Ithaca to Seattle
in 4,000 Miles or More

August 15: Ithaca, NY

The last rent is paid. The apartment’s walls are bare except for the shadowy marks of masking tape and empty nail holes. All of my worldly possessions are packed in boxes scrounged from Cornell University Press and Triphammer Wines & Spirits. Mom has performed her special voodoo to make everything fit in one mini van and half an Acura, and Mai and Bruce, experts at moving, have whisked away superfluous junk. I’ve said my good-byes to the hearteningly enthusiastic Varna fencers and emptied my locker in Stifel Salle. Time to reset the odometer, reset my life, and head westward to see what happens next: through the cornfields of the Midwest, the grasslands of the Great Plains, the sagebrush of the West, the passes of the Rockies and Cascades, and, finally, Seattle. Here’s to a grand adventure across the Land of Opportunity.

All you map-people out there are invited to
view a reasonably sized version of this map.

We begin on Route 13 through Ithaca, reversing the route of my arrival four years earlier. A parade of landmarks rolls by:

• The view across sparkling Cayuga Lake to the Museum of the Earth, whose basement I reorganized, and Cayuga Medical Center, whose cafeteria I patronized thereafter.


• The Sceincenter’s chain-link fence, which I ripped a decade’s worth of greenery from and spraypainted black.


• Ithaca Bakery, the source of the chocolate croissant in my passenger seat.


• The Friends of the Library warehouse, site of the nation’s largest used book sale.


• The Big Orange Box. No tears shed.


• Dirt roads leading to the Finger Lakes Trail, Upstate New York’s section of the North Country Trail. Theoretically, one could walk from Pleasant Grove Road to North Dakota, but not with a dresser and coffee table. We’re driving.


• Arnot Forest, where the STS Department holds its annual retreat in a flimsy cabin used mostly by Scout troops.


• The overlook from which, four years ago, I first saw Ithaca, the hilltop towers of Cornell and Ithaca College poking through the trees and Cayuga Lake curving into the distance.


• I-90 stretching toward the setting sun.

August 16: Bear Lake, MI

August 19: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, MI

Vertical sandstone cliffs dye Lake Superior a Caribbean blue here in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Between cliffs, the land slopes down to meet the water at sandy beaches. Forty-two miles of the North Country Trail (New York to North Dakota) follow the shore, offering backcountry campgrounds every four or five miles.

When I pick up a two-day backcountry permit in Munising, MI, the campgrounds two, five, ten, twelve, and thirteen miles away were all full. A site fifteen miles away was open due to a cancellation. Thankfully, fifteen miles on professionally maintained, high-traffic, relatively flat trail is a reasonable tramp. I take eight hours, including lunch and photography stops.

Sand is everywhere. The trail itself is sand: loose beach-sand, good for exercising the ankles, for the first few miles east of Miners Castle Trailhead, then compacted sandy soil in a sunny Eastern hardwood forest. How pleasant, to walk in a place full of familiar beeches and trilliums and grouse that I’ve come to know so well on Ithaca’s Finger Lakes Trail.

On the second day, it rains. What an appropriate segue from East to West.

August 22: Waukesha, WI

Amy's Feast is the stuff of legends. Its praise will be sung for generations.

August 27: Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN

Food on sticks, pegs in wood, people on ropes, and the mythical Source of Post-Its: My intrepid college roommate and I spend the weekend eating our way through the Minnesota State Fair (second-largest state fair, after Texas, and, well, it's Texas), learning cribbage, hanging out (ha ha) at a climbing cliff at Taylors Falls, and visiting the 3M company store. Minnesota, hats off to thee...

September 1: Boundary Waters, MN

Someday we’ll tramp the length of the Kekakabic Trail, from Snowbank Lake just east of Ely, MN, thirty-eight miles east to the Gunflint Trail, but not this year. This year, we go east for two days along the Kek, then return by way of two short loops. Campsites range from beautiful lakeside clearings with room for a Scout troop’s tents to one particularly underused site featuring a sapling growing up through the fire grate and a privy lost to the woods. Trail quality also varies. The Kek itself does a good jungle impression. Often we can’t see our feet for the underbrush, and the greenery reaches for us from either side. There may once have been trail signage. Now, the trail is visible only as the ancient remains of a logging road, a marginally open space between mature trees, overtaken by saplings and shrubs. Trail quality decreases from there. The remoter stretches of the loop trails have us climbing over, crawling under, and bushwhacking around uncountable treefalls. But that’s what we get for hiking in canoe territory.

However, we do see surprisingly many other hikers. One older man interviews us on a tiny camera looped around his neck about our impressions of trail conditions. He represents the Boundary Waters Advisory Committee and suggests that we write a report to the Forest Service about our difficulties. The more hikers the Forest Service hears from, the more they realize that we do exist and that we do appreciate trail maintenance.

Highlights of our tramp include:

• Perfect weather.


• No ticks.


• Eating flattened Little Debbie cupcakes in the middle of the wilderness.


• Discovering that my dirty socks stick to tree trunks, useful for drying laundry.

September 8: Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND

The rolling prairie drops away on the western border of North Dakota, revealing a messy pothole of badlands. The Little Missouri River wanders through the bottomlands, creating a muddy strip of cottonwoods in this otherwise dusty land of juniper, sagebrush, and grasses. Colorful but pale, striated cliffs rise to dry, hillocky grassland. Here graze bison, elk, wild horses, and mule deer, and prairie dogs chirp from cities of holes that sprawl across flat valleys.

