The first of the 2009 Adirondack Bracket final four pairings is set. The tournament’s sole remaining top seed is the Northville/Placid Trail, wending its way through the third quad past state prisons, the ORDA Board of Trustees, moose, and Theodore Roosevelt’s midnight ride.

When called for comment, Neil Woodworth, Executive Director of the Adirondack Mountain Club—the organization which established the trail in the early 1920s—betrayed no surprise whatsoever at the fortunes of this iconic Adirondack hike.

“The Northville/Placid Trail was NY’s first long-distance backpacking trail,” said Woodworth, in establishing the trek’s bona fides as a contender for the 2009 Adirondack Bracket championship. “As a hiking experience it traverses a wide range of ADK landscapes from its largest rivers [Sacandaga] through some of the most beautiful lake country [the Canadas and Cedar Lake].”

Woodworth has hiked all but some of the highway portions of the trail in segments over the years. His favorite stretch leads from Long Lake to Shattuck Clearing to Duck Hole to Wanika Falls and on to Lake Placid. “The Cold River Country offers an incredible wilderness feeling.” With civilization 15 to 16 miles away in every direction, “you really get a sense for how Noah John Rondeau and some of the early explorers felt,” Woodworth said.

This empathy for early explorers may come in handy for the 133-mile-long pleasure hike as it goes up against none other than Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer and warrior who traced the eastern flank of the park by birch bark canoe nearly three hundred years before there even was a Blue Line.

Champlain’s journey south from Quebec was not motivated by natural beauty or the health-restoring exertions of outdoor recreation. His game was pure offense, taking war deep into the home court of the Mohawks, who had been interrupting potential European trade routes through the lake valley. Denounced in many quarters today for his extremely brutal tactics, his introduction of gunpowder to the contest near what is now Ticonderoga on the morning of July 29,1609 changed the game—and by extension Adirondack settlement and culture—forever. With one shot from his harquebus Champlain killed two Mohawk chiefs and gravely wounded a third, claiming a quick victory (and perhaps the invention of the three pointer).

In a September 2008 New York Times article Adirondack author and canoeist Chris Shaw retraced Champlain’s 2009 journey down the Adirondack shoreline. We leave you with his takeaway on Samuel de Champlain’s claim to a berth in the 2009 Adirondack Bracket final four:

“Champlain’s 1609 incursion into our neck of the woods marks one of those moments after which everything changed, whether we agree with the outcome or not. And who’s to say how it might have been different? He was a navigator and a pirate. He had high ideals of unifying the cultures of North America, yet he spent years dividing them for profit. The journal of his trip on Bitabagw (the Abenaki name for Champlain’s eponymous lake) is evocative if vague on details, except for one thing. When challenged by medicine men to mind his dreams, and despite his deep skepticism, he produced a perfectly prophetic dream of their victory over the Mohawk. This shows us that meaning abides more deeply in geography than we normally allow, and we can still tap into that reality though the preservation of species and habitat.”

If you missed our preview of the Bracket tournament and recaps of the first rounds you may find them here, here, here and here.

Come back tomorrow for the final match up of the final four.

Be Sociable, Share!

•