‘Resources’ Category

Guidebook for Adirondack trail runners

Posted on: May 23rd, 2012 5 Comments

By Phil Brown

The Adirondack Park has more than two thousand miles of hiking trails. In theory, this means it has more than two thousand miles of trails for running, too, though you aren’t likely to encounter people jogging up Gothics, say, or Basin Mountain.

What trails are suitable for running will depend on the runner’s strength and ability, but if you’re looking for suggestions, you’ll find plenty in a new guidebook by Spencer Morrissey and Corenne Black. It’s the only book of its kind for the Adirondacks.

Adirondack Trail Runner describes more than ninety routes that the authors have run. Most of them traverse flat or rolling terrain, making them suitable for novice or intermediate runners. There are harder routes, such as the traverse from Adirondak Loj to the Upper Works via Avalanche Pass. It would have been helpful if the authors rated the difficulty of the trails, but most readers will be able to judge for themselves by the descriptions.

Adirondack Trail Runner by Spencer Morrissey and Corenne Black

Adirondack Trail Runner sells for $14.95.

At the start of each chapter, the authors include directions to the trailhead, distances to waypoints on the trail, and a one- or two-sentence synopsis of trail conditions. Each chapter also includes color photographs, a topo map showing the route, and an elevation profile showing the trail’s ups and downs. (A word to the wise regarding elevation profiles: because of the compressed scale, they tend to make hills appear steeper than they really are.)

Morrissey also is the author The Other 54, a guide to the Adirondacks’ hundred tallest mountains after the traditional forty-six High Peaks. Like that book, his new work is a labor of love. He published The Trail Runner under his own imprint, Inca-pah-cho Wilderness Guides, and it bears some of the flaws of many self-published books. The writing is not polished, the photos are sometimes dark or dull, and the book’s design is not that attractive.

As with The Other 54, though, the authors’ enthusiasm and folksy writing style make up for the book’s shortcomings. The humorous touches start with the dedication: “For all of those who feel like someone is chasing them!!”

As to their choice of routes, I have run seventeen of them and have hiked most of the rest, and I’d be hard-pressed to argue that this or that trail does not belong in the book. Nevertheless, I do think that they missed some good destinations (such as Mount Frederica near Lake Lila).

Also, they could have struck a better geographical balance. More than half of the routes lie in what the authors define as the Eastern Region, which encompasses the High Peaks and part of the Champlain Valley. In contrast, there are only nine in the Western Region, and three of these are at the Ranger School in Wanakena (Morrissey is an alumnus). The number of trails in the other three regions (Southern, Northern, and Central) ranges from eight to fifteen.

The book also includes advice on trail-running gear, injury hazards, and backcountry ethics. It sells for $14.95.

Full disclosure: my son, Nathan Brown, copy-edited The Trail Runner. 

 

A few words about ‘The Climbing Dictionary’

Posted on: December 12th, 2011 No Comments

I’m a Johnny-climb-lately. After moving to the Adirondacks, I spent most of my outdoors time hiking, backcountry skiing, or paddling. I had no interest in rock climbing—until I finally tried it a few years back.

I quickly discovered there’s a lot to learn apart from the techniques of actual climbing: rope management, gear placement, belaying, anchor building, rappelling, and how to open a beer bottle with a carabiner.

The Climbing Dictionary by Matt Samet

The Climbing Dictionary sells for $14.95.

And the language. Like most sports, rock climbing has its own lingo. A bumbling climber is a “gumby”; a perfect climbing route is “splitter”; a route over “choss” (loose, friable rock) is “mungy”; and “deadpoint” is the apex of a “dyno,” or jump move.

All this can be bewildering to a newbie (or “n00b”) who encounters such terms for the first time in articles, books, and conversation. Thankfully, Mountaineers Books has published a guide for the perplexed: The Climbing Dictionary (softcover, $14.95) by Matt Samet, a veteran climber and writer.