What a change from the jungle-like Boundary Waters. We can see for a mile on our day hike but occasionally loose the trail because the grass grows too sparsely to define a path. In other places, the trail has been eroded by feet, hooves, and gushes of sporadic rainwater into a two-foot-deep gorge, a miniature of the surrounding cliffs. Part of our trail crosses a wildly meandering creek half a dozen times. Unfortunately, it rained yesterday. By the time we give up jumping across and march straight through the ankle-deep water, our boots are caked in thick, slimy clay from slipping and sliding on the steep banks while clinging to prickly juniper and sage roots in hopes of keeping upright. To bad the opaque water does little to wash our boots.

September 9: Montana

Here, in Montana, is the West. Most highway exits bear "No Services" signs. Many are labeled simply "Ranch Access." On- and off-ramps have cattle grates.

This is also the fabled origin of I-94. This familiar highway has taken care of us for so many miles and so many years. As children, we traveled on it between home and our grandmother’s house in Detroit. It got me to fencing practice in Milwaukee and tournaments in Chicago. It ferried my sister and I to college in Madison and Minneapolis. Today, it has escorted us safely across the Great Plains and must now leave us in the hands of another. At Exit 0, just east of Billings, Montana, we left I-94 and merged smoothly onto the Great I-90. Stretching from Boston on the Atlantic to Seattle near the Pacific, I-90 is the longest interstate highway in our wide country. It appears as a tollway across Upstate New York and joins I-94 for several miles in mid-Wisconsin, so we know we will be okay. I-94 becomes yet another familiar thing I am leaving behind in order to make my way in the West.

September 10: Eastern Washington

The West is dry and hot. The never-clouded sun sears our left arms. Our sweat evaporates as soon as it contacts the air.

Idaho rolls by around midday in the form of a deep-blue arm of the sprawling Coeur d’Alene Lake, filling a maze of steep-walled valleys. Spacious houses line the forested banks, probably weekend homes for Missoula and Spokane residents, and pleasure boats throw showers of spray. Oh, to be immersed in clean, cold water! But we need more miles behind us today.

After Idaho, the terrain flattens to a tabletop and colors evaporate from the landscape. Only dead-grass-yellow and sagebrush-grey remain—hardly the "evergreen state" advertised by the state license plates. Instances of civilization appear rarely: a sun-bleached farmhouse huddled next to the only two trees in sight, a patch of cell-phone towers crowded onto a very slight rise several miles away. Even cattle ranchers seem to avoid this desert plateau. My nose and throat feel dry and gritty, and invisible dust coats every surface.

Potholes State Park, today's destination, is a man-made oasis. The park uses water from Potholes Reservoir in its underground sprinkler system. On one side of the road, RVs lounge on lush, squared-off lawns. On the other side, pale sagebrush and tan dirt-dust cover the land. After hastily pulling on swimsuits, we head straight for the beach—where our dreams of refreshing water are dashed on mucky mudflats and algae. How we miss Pewaukee Lake, fifteen hundred miles behind us. We give up and return to the shade of our campsite’s artificially healthy trees.

The Potholes region is, incredibly, farming country. Tractors drive through potato fields trailing plumes of tan dust that hang in the still air. Farther on, we stop at a refreshingly colorful fruit stand in the midst of a strangely green orchard. The farmer gives us samples of sweet, juicy melon, and we buy peaches and nectarines and pears. The farmer explains that he moved here from Detroit "when the water came"—when they dammed the rivers to bring agriculture to the desert. From there to the Columbia River, we follow a truck so full of onions that they bounce out of its topless bin onto the roadside. Apparently the dams have also brought surplus and waste to the desert.

September 11: Mount Rainier National Park, WA

Along our route, the Rockies have been mostly a series tall hills surrounding long, flat valleys. The Cascades, though, are true mountains: jagged peaks, dizzying drops into narrow river valleys, glacier-capped volcanoes. Rainier itself looks down upon so much of Washington’s population that its portrait graces the state’s license plates.

We camp in a crowded but quiet place on the northeast slopes of "The Mountain." Thin, scraggly pine trees are full of Steller's Jays, the West's black-headed answer to Blue Jays, and a bold flock of scavenging Grey Jays. We fall asleep to the rushing of the White River, a small stream whose opaque, grey waters must fill its broad, rocky bed with whitewater in the springtime. Several groups of climbers pass our site, ice axes, crampons, and helmets strapped onto heavy-looking packs, heading cheerfully toward the mountain and quietly back from it. In the morning, we hike around Sunrise, where Rainier gifts us with a cloudless sky and overlooks of too much depth and breadth for our overworked cameras to capture. If I were superstitious, I might have imagined that I was making a pilgrimage to Rainier as the patron-spirit of the place that I hope to call home.

September 12: Port Orchard, WA

After 4,353.05 miles and nearly a month of travel, the brave little Acura rolls safe and sound into my sister’s apartment complex in Port Orchard, Washington. I smell pine and saltwater. The Olympic Mountains provide a jagged horizon in the northwest. Seattle is hidden behind the many peninsulas of Puget Sound. I'll travel there soon enough on the search for employment, but for today, we simply enjoy not driving.

