About Lisa Ballard

Contributor Lisa Ballard is the author of "Hiking the Adirondacks" and "Best Easy Day Hikes Adirondacks." A native of Saranac Lake, she contributes to numerous magazines and websites from her base camps on Chateaugay Lake and Red Lodge, Montana.

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Comments

  1. Dave DiRoma says

    I first climbed to the top of Bald Mountain in the mid-1960’s as a13 year old. We used to camp on fall weekends at the Bald Mountain Colony campground across Rt 28. In those days if you wanted to climb to the top, the trail started right on the road, almost across from the campground driveway and sort of meandered its way to the top. As I recall at the start of the climb you had to walk up a rock face that was not particularly steep but had a steel cable anchored to the rock to use as a sort of handrail. If you did it on a day when the fire-watcher was on duty, you were given a card marking your official “ascent” and signed by the ranger. Later, in the 1980’s my wife and I made it to the top a few times. By then the trailhead had been moved to it’s current location and re-routed so no more cable handrail.

  2. Bob Poplis says

    Thanks Dave. Interesting comment from you on how it used to be and how it has changed. We are so fortunate as to how NY has kept the fire towers for the public to enjoy when other states have removed them completely.

  3. Alan Reno says

    Rondaxe is the only name I’ve known this delightful little mountain by.
    I’d guess there’s at least a baker’s dozen hills and mountains tagged as Bald. We don’t need another. Just like we don’t need another Clear Pond
    or Deer Brook.

  4. Hans Erdman says

    Bald was the very first mountain I ever climbed back in 1964 when I was a camper at Woodcraft, just down the Rondaxe Rd. It was also where I learned to rappel, and to do high-angle rescue and evacuation when I was a search and rescue volunteer almost 20 years later, and was the western edge of the area I was licensed to guide back in the 1980s. There weren’t 15000 people a year back then. I’d be surprised if there were 1500. I have a poster of Bald Mountain fire tower hanging in my study here in Minnesota to remind me of the good old days.

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