sandwich was two minutes off the grill and piping hot. We invited Mark to meet us farther along and join us for a few miles of gravel road to a trailhead, since paved highway miles aren't very exciting. We were on our last big roadwalk stretch for a little while - in about six miles, we'd get to the edge of Adirondack park and have almost thirty miles of developed singletrack trail. He eagerly agreed, so we pushed on down the shoulder with our sandwiches as he drove off.

I was in the lead as usual as we turned off the highway and began climbing the steep gravel track to the trailhead. Despite the constant spitting rain, it was fairly warm, and I was hiking in only my sun shirt and rain jacket. I wasn't super pumped about hiking in the rain, but I liked the idea of company and the good breakfast had improved my mood. We found Mark with his car about three miles up the gravel road where it flattened out to a plateau, and I pulled my pace back so I could join him and Constantine in conversation. Mark worried about slowing us down, but I felt like spending a little extra time was the least we could do to return his generosity. He wasn't all that much slower than us anyway, and the weather was mild enough to make it pleasant. I breathed in the cool crisp air and relaxed into the pace - even the cold puddles felt good on my sore foot. We bid Mark goodbye at the trailhead just as the rain began to come down in earnest, and I began to wish I'd put on my thermal layer as we sloshed and slid down the muddy trail. It was 11:30am and I was getting hungry, but this trail system had shelters along the lakes and I wanted to make it to one of them for lunch.

The wind intensified as we grew near, and the trail was in rough shape. It took us an hour and a half to make it to Pillsbury Shelter, and by that time we were freezing. It was absolutely bucketing down, and Constantine was tempted to call it a day. “We've done what, like 17 miles? We could stop. That's an okay day. Ughhhhh it's cold.” I was tempted too, but we really couldn't justify stopping at 1pm, and this particular shelter faced into the wind. We wouldn't be very comfortable here, and we'd only get colder if we stopped moving. “There's another shelter in three miles. If it doesn't get better, we can stop there.” An osprey was flying above the lake, swooping down low over the water to snatch at prey, and the rain began to lessen as we watched its flight. Finally it sailed off into a tree, and I took that as our signal to go. If we sat much longer, I knew I wouldn't want to leave. “Come on. Just three miles. There's another shelter a mile after that, and then another one in two miles. We can stop any time we want.” I threw on my thermal midlayer and puffy under my rain jacket and we set off.

The break in the weather lasted four hours. The sun even came out for a few minutes, and I got hot and shed my puffy. The trail was rustic but mostly did exist, only fading out to signed bushwhack for a few short miles here and there. I began to enjoy myself again, feeling like a real thru-hiker as I hopped up and around obstacles without breaking my stride. My legs felt strong and my core burned with inner fire, pushing out heat to the boundary of my wet skin. We reached Brooktrout Lake Shelter with excellent timing, as the skies chose that moment to unleash a ferocious blast of hail. It was around five thirty, and we decided we must have done about 26 miles - time to call it a day. The trail provided us with yet another beautiful clear spring, and we snuggled into our quilt happy as the sleet poured down.

A map we found in the shelter gave the distance to the road as 5.2 miles, so using that as our guide we estimated that the town of Old Forge was about 25 miles away. There were a lot of wiggles and switchbacks in the gravel road we'd be following so it was impossible to be more precise, as Gaia Maps only allows you to measure distance as the crow flies. We were both out of dinners and needed to stop for more food, so we decided to make Old Forge our target for the afternoon and camp a little farther on at a trailhead just outside of town. The weather was promising. Though there was a chill in the air, the sun seemed to be making progress against the clouds, and the trail improved as we got closer to the trailhead.

The tannins in the swamp water had dissolved the adhesive on my KT Tape, so my tendonitis was acting up as we reached the trailhead. Looking back at the sign, we saw the distance to Brooktrout Lake Shelter marked at 6.3 miles. Interesting. Which was right, the sign or the map? We didn't stop to consider what that implied for our distance estimate, as the sun was fully out and we were busy rejoicing in it. We ate a snack and removed our layers, then settled into our pace for the long gravel road.

It was long, long, long, and while it was beautiful and remote, it also grew monotonous. This road wound through an expansive primitive camping area, and the scenery consisted of pines, dirt, and identical picnic tables. I was starting to feel some real pain from my ankle and regretted not replenishing my supply of KT tape before we left Schroon Lake; the two strips that were flopping around in my sock were the only two I had. The sun was losing its battle against the clouds, and as the day wore on we donned more and more of our layers. I began to suffer. My mood dragged down as the light dimmed to grey, and I hurt, and there was nothing to distract me. We seemed to be making no progress, and the road kept being the same three things over and over. Pines, dirt, picnic table, pines, dirt, picnic table, pines, dirt, picnic table, pines… there was not even a footprint or a bike track to relieve the monotony, and even my audiobook felt dull. I vaguely wondered about purgatory, checked my maps, and waited for something to be different.

We had nothing to look forward to save for a short three mile section of trail connecting this endless dirt road to a paved highway, and I was itching with anticipation as we drew near. We zipped through a tiny resort community, then made our way through a closed developed campground. At the back of the camping area, we should find Limekiln Loop trail. We didn't see a sign for it, and the red line on our maps was so far from being accurate that we disregarded it entirely - an hour ago, it had directed us to walk straight through someone's house and into a pond. We did see an ATV track leading roughly the right direction into the woods, and it seemed to be on some kind of road or trail, so we followed it. It was rough and ready, but even when the tire treads veered away up the side of a hill, we could still see the faint ghost of an old road, so we kept on straight.