Thanks to everyone for being so supportive of this crazy adventure and for providing me with housing, entertainment, and friendship along the way. We'll see what happens next.

Logbook Wisdom

 
Leave a blank book in the middle of the woods for a year, and what happens? It becomes a Rorschach test for hikers, except the hikers leave the inkblots. The books are part community message board, part graffiti canvas, part group diary, and part rainy day diversion. Most entries record little more than names, dates, and destinations, with occasional musings on the beauty of the surroundings, but here are a few other uses that hikers thought up:

• Thank-you card: “Dear lean-to adopters and trail maintenance crews...”
  
• Autograph collection: What would your trail name be? I followed the exploits of the likes of the Rondackers and Bachelor Bob. A string of letters and numbers followed some names: NTP 2004, LT 99, AT, GA-->ME 06-07. This code is the hikers’ version of adding Ph.D. or F.R.S. to their names, like medals of honor, or brief resumes of the trails they’ve walked. Bachelor Bob followed his name with alphabet soup, which lent weight to his frustrated criticisms of signage and trail maintenance issues. Since I was walking in his footsteps for a few days, I could only commiserate in my own entries.
  
• Travel guide: Most NTP hikers walk northward, so the rare southbound hiker reaps a harvest of cautions and recommendations about the trail ahead.
  
• Opinion forum: Hot topics include the necessity of fire bans and the tension between historical preservation, public accessibility, and the wilderness aesthetic. Also popular are impassioned essays against the inevitable lean-to litter.
  
• Breadcrumbs: A rescue party can play connect-the-dots until they find where a missing person’s entries leave off.
  
• Directory: Entries noted the best firewood-gathering grounds and the most productive fishing spots.
  
• Confessional: A gay couple confessed to accidentally “showing off” while skinny dipping to a Boy Scout Troop. Unsurprisingly, such incidents happen on an apparently regular basis.
  
• Religious testament: Spiritual moments strike people often in the wilderness, but I was confused by the praises to God’s aesthetic sense at Duck Hole, a reservoir.
  
• Sketchbook: A few disturbingly practiced adolescent drawings wait patiently among entries, hoping to shock unsuspecting browsers. Elsewhere, innocent illustrations retell hikers’ adventures in graphic-novel style.
  
• Backwoods girl talk: “When Aunt Flo comes calling a few days early, sphagnum moss offers a comfy and absorbent solution.”
  
• Weather monitoring station: Dripping wet hikers need somewhere to vent their weather-related frustrations.
  
• Wilderness survival guide: “Remember the computer game Oregon Trail: meager rations and a grueling pace means everyone dies!”

 

The Pantry According to Rachel

To be recited prior to the ceremony of the Ingestion of the Animal Crackers.

1 Praise Thee, O Circus Animal Crackers!

2 Never before this Day have You been so anticipated through such Tribulations and through so many mud Puddles.

3 For you are the perfect Union of refined Sugars, enriched bleached Flour, red Dye #2, partially hydrogenated palm kernel, soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola Oil, and traces of Peanuts.

4 No multitudes of pestilential Blackflies nor host of bloodthirsty Mosquitoes can dissuade me from partaking of Your pink and white Frosting.

5 Your cookie Center imparts Strength unto weary Muscles, and your multicolored Sprinkles bring joy to heavy Hearts.

6 This Day the very Weather turned against me, but through this Flood, You have remained at my Back (specifically, in the confines of my Pack).

7 May you be forevermore my Source of Sustenance in the Wilderness!

 

Food Poetry

 
Oatmeal, oatmeal, perfect food,
Breakfast, cookies, lifts my mood.
Gorp, granola, raw or stewed,
Fills me up with fortitude!
 

Sing Along

To the tune of the Scout camp "Swimming Hole" song,
composed during a rather wet day over a mountain pass.

Hiking, hiking, on the mountaintop,
Wet's the day, but stay and play
In the muddy glop!
Uphill, downhill, tramping 'til you drop,
Don't you say this mountain day
Should never, ever stop!
 

Musings from Blackfly Season

• When I squish blackflies on my face, is their cause of death blunt trauma or drowning in saltwater?
  
• How many calories are in a blackfly? There’s not much meat on one, but think of them like grains of sand on a beach. With as many as I caught in my tent each night, I could have had a hearty meal. They already flavored my oatmeal and pasta. I’m surprised I didn’t choke by breathing them in.
  
• Do blackfly guts count as hair-care products? After a few days, I had more of that on my scalp than shampoo.
  
• If humans are 80% water, how much water is in a blackfly? It sounded like it was raining when I sat in my tent, but it was the ticking of many dozen blackflies throwing themselves against the tent wall. I put on my raincoat to go outside, with the hood up and the sleeves cinched tight around my wrists. I used my scarf more for insect protection than for its intended purpose.
  
• Do insects make inter-species alliances? I could usually escape blackflies by jumping into a river. At the Cedar River Flow near Wakely Dam, however, I was nibbled above by flies and below by fish. That was not fair.

Blackflies Versus Customers

I quit my retail job to go hiking in the thick of blackfly season. This is why.

Why Blackflies are Preferable to Customers

• The police don't have to get involved when you squish the life out of a blackfly.
  
• Customers are there all year round.
  
