Glimpses of the past and present at Rattlesnake Knob

Former Four Peaks Camp adds 600 acres to state-owned land in Jay

By Tim Rowland

I wanted to climb something high to get a better view of the Canadian wildfire smoke, and luckily this was about the time the state was acquiring nearly 600 acres from the Adirondack Land Trust in an area of the town of Jay formerly known as Four Peaks Adirondack Camps.

Through the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, the rustic camp occupied a quadrangle in the Jay amidst the mountains of Bassett, Wainwright, Ebenezer and Winch.

Master of Four Peaks was the Brooklynite Martin Schwalbaum who had many talents, hospitality not being one of them.

Rather than seeing to his guests’ comforts, recollections are that the prickly host was always testing awkward social experiments on his clientele — like berating them for failing to understand the usage of complex backwoods hardware that would have puzzled Jedediah Smith himself.

Nevertheless, he designed a robust trail system, planted apple orchards and built themed cabins including the Gypsy cabin, which was attached to an old Tinkers’ wagon (today it would be known as the Spongy Cabin), and Thoreau’s Cabin, a replica of the one at Walden Pond. 

Much of the old infrastructure, which was already rotting away when it was obtained by the land trust, has been cleaned.

But ghosts of the old development remain — a picnic table here, a trail there, a scattering of diamond-shaped directional signs, some with legible lettering others faded to white, aging apples, meadows marking old cabin sites and the signature turquoise paint Schwalbaum swabbed on the trees to blaze his trails. (Which sort of defeats the purpose of trailblazing, but never mind.)

The strategic value and potential of this tract is considerable. It abuts the Hardy Road mountain-bike trails in Wilmington, with plans for more trails at Four Peaks in the works.

The tract is now going through APA and DEC classification, management planning, and all that jazz, but a bushwhack is still possible to one of multiple overlooks on the mountain flanks.

Four Peaks is on Stonehouse Road, a maintained dirt affair that climbs to a dead-end parking lot. 

Stepping over a rail at the gate on the right will lead to an old gravel road and a broad terrace where Martin’s home/barn/shed was located.

Old woods roads (bearing left) lead up onto the flank of Bassett and some views of Whiteface, including a spot that was said to be in the running for the site of the ski jumps in the 1980 Olympics.

Rattlesnake Knob

But the pick of the litter is Rattlesnake Knob, a stony subpeak of Ebenezer with expansive views to the south and west. 

Schwalbaum likely considered Rattlesnake Knob as one of the four peaks, leaving Winch as sort of the fifth Beatle. Today, with the four independent peaks in private hands, Rattlesnake is the only high point that’s publicly accessible, although for basically the cost of a gym membership at the adjacent New Vida Preserve you get gym rights and access to miles of trails over and around Bassett.

The climb up Rattlesnake is moderate but not insignificant, as it gains nearly 900 feet in just under a mile and a half.

From the parking lot, walk back down Stonehouse Road for about 100 feet to a gate on your right and follow the hiker-trampled grass leading across a meadow to a woods road that some of Schwalbaum’s faded old trail markers indicate as a road to the East Path. Soon you will pass the largest red maple you’ve ever seen — some time ago it shed a prodigious limb that pancaked half an octagonal picnic table left over from the Fourpeaks days.

Shortly after that is a Y — left is the main road to the top, while right leads to a sugarbush Schwalbaum dated to 1902. Bearing left will bring you to a second Y. Here, bear right. Other markers point to Ebenezer Mountain, but today Ebenezer is privately owned, so avoid the roads to the left heading in that direction.

The woods road is easy to follow and leads almost to the top, with only a little scramble remaining to the knob (which will be on your right from the little saddle between Ebenezer and Rattlesnake that Schwalbaum called The Notch).

The only issue is that there are lots of woods roads that are easy to follow going everywhere. They will take you to Rattlesnake. They will take you to the Whiteface overlook. They will take you to Ordway, Kansas, for all I know. So it’s a good idea to have your GPS app with you, to make sure you’re on the road leading to the notch between Ebenezer and Rattlesnake, and not somewhere else.

And if roads spoil all your fun, there are less obvious routes. One, which involves some detective work, starts on the grown-over town road that once connected what are now Stonehouse and Perkins roads. Bear left over the remains of a stone stream crossing and continue climbing moderately as the route loses itself in some old logging fields. 

At some point, on a recent exploratory hike, the logging area ended, and I had all but given up picking up the scent again until, boom, on the remnant of a sawn pine log at my feet, was a splash of turquoise. Better lucky than good. Beyond in the woods was a very faint but evident footpath leading up to the knob.

The summit is a handsome place indeed, with the best view of the Sentinels I know of, as well as nice looks at Whiteface and environs and the Beaver Brook Valley.

It’s an easy cruise back down the woods road, or if you have your GPS app (there’s a Verizon tower on Bassett) you should still have plenty of time to poke around, discovering little bits and pieces of Martin Schwalbaum’s Four Peaks empire, which he loved so much, before it’s faded away for good.