The book defines more than 650 terms from rock climbing, bouldering, and mountaineering. Many of the definitions are illustrated by drawings by Mike Tea, an artist who works for Black Diamond, a manufacturer of cams, nuts, and other climbing gear.

In most cases, Samet does more than just define a word; he illustrates usage with humorous quotes and provides word histories that are like small windows onto the history of climbing itself. Did you know that before climbers wore helmets they sometimes protected their heads by stuffing mittens and newspapers under wool hats?

Many of the words are merely useful, such as the names for gear (ice screw, etrier, deadman anchor), but others exemplify the wry, irreverent outlook on life that seems indispensible to people who risk their necks for fun. For example, someone who “craters,” or hits the ground after a long fall, is likely to become “talus food.”

Samet captures this spirit in his definitions and exemplary quotations. Here’s his entry for blog-worthy: “Any rock you’ve ever climbed, videoed, and shot photos of … and uploaded to the Internet. In alpinism, any diversion, no matter how insignificant, from an existing climb is usually blog-worthy.”

Sometimes, though, the author strains too hard at humor, especially in his quotations. He illustrates the use of headlamp with the following: “Dave-o and Sha-Nay-Nay had to open a bivy a half-mile from the car because they spaced their headlamps; then wolves ate their faces off in the night.”

Never mind that the non-imbecilic have no need for a definition of headlamp; the quotation fails to illuminate meaning and it fails to amuse.

That’s OK … we all have our gumby moments. If you love climbing, you should enjoy this book.

Phil Brown is the editor of the Adirondack Explorer newsmagazine. Click here to read his article about climbing Chapel Pond Slab.

 

Northern Forest Canoe Trail guidebook

Posted on: November 4th, 2011 No Comments

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail is a paradox. It’s been around forever, but it was “completed” just four years ago. Whatever, we’re glad it exists.

The NFCT is a 740-mile water trail that follows Native American paddling routes. It starts in Old Forge and ends in northern Maine, after passing through Vermont, Quebec, and New Hampshire. This includes sixty-two carries, totaling fifty-miles. You can paddle it in the other direction, but it will require more portaging.

The nonprofit Northern Forest Canoe Trail Inc. has done a great job of promotion. Over the past ten years, the group has put up kiosks in various towns along the route, organized paddling film festivals and volunteer projects, and published two books about the trail as well as a series of thirteen full-color maps.

Northern Forest Canoe Trail guidebook

The Northern Forest Canoe Trail guidebook sells for $24.95.

And now they’ve teamed up with The Mountaineers Books to publish The Northern Forest Canoe Trail: The Official Guidebook. For those doing the whole trail, the book is essential. But day-trippers also will find the book useful. After all, you don’t have to paddle the whole thing to enjoy the NFCT. You can cherry-pick the best sections.

The book breaks down the trail into thirteen sections, each one covered by one of the NFCT maps. The book and maps are made to work in tandem: route descriptions often refer to numbered landmarks on the maps. You’ll have to purchase the maps separately ($9.95 each). The book has some overview maps, but they aren’t useful for paddling.

The 147-mile Adirondack leg of the NFCT has three sections (and thus three maps): Fulton Chain of Lakes to Long Lake, Long Lake to Saranac River, and Saranac River to Lake Champlain. From Old Forge to Saranac Lake village, the trail more or less follows the route of the Adirondack Canoe Classic, an annual ninety-mile race that takes place over three days.

Most of the Adirondack portion of the trail is flatwater that can be enjoyed by novice paddlers. The Saranac River, however, contains numerous rapids on its way to Lake Champlain. Nevertheless, the river also has long, quiet stretches that should appeal to flatwater specialists. One of the virtues of this book is that it brings to our attention the many paddling possibilities on the Saranac.

Throughout, the route descriptions are detailed and well-written, with precise mileage between landmarks, directions to put-ins and takeouts, camping information, and numerous historical asides. There is a gallery of twenty-five color photos in the center of the book and black-and-white photos elsewhere.

