Linger on the Leichter Trail

New 1.5 mile hike from Champlain Area Trails provides options for views of High Peaks and Champlain Valley farms

By Tim Rowland

The Leichter Trail in the town of Wadhams is the latest addition to the Champlain Area Trails’ portfolio, and it’s a classically CATSy effort, short and easy, perfect for dog walkers, people whose High Peaks days are behind them or, for the sake of argument, outdoors writers with some time to kill between interviews.

One problem: the thoughtfully designed trail has so many charming little vistas and vantage points that our hypothetical outdoors writer who reckoned the mile-long pathway would take half an hour tops wound up spending three times that, and having to race to the next assignment with an urgency normally associated with someone who has accidentally removed a pin from a hand grenade.

Taking Youngs Road just east of Northway Exit 31 provides easy access, with the trailhead on the right, a tenth of a mile past the intersection with Taylor Road.

It honors the memory of Franz and Nina Leichter, an impactful couple. He was a visionary state lawmaker representing Manhattan, she a champion of mental health, chronicled in her daughter Kathy’s film Here One Day.

Kathy and her brother Josh worked with the Lake Champlain Land Trust to permanently protect the 115 acres of fields and woodlands that the trail meanders through as part of the Riverview Wildlife Corridor Conservation Project. The project protects a section of the Boquet River watershed and is another addition to the Split Rock Wildway, a corridor that establishes a safe route for wildlife venturing from Lake Champlain to the mountain wilderness to the west.

Although the entire trail gains scarcely 50 feet in elevation, it’s an impactful 50 feet, as from the trailhead it ascends through an open meadow to a bit of a ridge from which long views to the southwest reveal hints of the High Peaks and of the Highish Peaks to the north of them that come up just shy of 46er fame.

At a little more than a tenth of a mile, the trail comes to a T, the trail named for Franz to the left and the trail named for Nina to the right. I went left, and at 0.16 miles had the option of heading straight along the forest fringe, or bearing left (which I did) and entering a wood of sorts, with white pine interspaced with thickets of the invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle that often step to the fore when farmland reverts to forest.

Although buckthorn produces copious fruit that’s fed upon by birds, it is kind of the Froot Loops of the berry world, in that it provides insufficient nutrition to stoke their energy stockpiles for the winter. As a landowner, I have come to hate the rapidly spreading honeysuckle with the heat of a thousand suns, but for 10 days each year I grant it amnesty, because its blossoms, ranging from white to deep pink, really are a treat, making it a guilty pleasure along the lines of Tater Tots and watching the Yankees squander a seven-run lead in the ninth.

Soon the trail enters a young, hardwood forest, and at 0.3 miles reaches the Hillary’s Step of the Lichter Trail, a rock ledge accessed by a three-rung ladder. If ladders give you trouble, you can reach the same point by continuing straight where the trail splits and accessing this little spot from the opposite direction. Either way it’s worth it, because at this highpoint of the hike, a platform overlooks a chattering brook down below. It was, as Winnie the Pooh had it, a good “Thinkin’ Spot,” and this was where I lost a serious amount of my allotted time.

The trail from here flits in and out of the treeline, which in early June was awash in flowering viburnum and populated by interesting birds, such as cedar waxwings, and not-so-interesting, such as the verios that tend to follow hikers around like Poe’s raven.

Continuing on will bring you back to the original T, and preceding straight will commence on Nina’s Trail through a hayfield along the ridge.

Part of this meadow will be maintained, while part will revert to a more natural condition. A staggering number of Champlain Valley family farms have disappeared of course, but this attractive trail offers a bit of a throwback to the agricultural past, with rolling fields and weathered barns in the distance.

The ridge descends gradually to a beaver pond and then crooks eastward to follow the wetlands, a fine wildlife habitat and another interesting feature of this short little jaunt. All told, I clocked it at 1.5 miles, and while initially wary of the CATS literature’s suggestion that it takes an hour or two to complete, I now concur. Leichter is a trail designed for lingering.