Then it vanished. Okay, no big deal. There was an old rusty sap bucket behind some blowdown to our left, so we jumped over the tree and followed a trace depression to it. This “trail" grew more and more sketchy until we finally had to admit we were in a bushwhack. The red line was far to our east across a swamp, and the dotted line labeled “Limekiln Loop" was equally far away in the opposite direction, and we were in the middle of a snag. The sky was overcast and offered no clues as to which direction we were walking, and the brush was so thick that we couldn't see three feet in any direction. The GPS in my phone was confused and spinning in circles, and I felt panic rising behind my breastbone. We aren’t lost, I told myself. We're both experienced hikers. We know where we are. We're a mile away from a gravel road. We just have to get there. But I couldn't stop it. I was panicking, responding to a claustrophobic memory of being lost and alone. I wasn't sure exactly which one this time. It was a composite anxiety of all the times I had been cold and disoriented in the deep woods, fueled by the pain in my ankle and the menacing sky. “Fuck!”

“Baby? You okay?” Constantine looked back to see if I'd fallen.

“I'm… oh, fuck. What if… what if… never mind. Let's just get out of this thing, my panicking isn't going to help you navigate.” I was trying to hold it back and just move, but I was sobbing with the effort of keeping it contained, of just following him and not freaking out. I was definitely freaking out, but I tried to keep it internal. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine. Why was I so afraid? What had the GDT done to me? Exposure therapy. You're safe, this is good for you. But I did not feel safe, and it did not feel good.

It felt like ages, but Constantine got us back to the dotted line, where we found a rough but serviceable trail complete with circular FOOT TRAIL signs. “Phew. Okay. We're safe, there's a trail, I didn't lose anything… FUCK!” I'd been checking constantly to make sure everything stayed tucked into my pack, but I was now missing a trekking pole. I loved my new trekking poles. I needed my new trekking poles! I'd got them on sale! I couldn't just lose one. There is one good thing about being on a stupid bushwhack trail where no one ever goes, and it’s that you can completely lose your temper if you need to. I completely lost mine. “Fuck! Goddamnit! FUCK! AHH!” I dropped my pack and paced around in a fury.

“Shit. We'll never find it back there, I'm sorry,” Constantine said. He was being so nice to me, even though I was acting like a child.

“I just had it. I reached back and checked thirty seconds ago! It's gotta be right here. Give me two minutes, I won't try any longer than that.” And with that, I plunged back into the bushwhack to retrace my steps. Within moments I was completely disoriented, and couldn't even figure out which direction we'd come from. “Shit! I'm lost. I'll never find it.” I at least had the presence of mind to stay within shouting distance of Constantine, and so after a few irritated minutes I gave up and tromped back to the trail. Constantine is a true gem though - his GPS was working and he'd been leading, so he had a pretty good idea which way we'd gone. He confirmed that I was sure I'd had the trekking pole in the last thirty seconds, and a few moments later emerged from the pines triumphant. He found it! “It was snagged on a log, it must have been right when I saw the trail and you came running.”

Buoyed by this unexpected victory, I didn't even grumble too much when it started to rain, although I did apologize for throwing a hissy fit. We were supposed to be less than a mile from the gravel road, but true to form, the trail was much longer. Two and a half miles and many pointless turns later, we finally emerged from the warren of unmarked ATV trails and found the paved road. It was now five o' clock on a Sunday, and nearly everything in Old Forge was closed. Constantine had some cell service and checked our mileage - we still had six miles before town. If I had had any energy left at that point I might have thrown another tantrum, but I was so tired and sore that I just sighed and resigned myself to another three days of pain before Rome.

The pavement hurt. I had my audiobook going in both ears to try to drown it out, but it hurt, hurt, hurt, and all I could do was keep going. Our only resupply was a gas station that might or might not be open until 9pm, and we definitely wouldn't get there until 7. The pharmacy was closed, the grocery store was closed, and our next legal campsite was at least four miles outside of town. I couldn't do it, but I had to. Walking fast hurt less than walking slow, so I pushed, and finally we made it to the town of Old Forge.

Immediately, I noticed it had a ton of motels. Then I noticed the massive black thunderhead crackling just behind us. “Um.” I pointed. “Motel? I know we just had one two day ago and it'll look lazy and everyone watching the GPS track will hate me and they'll think I'm slowing you down but I just… I just…” and then I was crying again, humiliated by my own mental weakness, chastising myself for wanting to stop and then scolding myself for being too mean. I was injured, it was about to storm, we were both soaked and covered in twigs and we hadn't done laundry for ten days. And we were out of food! Of course it made sense to stop. I was being way too hard on myself, and that realization made me feel even worse. I just wanted the sun to come back and make everything better, and I wanted to tape my ankle so it would stop hurting.

Constantine said all these things to me, exactly as I was saying them to myself, and I got some cell service and booked us a cheap motel for the night. It was late and if we didn't zero we wouldn't get to enjoy it much, but he looked at the weather and saw that the next day called for rain. We would zero in Old Forge, go to the pharmacy, and resupply at an actual grocery store. I could relax. It was all going to be okay.

Today is that zero, and I've been writing for five hours. My ankle feels much better with the tape, and I made sure to restock everything that's supposed to be in my first aid kit. We have plenty of food and we've got plenty of rest, and tomorrow is supposed to be sunny. I even got new socks! Our next stop (fingers crossed) is Rome, and after that the maps are said to be accurate. I can't wait to finally know exactly where we're going.

Until next time,

Magpie