One of the fifty or so paddlers who have done the entire NFCT in a continuous journey is Mike Lynch, an outdoors reporter for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. You can read my interview with Mike on Adirondack Almanack.

‘Long Distance’ by Bill McKibben

Posted on: November 4th, 2011 No Comments

Several years ago, we asked Bill McKibben to ski the entire Jackrabbit Trail in a single day and write about it. Saranac Lake to Keene. That’s twenty-four miles, but that wasn’t enough for McKibben.

When he turned his story in, I learned he started instead at Paul Smith’s, where there is an orphan piece of the Jackrabbit. By following this trail and then a railroad bed, he was able to make it to Saranac Lake and add ten or eleven miles to the trek.

Why extend an already-lengthy trip by slogging along a boring railroad track? I thought Bill must be a bit nuts, but now that I’ve read Long Distance, I understand where he’s coming from.

Long Distance by Bill McKibben

Long Distance by Bill McKibben.

Long Distance chronicles McKibben’s yearlong quest to become the best Nordic ski racer he could. He trained like a pro, working out for hours each day, and competed on three continents. Originally published in 2000, the book was reissued in paperback by Rodale in 2010.

Early on, McKibben visits the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid to undergo a series of unpleasant tests involving a treadmill, a snorkel-like device, and numerous blood-lettings to ascertain his VO2 Max—a measurement of how efficiently his body uses oxygen. The tests reveal he has a higher-than-average VO2 Max, but it’s still far below that of elite athletes. And no amount of training will change that. The upper limit of his VO2 Max and thus of his competitive potential are determined by genetics.

It is not McKibben’s destiny to become a champion. Nevertheless, he diligently puts in six hundred hours of training over the year, all to prepare for a grand total of maybe twelve hours of racing. In one event in Lake Placid, he manages to come in first in his age group, but usually he’s closer to the middle of the pack.

What’s the payoff then? McKibben describes the “absolute immersion in the present” that he feels during a fifty-kilometer race in Ottawa, when all the cares of modern life fall by the wayside. “Everything really had come together for a moment,” he writes. “Or perhaps a better way to say it is that everything had disappeared.”

McKibben, of course, is best known as an environmental writer, the guy who sounded the alarm about global warming in The End of Nature and who founded a worldwide movement to try to get politicians to do something about it. When I saw him speak in Saranac Lake, he struck me as an Old Testament prophet with a sense of humor.

Long Distance reveals the private side of the public intellectual. Despite all his accomplishments—as a Harvard graduate, staff writer for the New Yorker, best-selling author, and global activist—McKibben still longs to be what so many males long to be: an athlete. Growing up, he felt like a wimp, because he wasn’t much good at basketball, hockey, baseball, or the other crucibles of boyhood. He writes that “gym became a recurring bad dream, highlighted each year by the President’s Physical Fitness Test, when I got to prove to myself that I still couldn’t do a pull-up.”

He feared he didn’t measure up to his athletic father, who went out for baseball and climbed mountains in his youth. Bill gravitated toward intellectual pursuits. When still in high school, he covered the school’s basketball team for the local paper. His father picked him up after the games. “He was proud of me, I knew, but I think some part of me always wondered if he’d have been prouder had I been out on the court myself,” he writes.>

Part way through his training year, McKibben receives word that his father has a malignant brain tumor. He spends the next several months shuttling between Vermont, where he lives, and Boston, where his father is dying. He continues to exercise and ski, when possible, but the ordeal of watching his father deteriorate, physically and mentally, puts cross-country skiing into perspective. Training for a race becomes a metaphor for training for life. Our real tests are the difficulties thrown in our path—depression, illness, the demands of human relationships.

“The most profound test, of course, is the last one, dealing with your death,” he says. “But if you’ve done the training, the race will take care of itself—or so it seemed, watching Dad.”

