Jones Hill trail a tribute to an Adirondack great

Mary Coffin was dedicated to making the North Country National Scenic Trail a reality

By Tim Rowland

On the first day of spring that really felt like it, Bob Rosati, Kim Putnam and Dick Frio were performing some spit-polish work on the new northern section of Jones Hill trail near Schroon lake, cleaning up blowdown, kicking aside a winter’s worth of fallen sticks and removing orange surveyor tape with which foresters had sketched out the route.

But mainly they were there to remember Mary Coffin, herself a force of nature, and a main reason the Jones Hill trail was built in the first place. In the hospital for what was expected to be a routine procedure, she died in October having just gotten word that the notoriously foot-dragging Department of Environmental Conservation had, finally, given volunteers permission to mark Jones Hill North with red medallions. 

Rosati said her last command, issued from her hospital bed, was “Get out there and mark that trail before they change their mind.” So Rosati and Putnam did.

Coffin despised the limelight about as much as she loved her outdoors, so if you haven’t heard of her work, that’s why. But her name belongs with the all-time Adirondack greats, and when the in-progress, 4,800-mile North Country National Scenic Trail (NCT) is completed, much of the New York section will be thanks to Coffin and her husband, Bill.

The Jones Hill trail will be an eastern segment of NCT’s meandering journey through the park. Coffin fell in love with it when she first visited its summit in 2012 and later began marking out a route with her pink Park Service tape, always tied to a tree in a bow, not the customary granny knot.

Coffin should have lived to see its official opening, but in the arcane world of Adirondack trail building, one delay followed another. The pandemic didn’t help, nor did the DEC’s bewildering decision to halt hiking-trail construction following a court case that specifically applied to snowmobile trails.

Coffin was a rule-follower, said Rosati, who is Coffin’s heir apparent on the NCT project. When he hesitated to make a necessary but not specifically authorised cut, Frio needled him that he was “turning into Mary.”

But if she followed the rules that didn’t mean she couldn’t harp against them, and when the irresistible force of Coffin went up against the immovable force of state bureaucracy, it was usually the bureaucrats who wound up picking themselves up off the floor.

So Jones Hill was bound to happen. It is a gorgeous 8-mile traverse from the Big Pond trailhead on Hoffman Road in the south to the Dirgylot trailhead on Rt. 9 in the north. I had last been on it in June 2023 with my colleague Mike Lynch, on a day when the black flies must have been having a national celebration of some kind and were uncommonly rowdy.

At that time the southern section had been built, but the northern reach was just a theory, with orange state-forester tape marking something of a route and no good way to get across Platt Brook.

RELATED READING: Jones Hill: An understated trek in Schroon

As we set out from Dirgylot, the first improvement from my last visit was immediately clear — instead of accessing the tube beneath the Northway by way of an access road past a trashy sand pit and rusty equipment emporium, the trail ducks into the woods and parallels the old road, out of sight of the industrial yards.

After passing beneath the interstate, the trail climbs moderately on an old woods road before reaching a T at 0.6 miles, where it turns left. At one mile, keep a sharp eye out for the spot where the trail turns right and leaves the road. Because the trail is new, the leaves have yet to be trampled into a dark tread, so you’ll want to keep your eyes up as much as down to follow the red medallions. At 2 miles, we reached the scenic Platt Brook. A fisherman trail follows the brook in both directions, and if you’re not up for a climb, just wandering along this classic Adirondack stream is a reward in itself. 

There’s now a bridge over the brook, thanks to the ADK 46ers Trail Crew, and after crossing it, foresters did a nice job tagging a pretty little stream and then doubling back to access a ridge that, while longer, offers a more gentle ascent. I assumed we’d ascended about 700 feet in elevation, and checking my gizmo was surprised to find we’d climbed nearly double that, to a fine view at the top of Hoffman Mountain and the broad ridge upon which it is mounted.

This was also a pinnacle for Coffin, but only one of many. A biology teacher at East Syracuse Minoa Central School, Syracuse University and on assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Burma, she joined the Adirondack Mountain Club in 1981, then the Finger Lakes Trail Conference and North Country Trail Association.

She was a founding member of the Central New York NCT organization and helped plan and build the Onondaga Trail extension that is concurrent with the national trail. That done, Rosati said, she and Bill looked at each other and said “Now what?”

For Mary, the “what” was learning to master GPS, grabbing a backpack and plunging into some of the Adirondacks’ most unforgiving wilderness. Getting the state to even agree on a general route had taken years (there was no guarantee it would have crossed the Adirondack Park), and Coffin, teaming up with the Iroquois and Schenectady ADK chapters, made over 100 trips into the bush.

Even as health issues prohibited Coffin from leaving camp to do work herself last fall, Putnam said she demanded to see videos of the progress. In one clip, a trail crew had used logs instead of rock to channel water. “I told her, ‘You’re not going to like a few things,” Putnam said. Sure enough, Coffin jabbed pause and instructed that the unacceptable shortcut be rectified.

It is an intimidating act to follow, said Rosati, who was bequeathed a staggering amount of files, maps and GPS data, much of which was almost lost. After her death, it turned out no one knew her computer password — a great archive was saved when her daughter figured out the password, based on Coffin’s college nickname.

From Forrestport in the southwest to Crown Point in the east, the NCT still relies on significant amounts of road walking. As the years go by, the goal is to get the trail off the roads and into the woods.

Jones Hill represents only a handful of the 158 miles the NCT traverses through the Adirondack Park, but it is a fitting tribute to Mary Coffin, who devoted so much of herself to the joys and frustrations of Adirondack trail building.

As we hiked, kicking aside sticks and pulling down tape, we came to a young beech, its bark showing the rigors of insects and disease. It was marked with surveyors tape, but this tape wasn’t orange, it was pink. And it was tied in a bow.

“We’ll leave that one,” Rosati said.

Photo at top: View of Hoffman Mountain from the summit of Jones Hill. Photo by Tim Rowland