• Blackflies are supposed to have the IQ of an insect.
  
• They both carry diseases, but the bite of a customer is more painful.
  
• I've never had a blackfly become belligerent when it sees through my attempts to fake a full working knowledge of hedge trimmers.
  
• Blackflies don't care whether the surrounding plants are perennials or annuals.
  
• In polite conversation, it is acceptable to refer to blackflies as part of the local wildlife.
  
• Blackflies prefer to stay downwind.
  
• There's a spray for blackflies.

How to Avoid Adirondack Bears

 
 

 

Post Title

   Adirondacks   

 

 
And this is where the post will set up camp.

Chez Tramper

Welcome to the Chez Tramper! Here, all of your hiking-day hunger will be assuaged by a multitude of gourmet grains, gorps, granolas, and chocolates. Our resident menu crafter has spent many hours meticulously counting calories and proportioning carbs, proteins, fats, fruits, and all-too-rare veggies into weeks of satisfying meals to tame your tastebuds. In fact, she has donated 85% of her apartment floor space to our establishment as a preparation and staging area. (She also hopes she did not frighten the maintenance guy during his recent unannounced visit, although she’s pretty sure she left a path between the door and the fuse box.)

Our menu crafter takes her job seriously. She begins by modifying the familiar food pyramid to meet hikers’ special caloric needs as well as weight and bulk restrictions. As a veteran of many a raisin overdose, she balances fiber with particular care. She supplies carbs liberally. She believes that pretzels are a fine addition to gorp, assuming they are passed through a mortar and pestle, and that ramen noodle dust is just as nutritious, easier to eat with a spoon, and certainly more convenient to pack, than ramen in its pristinely wavy form. For special occasions, she might suggest splurging on a liquid sauce to add to the night’s rice or pasta. A packet of palak paneer from the Indian foods aisle might be worth its unfortunate heft for its spinach-infested greenness on day 10 of your journey. Homemade granola is her specialty.

Protein is easier to bring to the woods than many imagine. Peanut butter and mixed nuts are longtime standbys, as are beef sticks and jerky. A trip to the natural foods co-op reveals multiple flavors of dried bean mix, and even everyday grocery stores offer vacuum-sealed packets of precooked chicken hidden among the tuna cans. Some protein also comes from the cheese in your macaroni and parmesan and from your crackers and Swiss or sharp cheddar.

You may soon come across the Chez Tramper brand off the trails. During the course of experimenting for ever-better tramping food products, our intrepid team of food scientists has discovered many substances new to epicurology. Entrepreneurial specialists are currently working to find alternate markets for these innovative substances. For example, our head research chef, deviating from a recipe for hardtack (bland but rugged crackers), discovered a process by which hockey pucks may be manufactured. Our peanut butter granola bars will be marketed to dentists as saliva sponges: pop a crumb in the patient’s cheek, and the good doctor won’t have to bother with his spit vacuum.

We offer a sampling of our fine menu below. Recipes are available upon request. Shipping and handling fees apply in addition to the basic per-meal cost and all applicable taxes.

Le Menu

Breakfasts

*Homemade granola

Choose from Maple Nut, Honey and Berry, and Apple Cinnamon.

*Instant oatmeal

Fortified with brown sugar, fruit, nuts, and powdered milk.

*Pop Tarts

Note: Must pack your own toaster.

Lunches

*Peanut butter and jelly

Additions to this classic include candied ginger slices, Nutella, or chocolate chips.
Note: Available on your first few days; available subsequently on an experimental basis.

*Pretzels/crackers with beef sticks or pepperoni and Swiss or Seriously Sharp Cheddar

Allow us to suggest our homemade hardtack. These thick, crisp crackers, subtly flavored, can survive long periods of in-pack abuse. In case they are not eaten, they double as heirloom mementos of your trip which you can pass down to your children and grandchildren.

*Peanut butter, cracker crumbs, and dried fruit

A fine alternative to classic PBJ.

Entrées

Mix and match the following grains, proteins, and flavorings:

*Grains

Rice, ramen, pasta, couscous, buckwheat.

*Proteins

Meat stick slices, pepperoni, grated parmesan cheese, dried bean mix, precooked chicken packets.

*Flavorings

Bullion (always a classic)

Italian herbs (basil, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder)

Tabbouleh (parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, and a hint of mint)

Various other powdered and liquid flavoring packets from the baking and international foods aisles

Snacks

*Banana chips

*Salted mixed nuts

*Dried fruit

*Crumbs

Available in cereal, pretzel, or cracker flavors.

*Crumbled gorp

This gorp cousin was born from the leftovers of our menu crafter’s kitchen and includes pretzel and Corn Chex crumbs studded with chopped pecans and dried tidbits.

