Easy-access Adirondack paddling: How to keep canoeing into your senior years

A new guide features 29 easy-access canoe launches with gentle slopes and calm waters for seniors.

By Zachary Matson

When Lorraine Duvall visits a canoe boat launch, she runs through a checklist of must-haves: the launch is close to parking, it accesses motor-free or no-wake waters and a gradual sloping beach enables an easy water entrance. 

The Warren County canoe launch on the Schroon River off County Home Bridge Road near Warrensburg fits the bill. After pulling into a parking spot, Duvall walked no more than 15 yards to where a small beach descends easily into shallow waters. 

“This is totally perfect,” Duvall said on a cool, sunny day last week. “You just walk right in.” 

Duvall, 86, has been exploring Adirondack lakes and rivers since she eyed a woman in 1991 carry a small Hornbeck canoe down an embankment and easily launch on Lake Durant. “I want that!” she told friends at the time.

Duvall can’t paddle all the routes of her past, but she stays active and on the water — and hopes others will as they also age. She recently published a guide of accessible Adirondack paddling opportunities on the Protect the Adirondacks! website, compiling 29 paddles across the park that meet her criteria for paddling with age. The routes provide easy access during put-ins and take-outs, and ensure paddlers won’t need to carry around beaver dams or over portages. They do help quench the thirst for wildness and calm waters that doesn’t dissipate with age. 

While guidebooks and listings on the Department of Environmental Conservation website provide basic location information about canoe launches, they often aren’t descriptive enough for someone to know whether it’s a good match for their skills and physical abilities, Duvall said. So she compiled the information she was looking for. Duvall said she often meets people who say they have given up paddling because they don’t know what launches and paddles they can manage; with the right information, she said, they could keep enjoying Adirondack waterways.

“It’s becoming more and more important to me,” Duvall said. “Where can I go? Where can others go?”

Bonnie Vicki, who has lived in North Creek since 1971 and racked up a long list of Adirondack paddling adventures, recommended a handful of launches on the Schroon River south of Schroon Lake. I joined Vicki, 76, and Duvall and her friend Debby Rice, 71, who both headed down from Keene for some reconnaissance of the Schroon access points. Rice has a Thule Hullavator on her car, a hydraulic boat rack that lowers to the sides of the car for easier (and eye-level) loading and unloading.    

While most of the paddles in Duvall’s new guide and their put-ins don’t technically meet American with Disabilities Act compliance (very few of those launches exist in the park), they provide an ease of access for older or physically-diminished paddlers that many paddles throughout the park don’t.

After the easy launch on the Schroon, we paddled a short distance to an oxbow pond lush with waterlilies. We enjoyed a leisurely pace — the only objective was a relaxing day on the water.  

“This is lovely paddling,” Duvall said.

“If you just want to be out on the water, this is not too bad,” Vicki said. 

While Duvall said she likes to limit her excursions to one put-in and take-out, this mission was also one of information gathering. We packed our canoes back on our cars and headed north to an unofficial launch just above a set of rapids off of Schroon River Road. The site on a short but steep embankment did not meet Duvall’s accessibility criteria, but an official launch off of Horicon Avenue a short distance upstream did. From there, you can paddle between the rapids downstream and Starbuckville Dam upstream. The launch checked the boxes for Duvall, but we were headed to a third launch, just downstream of the Schroon Lake outlet. 

We paddled downstream around some large bends in the river and found another quiet side channel to explore. The channel narrowed and skirted into a more wooded area. Large, fallen trees suggested recent storm activity.   

Vicki hasn’t lost much of the spirit of exploration. She recently carried her boat 3/10ths of a mile to a small pond. “I thought I was doing great, then I had to carry back,” she said. 

Each bend in the side channel beckoned her to paddle further.  

“I wonder what’s around this next turn,” Vicki said.

Eventually a muddy dead end and downed tree blocked the way forward, but Vicki luxuriated in the small pocket of quiet she had found. 

“I like it back here, it feels like wilderness,” she said.

Further downstream, Vicki and I explored Trout Brook, which meets the Schroon at the site of a small marina full of boats likely destined for the lake. Duvall and Rice found shelter from the sun in a shady spot along the shore. Duvall encouraged Rice to get into paddling after Rice suffered an injury. An avid hiker, Rice is finding that paddling helps continue her connection to nature.

“She told me: ‘You’ll paddle further than you can hike,’” Rice said.

Rice helps Duvall with one of the more challenging parts of a day on the water: getting in and out of the boat. The easy beach access helps but maneuvering in and out of an unstable canoe is hard. Rice holds the boat still as Duvall lowers herself back first into the boat. The move doesn’t always work.

“The worst case scenario is you take everything out of your boat and just go swimming,” Duvall said. 

When I go paddling around the park, I’m heartened to see people decades my senior; it’s both a reminder and motivation that there are many days of adventure ahead. For those who have reached old age, paddling is a lifeline to one of the great passions of their life.

“Right now it’s everything,” Duvall said. “Getting older is about letting go when you have to let go. But I don’t have to let go of this right now.”

“Plus,” Vicki added. “Paddling helps keep us young.”