Help us keep bringing you the Adirondack information you value.
Email
Twitter
RSS
Facebook
Not far from the Acropolis in Greece, there’s a famous rock outcropping high above the Mediterranean Sea where the Apostle Paul tried to talk the Athenians out of their idolatry. Or so they say. No one thought to take any Polaroids as proof.
But there is something special about natural features that in some way connect us through the centuries — a vista of Gothics that Old Mountain Phelps insisted was “not the sort of scenery you want to hog up all at once”; a tremendous erratic that abolitionist John Brown certainly would have noticed on the rutted wagon trail out of Keene; a stony summit into which surveyors pounded a medallion under the watchful eye of Verplanck Colvin.
And then there’s Stoddard’s Rock. For all his accomplishments, having a rock named in his honor — and not a large rock, either — might not have made the great Adirondack photographer’s Top 10, even if he’d known about it, which he assuredly didn’t.
The forecast was for a few inches of snow overnight and bright skies in the morning, so the idea was to ski the remote and scenic Trout Pond Road in Chesterfield before the sand trucks hit it with abrasives. Sure enough, it was sunny in the morning but — no snow. Best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
Call it reverse ageism, but I have concluded that breaking trails after a heavy snow is a job for younger people. This, after slogging up Blueberry Mountain in Keene last year through 14 inches of fresh powder. I made it to the top, but it was work, and as the late Junior Sample said on Hee Haw, “work, that just kills me.”
We had been instructed to bring snowshoes, which we did out of a sense of honor, but on the first day of 2022 there was really no need. We would be tramping over skinny snow, the Weight Watchers version of the real thing, the typical plump mounds and drifts reduced to an unhealthy parchment stretched thin to cover what it could of stones, stumps and tufts of grass.
General inquiries about the Adirondack Almanack should be directed to editor 
Spring hikes for older legs
For decades editors have told me not to use the word “elderly,” because it is both subjective and derogatory, an edict that I have afforded the same bland indifference with which I semi-acknowledge a dental hygienist who has just pressured me to floss.
But at a public hearing over a Ticonderoga public works project this week, a young woman was decrying new curbing that had facilitated the formation of ice and caused her to fall. She was OK because she was young, she said, but — and here she pointed to her neighbor, not much older than me — “this elderly gentleman” might not be as lucky.
He gave her a look, but didn’t say anything. I got to admit, though, that kind of stung. Still, the Adirondacks is filled with little hikes suitable for us elderly folk.
I used to think some of these short but interesting jaunts like Essex Quarry or Cathedral Pines as beneath my dignity, but now that I’m elderly I revel in these, and other perks of the infirm.
» Continue Reading.