*Variations on the theme of gorp

*Various granola and energy bars

Desserts

*Hot chocolate

*M&Ms

*Chocolate-covered sunflower seeds

*Chocolate-covered candied ginger

Ticks and the Post Office

I called several Adirondack post offices recently in order to check up on the procedure of food dropping. These calls required almost as much planning as the rest of the trip. It’s possible that out of everything that makes me anxious about this trip (chiefly ticks, bears, and starvation), what I’ll have to worry about most is coordinating my arrival at post offices to fall within their business hours. Trickiest of all is the hour, or two, in which each closes for lunch, staggered apparently to avoid some Adirondack-wide stampede to the best lunch counter this side of Lake Champlain. I offer a sampling by way of example:

Piseco (pop. 200)
Mon-Fri: 9:45-12, 1:45-3:45 (Perhaps suggested by a random number generator?)
Sat: 11:30-1 (Note to self: avoid obtaining a pen pal from Piseco.)
Blue Mountain Lake (pop. 146)
Mon-Fri: 8-11, 12-4:30 (3/4 the size of Piseco, with double the PO hours... perhaps a town of dedicated catalog shoppers?)
Sat: 8-12
Long Lake (pop. 852)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-12:30, 1:30-4:45 (I assume they close early to avoid the excruciating Long Lake 5:00 rush hour?)
Sat: 9-12
Lake Placid (pop. 2638)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-5 (This bustling metropolis is far to cosmopolitan to shut its doors for lunch.)
Sat: 8:30-12:30
Keene (pop. 1063)
Mon-Fri: 8-12, 1-4:30
Sat: 8-11
Keene Valley (pop. ?)
Mon-Fri: 8-1, 2-4:45
Sat: 8-11:45

However inconvenient their eccentricities, the postmistresses make up for it in helpful friendliness. At Blue Mountain Lake, she answers the phone in that typically dull voice indicative of business phone veterans with a mouthful of spiel to get out while the caller patiently waits their turn. But as soon as I mentioned that I was a hiker and not, say, some local adolescent calling to ask how much a one-cent stamp cost, inflection breathed life back into her words and she became chatty like only a bored, small-town PO worker can be. She explained in detail how to address my care package: “General Delivery--Hungry NPT Hiker,” with an approximate date of arrival and a phone number to call three days later, because she won’t have hikers lost in her woods. We discussed weather reports, blackfly densities, and trail conditions. She asked politely about my plans and became inordinately cheerful when I told her I’d be alone. She explained that she was a determinedly pro-girl-power Girl Scout leader. How strikingly different from the last time I told a post office worker my hiking plans. The lady behind the window in Wellington responded with, “You know that hikers die in the mountains when they’re alone, don’t you?”

As an afterthought, I asked about this year’s tick forecast. “Oh, we don’t have much trouble with ticks,” she replied. The only people she’s known to have picked up ticks caught them down near Albany. Could this be so? I laughed out loud when I hung up the phone. You mean I won’t have to watch the silhouettes of ticks patiently and methodically scaling the tent walls as I lay down to sleep? I won’t have to pry tick mouthparts out of my flesh every hundred feet? (Part of the tick oogey factor must have to do with the use of the term “mouthparts” and descriptions of how they break off and remain embedded in your skin if you’re not careful. I intend to be very careful, thanks.)

The trip suddenly felt almost too easy. In the last few weeks, I’ve been coming to terms a succession of anxieties. First was bears. Once I convinced myself that bears don’t regularly munch on tent poles at 3 a.m. unless the tent’s inhabitants have been frying up salmon steaks by their bedside, I was free to worry about food. Once I planned out filling meals and ample snacks delivered via several mail drops, I wondered whether my feet would be able to keep up with my tramping schedule. After a few ambitious local hikes, I decided I could make myself walk forever if need be, unless the trail was infested with ticks. And now I’ve run out of gripping concerns.

Now all I have to worry about is breaking an ankle in the next two weeks. Or unknowingly dropping the car keys into a beaver pond at mile marker 54. Or spending my end-of-trip bus money on salad and chocolate in Long Lake, because the bust stop at the Noon Mark Diner doesn’t accept credit cards. Or arriving at the wrong post office at 4:50.

Shindagin Hollow

The Tale of
Shindagin Hollow
 

Coming Soon!

The Plan: Rough Draft

For the last week, maps of various regions in the Northeast and Midwest have covered the floor of my apartment like intricate Girl Scout sit-upons after a particularly rambunctious meeting. Now there is a plan, and it follows the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT).


View Larger Map

This track won the bid for several reasons. The region garners rave reviews for its scenery and size. It’s also the right length for my time frame. The current draft of the plan calls for leaving on Tuesday, June 10 and returning to Ithaca sometime around June 30 so that I can spend July 4th on Pewaukee Lake. That gives me three amazing weeks, making me feel rich with good fortune, even if I am an unemployed bum.

Plus, the trailhead is close, 170 miles or just over 3 hours away, assuming I don’t miss a turn in Ephratah or Herkimer or Fink Basin. Google’s directions might as well be a journey through the villages of Dr. Seuss, written in the format of an epic free-verse poem.

By the last stanza, I should be on the south end of Adirondack Park, a conglomeration of wilderness areas interspersed with squares of private land and tiny hamlets that takes up most of northeastern New York State. If you open Google Maps in just-plain-map mode, it’s that big green splotch upstate. In terrain mode, it looks like a rough-textured green scab. These mountains were made differently than the ancient, eroded Appalachians, which take the shape of narrow, curving ridges snaking up and down the Eastern Seaboard and were created by tectonic collisions. The Adirondacks are more of a fat, warty toad than a snake. They are still growing by a couple millimeters a year, being pushed skyward by an ambitious bubble somewhere below the Earth’s surface.