After his father’s death, McKibben travels to Norway with his wife, Sue, and their daughter, Sophie, to enter one last competition, the Birkebeiner, a grueling fifty-eight-kilometer race that attracts several thousand serious skiers each year. He’s happy to finish in the middle of his age group.

“The next morning dawned clear and cold, so Sue and Sophie and I went for another ski,” he says. “For the first time in a long time, it meant nothing at all, and that was nice, too.”

Don’t expect to find lots of tips about wax, poling technique, and such in Long Distance. You’ll learn more about life than about skiing. It’s a pity that such an insightful book is marred by typographical errors. I found twenty or so after I started keeping track.

Review of ‘The Other 54′

Posted on: November 4th, 2011 1 Comment

What’s a mountain climber to do once he or she has summited the Adirondack Forty-Six, the Catskill Thirty-Five, and the Northeast 115? Create a new list, of course.

And so we have the Adirondack Hundred Highest—the obsession of hard-core hikers who don’t mind surrendering a few pints of blood in their quest to stand atop the region’s tallest mountains.

The Hundred Highest includes the forty-six High Peaks first climbed by Bob and George Marshall and their guide, Herb Clark, in the first quarter of the last century. All of these peaks now have marked trails or obvious herd paths, so climbing them is not as difficult as it was in the Marshalls’ day.

The Other 54 by Spencer Morrissey

'The Other 54' sells for $18.95.

Not so with most of the other fifty-four of the Hundred Highest. Thirty-nine of these peaks lack trails. Climbing them entails bushwhacking up streambeds, scrambling over or under fallen trees, and pushing through phalanxes of spruce that guard the summits. Those who undertake such a trek can expect to be poked, scratched, bruised, and bitten. It’s not for inexperienced hikers.

In 2007, Spencer Morrissey wrote a guidebook titled The Other 54 for adventurous souls aspiring to join the Hundred Highest club. He estimates that only forty or so people have done all the peaks. Those who qualify can request a patch from the Hundred Highest website.

Morrissey sold all 2,500 copies of the first edition of The Other 54 and has just come out with a second edition, which he published under his Inca-pah-cho Wilderness Guides imprint (the name derives from the Algonquin name for Long Lake, Morrissey’s hometown). It remains the only guidebook available to bushwhacking the pathless peaks.

The second edition updates trail conditions, describes several additional routes, and corrects many misspellings and grammatical errors (full disclosure: my son was the copy editor). In an improvement over the first edition, Morrissey arranges the chapters (one per peak) geographically rather than by the heights of the summits. This makes it easier to plan multi-peak treks. He could have made things even easier, though, by dividing the book into regions and including locater maps.

Most chapters include at least one black-and-white photograph. All include a topographical map showing the various routes to the summit. In the first edition, all the maps were grouped in a color gallery at the back of the book. The current layout is more convenient, but the tradeoff is the maps are black and white. 

One odd feature is that Morrissey repeats directions unnecessarily. In the chapter on Lost Pond Peak, for instance, he describes four routes to the summit, all starting on the same trail at Adirondak Loj. Instead of providing the driving directions once, he repeats them at the start of each route description. Likewise, sections of the route descriptions are repeated. It’s like déjà vu all over again.

Given the author’s enthusiasm and sense of humor, it’s easy to forgive the book’s shortcomings. Besides, whatever its flaws, The Other 54 is essential equipment for Hundred Highest aspirants.

A more serious criticism (whether justified or not) is that the book will lead to environmental degradation on summits that are now pristine, just as the Forty-Sixer craze led to the creation of herd paths.

“You simply can’t have thousands of people doing this, or even hundreds, and hope to maintain the resource or wilderness qualities of this place,” says Jim Close, an avid hiker who has climbed the Hundred Highest himself.

Since the Marshalls, more than seven thousand people have climbed the Forty-Six. They were rewarded with grand vistas on most of the summits. One wonders how many of these hikers would have wanted to endure an arduous bushwhack up Sawtooth No. 5 for a glimpse of the horizon through the trees.

 

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