Coon Mountain: Small, spring hike with big payoff in ephemerals, vernal pools

Act now before these short-season beauties are gone

By Tim Rowland

You say mud season, I say vernal pool season.

Maybe 25 years ago I first became vaguely aware of these springtime phenomena, an interest that has evolved from a passing awareness to down-on-all-fours fanaticism, nose an inch from the water looking at kind of the equator of life and death, the tadpoles and larva headed up, the decaying leaf litter and drowned worms heading down.

These pools generally form with the rains and snowmelt of spring, and dry up a few months later. Then, according to the EPA (remember them?), “Many of these plants and animals spend the dry season as seeds, eggs, or cysts.” When the pool forms again the next spring, these life-forms in waiting sprout, hatch or do whatever it is that cysts do, and the cycle begins again. 

As a self-appointed connoisseur, I believe the best vernal pools can be found on Cheney Mountain just north of Port Henry where they are strung like dark, reflective pearls along the top of the ridgeline. The Clements Pond trail in Keene has an excellent VP, as does the Trailless Trembleau in Clinton County.

But on this day my brother Bruce and I were headed up Coon Mountain north of Westport, which is an annual springtime pilgrimage for the variety and quality of its ephemerals.

These flowers, which come and go before the tree canopy has a chance to leaf out, are much like the life in vernal pools, having a very limited time to do their reproductive work. These are the little life forms that seemingly come up from middle earth and busy themselves with their urgent work and then are gone, largely unseen by the greater Adirondack population, which is currently vacationing in the Caymans.

Coon is two trails in one, the Coon Mountain trail proper, and then the adjacent Hidden Valley Trail that encircles a small knob through a dark, enchanting forest.

The whole enchilada will run you about 2.4 miles with a modest but not inconsequential 530 feet of elevation gain. The easiest access is to take Lake Shore Road out of Westport and in 2.5 miles turn left on Halds Road. The trailhead is not quite a mile in on the right.

For 0.4 miles the trail ascends gently through an open wood to the bottom of a great cleft in the towering cliffs. This is where the show starts, as wildflowers have soaked up mineral rich runoff and profited handsomely from the experience. There are sprays of white Dutchman breeches, shyly nodding yellow trout lilies and red trillium the size of Olympic medals. 

The trail climbs deeply over stone here, but it’s worth taking it slow while your eyes ferret out flowers that are often hiding in plain sight.

Most of the climbing is done at 0.6 miles, and the trail drops down into the cupped hands of a stony depression. Here is the classic vernal pool, its impervious base perfect for holding water for long periods of time giving bugs and plants time to do their thing.

Vernal pools in America are not a classically Adirondack feature. They are more typically a product of a Mediterranean climate most notably found in California. But those little pools — usually no bigger than the bulldozer that destroys them, the EPA dryly notes — have been disappearing in the extreme. Only 10% of the Golden State’s VPs have survived, leading the state to require developers to recreate these incubators of life.

But vernal pools have a certain  je ne sais quoi that makes them hard to replicate. They are not random “puddles,” as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had it. (The law behind wetlands and vernal pools is actually quite interesting, as captured in an essay by the Adirondack Wild’s Dave Gibson.) https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2016/02/wetland-politics-justice-scalias-transitory-puddles.html

If you look closely, you can generally see plenty of insect, salamander and frog activity in these watery kingdoms, as well as interesting plants, eggs waiting to hatch and rotting blobs of unidentifiable material. 

Coon has a bonus vernal pool not visible from the trail, but back maybe 20 yards from the trailside pool on your right as you’re ascending. Both are normally a little larger this time of year, but it’s been dry.

Near the summit, we met up with a work detail from the Adirondack Land Trust, which has protected this special spot. They were pulling the invasive garlic mustard, whose broad, early leaves block the sunshine that is essential for spring ephemerals. 

There are two notable views from the top, one of the peaks to the west, the other of Lake Champlain to the southeast. There’s a brief window in early May when they are set off by the white flowers of the sarvisberry, and the ephemerals usually continue on past Mother’s Day most years.

On the way down we kept encountering weeds that the ALT had pulled and left on the rocks, either to dry out, or as a horror-film-like warning to other weeds, the way they used to put the heads of deposed monarchs on the business end of a pike.

We took the Hidden Valley loop on the way back, which is interesting for the cliffs of Coon that block out the sun and, on the right just before you cross a little bridge an odd little grove of maybe two-dozen white birch all by themselves that got seeded there somehow.

A couple of hours is all that’s needed for this hike, and there  are few that can match it for its variety of plantlife, topography and pleasing side order of vernal pools.

Photo at top: Hobblebush flowering over a vernal pool. Photo by Tim Rowland