Officially, the NPT begins in the little town of Northville just inside the southern border of the park, but the trail follows the road several miles to Upper Benson before disappearing into the woods, and that’s where I’ll begin. (I feel no need to be an end-to-end purist if it means a day of roadwalking.) The trail wanders 133 miles north, skirting or passing through the villages of Piseco, Blue Mountain Lake, and Long Lake, before finally petering out on the southern outskirts of Lake Placid Village. Along the way are lean-tos or huts like the ones I saw in Shenandoah: three sides, a roof, double-decker sleeping platforms for 6-8 people. Usual amenities include a privy hidden away nearby, a spring or stream for water, a fire ring, and tent sites. Trail maintenance should be noticeable, although the beaver population sounds eager, as they are, to fill the trail with water.

The official NPT guidebook, put out by the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), offers sample 10-day and 15-day itineraries, but it’s frustratingly impossible to determine how much ground I’ll be comfortable with covering on each day. I can compare mileages from previous trips, make sensitive measurements from 1:60,000 topo maps, and even walk the entire length of the trail virtually courtesy of Google Earth’s three-dimensional fly-thorughs. Even high technology can’t tell me how often I’ll loose an hour by mistaking an old logging road for the trail, or whether an impending thunderstorm will persuade me to set up camp early, or whether I’ll have a series of high-energy, keep-going days. I do have a few rest days built in that I can convert to mileage make-up days if need be. What I mean to say is that all proposed schedules come with emphatic disclaimers.

If I spend the first two weeks on the NPT, I can spend the remaining week wandering thought the High Peaks, the crowing glory of Adirondack Park. The High Peaks are a particularly topographically intense area just southeast of Lake Placid containing New York State’s highest mountain, Mt. Marcy (1,629 m/5,344 ft), a member of 46 summits in the area over about 4,000 feet. The spectacular scenery has made it the most popular area of the Adirondacks. A visit is required of every upstate resident, preferably at least once a year. Because of the popularity, the local bears have become wise to the ways of hungry humans and their flimsy bear bags. Bear cans are required here by park regulation.

Food is the limiting factor. If people didn’t have to eat, our packs would weigh nothing and we could roam the wilderness endlessly, besides instantly and conveniently solving world hunger. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case, and so I’m stuck with the logistical challenge of resupplying about every six days and crunching my Ramen into noodle dust in order to fit enough non-perishables in the bear can. One popular resupply method is to mail yourself packages care of local post offices and then making sure you end up in, say, Blue Mountain Lake (pop.: 146) on a non-holiday weekday morning or afternoon, but not when the PO closes for lunch.

The last major roadblock, or rather trailblock, remains transportation. There is no set shuttle service from Lake Placid to Northville. I could take an all-day bus ride to the town of Gloversville on the south edge of Adirondack Park, but I’d still be 20 miles away from my car at 9 p.m. in an unfamiliar town. Walking a giant loop back to Northville would require more time than I have, extensive roadwalks if I want to avoid retracing my steps, and scratching the High Peaks from the schedule.

Assuming transportation works out, here’s the rough draft plan:

Date	Day	Miles	Where to
Tue 10	1	7.1	Ithaca to Upper Benson to Silver Lake Hut
Wed 11	2	10.4	Hamilton Lake Stream Hut
Thu 12	3	10.7	Through Piseco to Fall Stream Camp
Fri 13	4	9.6	West Canada Lakes Huts
Sat 14	5	0.0	Rest Day
Sun 15	6	4.1	Cedar Lakes Huts
Mon 16	7	11.8	Wakely Dam Campsites
Tue 17	8	8.5	Stephens Pond Hut
Wed 18	9	7.9	Past Blue Mountain Lake to Tirrell Pond Hut
Thu 19	10	10.6	Through Long Lake to Catlin Bay Huts
Fri 20	11	5.9	Plumleys Huts
Sat 21	12	7.3	Seward Hut
Sun 22	13	7.0	Duck Hole Huts
Mon 23	14	8.9	Leave NPT for the High Peaks and Scott Clearing Hut
Tue 24	15	0.0	Floating Rest Day
Wed 25	16	9.5	Whispering Pines Campground near Lake Placid
Thu 26	17	???	High Peaks
Fri 27	18	???	High Peaks
Sat 28	19	???	High Peaks
Sun 29	20	???	High Peaks
Mon 30	21	???	Back to civilization, or at least as far as Ithaca

Farewell Party

If I keep my fingers well and truly crossed, and maybe if I do all my chores and finish my brussels sprouts and promise not to stick my tongue out at my sister, there’s a possibility that Home Depot Girl might be able to hang up her orange cape forever. I’ll find out in May whether I have an alternate employer, to start sometime in July-ish (although nothing’s gonna stop me from being on Pewaukee Lake for the Fourth this year).

If this happens, I’d like to give HDG a farewell party. I’m thinking of having the theme be “endangered animals.” I could bring HDG to the middle of some deep, dark woods and release her into the wild, never to be seen again.

This requires taking off the month of June and planning a long-distance tramp. But where to? Which woods or hills would you, gentle reader, visit if you had three weeks to kill? Am I forgetting anything critical, like an appointment I penciled in three years ago for June 15, or the fact that without a timely intervention, I will be tramping pantsless? (Which is true. There’s an inopportune hole in my current pair. I imagine hoards of ticks crawling through and writing to all their friends about how they found a nice, cozy spot in the shade on the banks of an artery, and that they’re thinking of building a tick hotel with maybe an amusement park and guided tours to my ankles.)

Ice Age Trail
St. Croix Falls, WI (just opposite Taylor’s Falls, MN) to Kettle Moraine State Forest to Sturgeon Bay

It was many, many years before my first real tramp, when I naively assumed that a lively day hike was the epitome of outdoors enjoyment, when I was first introduced to the Ice Age Trail. Mom and I would hop on our bikes and spend a day on the Glacial Drumlin Trail for sundaes at LeDuc’s. En route, where the bike trail skirts the north edge of Kettle Moraine State Forest,a wide, inviting path is mown through a grassy field and disappears tantalizingly into the trees. My bike, although willing and loyal on pavement, balked at the wildly uneven ground on the path, so its origin and destination remained intriguingly mysterious. Mom told me once that it was the Ice Age Trail and that it meandered all over the state, from top to bottom and side to side, following the southern extent of the glaciers. If you started walking, you could keep going almost forever. How gripping to a Covault, to whom turning around on a trail is considered an admission of defeat and often requires multiple dire warnings of slow and painful deaths to hikers who proceed. I vowed someday to follow that broad, sunny, seductively welcoming path into the woods, not stopping until I ran out of trail.

It turns out that my imagined trek wouldn’t have been as epic as hoped. At present, according to its website, the IAT looks more like a dotted line than a solid trail. Longish stretches cross state forests (including Kettle Moraine) and jump through state parks, but between these scenic stints are many miles of roadwalks and shortcuts through towns. The trail seems to beg for forgiveness by passing miniscule county and city parks on the way, like a desperate tour guide in a land with no word for “tourist.”

I think my ten-year-old self would forgive me for skipping over the IAT, for now. There are bigger mastodons out there to spear.

North Country Trail
Eastern New York State through the Fingerlakes Trail to Ohio’s Buckeye Trail, up Michigan and across the UP, over Minnesota and ending in the middle of North Dakota

I didn’t realize until a year or two ago that it’s possible to walk home from Ithaca on trails. Within 20 minutes’ drive of Pleasant Grove Road, I can find trail markers bursting proudly with the compass-rose-cum-northstar emblem of the North Country Trail along with a tiny map of the seven states I could cross if only I kept walking. The NCT tries its best to cross half the country, taking advantage of many established trails along the way, but there’s also plenty of roadwalking between public lands. Since I’ve already seen most of the Ithaca-area NCT where it coincides with the Fingerlakes Trail, I was considering jumping ahead to the UP to see what the land of Blackjack looks like in summertime. The NCT wanders through the Porkies and through Ottawa, Hiawatha, and Superior National Forests, finally jumping the Lakes at the Mackinaw Island Bridge. I’m told the bridge is quite impressive. I’ve been there once. My sister and I oohed and ahhed at the pea-soup fog as our severely disappointed parents described the stunning vistas allegedly surrounding us.

Other pluses include a relatively peaceable bear population (as opposed to that of the Adirondacks, which essentially behave like a fat breed of dog and expect to be fed like one) and the perhaps tenuous possibility of pressuring friends and family into chauffeuring me to and from trailheads. There’s topography but not in the extreme, and the Northwoods always seem serenely inviting, even in winter.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell, without buying the various guidebooks, how much of the NCT is physical trail and how much is either roadwalk or even a dotted line gestating in someone’s imagination. Plus, as long as I’m in the East (and who knows how much longer that will last), I might as well see the Eastern sights while they’re relatively convenient. And it might be easier to cut my long-distance teeth on a more established trail.

Appalachian Trail
Georgia to Maine

This is the obvious choice. It’s solid trail for as long as I have time to hike. Ammenities include huts and latrines and a plethora of information on the quirks and how-tos of each mile.

But I hesitate to step on Andrea’s bootlaces. That’s her and Tony’s quest, later this year. (Happy tramping, sister!)

Long Trail
Crosses Vermont from Maryland to Canada, coinciding with the AT for the southern half

It takes 270 miles and about 30 days to cross Vermont the long way. The Green Mountains, like all mountains in the East, stand in remarkably narrow ridges, leaving little room for multiple north-south trails and therefore little opportunity for loop hikes, requiring creativity for trailhead and trail-end transportation.

Still, mountains tend to make for good scenery, and there are plenty of huts along the way. But there might also be plenty of people, of course.

Northville-Placid Trail
Northville, NY through the Adirondacks to Lake Placid

It borders on criminal negligence to have lived in New York State for as long as I have without having climbed Mt. Marcy in Adirondack Park. (It’s not precisely clear to me what sort of “park” it is. It’s not national, nor state, nor local. It’s just a big green blob on the map, as if an intern at the cartographer’s spilled a glob of green ink and then wrote “Park” on the splotch, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder to make sure that his mentor was still busy in the next room. Due to its ink-drop origin, this area has one particular bonus: it’s round. This opens the possibility of multiple north-south trails, meaning a loop might be made. I’m still researching the reality of this possibility. I haven’t yet found a trail map of the whole park. It’s too big.

But nowhere is perfect. Possibly because of the legions of outdoors enthusiasts who make their Mt. Marcy pilgrimages in summer, hiker-bear relations have been deteriorating recently. At least one clever bear has figured out how to pop open the bear-proof food canisters of the model I took to Shenandoah. Bear canisters are required and must be a park-approved model. And I’m terrified of any bear not behind bars in a zoo. Maybe some bear exposure is exactly what I need to put this fear to rest. But is it worth the price of several days’ worth of food and a chewed-through set of Tupperware-on-steroids?

Anywhere Else?

This weekend I’ll visit EMS and chat with Cornell Outdoor Education, and maybe post to the Cornell Outing Club list for advice. We’ll see. Any suggestions or comments from the audience?

	Solid Trail	Loop	Easy Trailhead Transportation	Low Bear Density	Low People Density
IAT			X	X	X
NCT	?		?	X	X
AT	X		?	?
LT	X			X	?
NPT	X	?	?

Tramping Shenandoah

March 18 - 21, 2008

Let's try something new. Google Maps offers map editing tools into which you can embed text and photos, which sounds to me like a useful storytelling technology. Below is a link to my Tramping Shenandoah map. My route is marked as a blue line, and you can click on icons along the way for photos and explanations. Begin at the blue car in the northeast and follow the blue line south (clockwise) over Buck Ridge.

Enjoy your virtual tramp!

(Alternately, you can see the same blurbs and photos as a blog.)

New Jersey Isn't ALL Smelly

I can't speak for Newark, but my olfactory experiences at Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and in Madison at Drew University, and even at Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, which are where I spent Spring Break this last week, were altogether positive. In fact, the smelliest thing I encountered was a gymfull of ripe fencers, and that certainly isn't endemic to New Jersey.


Before I got to the fencing, I spent a few days on the Appalachian Trail (AT) in Delaware Water Gap NRA, on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and nowhere near Delaware). The AT is a hiking trail on which, if you have a few spare months and an insatiable craving for gorp and pasta, you can walk from Georgia to Maine. I've got about ten miles of it under my belt; to complete the entire trail, I've got 2,090 miles to go. Which means I'm 0.005% of the way done. Almost there!


Unfortunately, the last remnants of winter (and of a cold) made camping inadvisable, so I made two day-trips. Both began at the Gap, a narrows in the Delaware River pinched between Mt. Tammany (above) and Mt. Minsy (where the above picture was taken from). The first day took me north from the river, skirting Mt. Tammany and onto a ridge paralleling the river. Most of the way was wooded and quiet, and the slush underfoot was soft enough to cushion my steps so that the bottoms of my feet didn't feel pounded flat by the end of the day. Despite the snow, the sun was warm, so I only needed a light jacket for the cold wind on the ridgetops. Looking up, the sky was remarkably cloudless and populated by hawks, vultures, and a pair of gliders. Looking out, the river and its ridge was surrounded by relatively flat farmland. My turn-around point was Sunfish Pond, one of the "seven wonders of New Jersey," according to a pondside sign. It's a nice little lake, and I got to scramble over (snow-laden) boulders on one side, and I can imagine that it's a great spot to swim (illegally) in warmer weather... but I'm not sure that those features are unique enough to earn it the title of "wonder." It doesn't bode well for the impressiveness level of the other six "wonders" if qualifications may include "pleasant spot to pump drinking water from" or "doesn't smell like Newark." Still, it is a nice spot for lunch.

The second day took me south up to the summit of Mt. Minsi (1,463 feet) and along a ridge of radio towers. In my dislike of retracing my footsteps, I returned via access roads and country backroads. The houses I passed either were the country homes of well-off residents of New York City (about an hour's drive away), or had collected enough old vehicles to start a used car lot. Some of them looked impressively antique.


Then, it was on to Drew University for the NCAA National Fencing Championships. Still, I had a few afternoons with enough daylight to wander around in the nearby Great Swamp NWR (above). Most of it is off-limits to people as a wilderness, but there are a few boadwalk trails with bird blinds and feeders. I saw my first Ringneck Duck. I think. It was far away. And mostly under water. And didn't have a ring around its neck. But that's okay, because neither did the picture in the bird book.

Back at Drew, even the (tiny) campus was pleasant to walk around, which you could complete over a lunch break. The buildings are modestly sized and conservatively designed--lots of rock and stone, no all-glass monstrosities or Star Wars-esque curiosities, and certainly no "reflecting pools." And no major streets between them. The ample green space between buildings is nearly a forest of silvery, mature trees.

Oh, and the fencing was neat, too. I was put to work as a score- and timekeeper, and in return, I got a front row seat (sometimes a few inches too close for comfort) to some of the best fencing in the country. Most of the others were nonfencing Drew athletes whose coaches made them volunteer, and who had never seen this strange sport before, so I got to practice my "what is fencing in three sentences or less" speech. The ones who came for the morning shift got a comprehensive lesson in how to mark up score sheets, what buttons to push at what times on the scoring machine remote controls, and why the referees keep waving their hands in the air while speaking French. The afternoon shift, though, got brief on-the-job training before the morning shifters ran off to lunch (ideally, assuming the morning shifters hadn't already wandered off between rounds). Some refs had more patience than others... But we survived. Since I actually knew what I was doing, I was asked to scorekeep for the women's championship bouts. So, if anyone out there has forgotten what I look like, you can refresh your memory by tuning into CBS when they televise the gold medal bouts. I believe it's May 5, but I haven't managed to track down the time yet.

Happy Spring!