This trip report ended up being almost infinitely long. I didn’t think it would be that bad when I started but it crept up on me. Picasaweb has gone away so I put my pictures on Flickr instead. They don’t seem to have a very good captioning system, but the caption will appear if you hover the mouse over the photo. I am baffled by some of how the site works but it always takes me a while to learn new things online.
http://ift.tt/2bjv9YR
Indian Lake Revisited, 8/14-8/20 2016
I charged off like the proverbial herd of turtles on the morning of Sunday the 14th just before 7 AM. The overnight low had been in the mid 70s so I didn’t need my fleece shirt like I usually do early in the morning. It was a hot day, but cloudy most of the time and the wind was from the west which helped me along. I stopped for a quick immersion at the reservoir in Redfield and the stream at Swancott Mill, and that helped me stay cooler. Once I got to West Leyden I went to Boonville instead of the way I have always gone through Constableville. I started going that way because it was the suggested route from Google Maps back in 2009, and I never looked into it as carefully as I should have. In Boonville I got slightly lost and traveled an extra mile or so but came out where I wanted to be, at the beginning of Moose River Rd. There is a nice park there, and a cemetery with some very bizarre architecture, but I didn’t get pictures of any of it since I wanted to save space on my camera. I soon came to a sign that said PAVEMENT ENDS and wondered if I should turn back, as dirt roads really slow me down with the trailer and canoe, but I decided to press on and see what happened. I came to a very nice steel deck bridge over the Black River, which is much smaller at that point than where I normally cross it in Port Leyden. After that there were a few steep climbs that I had to walk, but soon it leveled out pretty well. After several miles I came out at the intersection on the other Moose River Rd that I have always taken that runs from Port Leyden to McKeever. This new route saved me 2 or 3 miles and avoided some of the worst hills on my old route, so I will use it in the future. A few miles from McKeever I found a frog in the road with a piece of grass in its mouth, and after it didn’t move when I nearly ran over it I went back to see if it was alive. It seemed to be just sitting there so I moved it off the pavement. My mother says she thinks it is a wood frog after seeing the pictures. The Moose was as high as I have seen it in all of the summers I’ve been going by there, so I stayed out of the main current when I took a break there. I got into Old Forge about 3, filled up my water bottles at the visitor center, bought a sandwich to take along for supper and left a message at home saying I had arrived safely. After a stop in Inlet to refill bottles again at the park and get some things at the grocery I arrived at 8th Lake somewhat after 6. There were a couple of sprinkles along the way but no real rain. Instead of putting in at the parking pullout (which was full of cars) I hid my bike and trailer behind some spruces very close to the road about 1/4 mile down the road and carried my stuff down to the water, a short but steep and brushy trip. The lean-to on the island and the one on the shore next to it were both occupied by a large party from what I could see across the water so I headed up the lake and found the lean-to by the carry trail empty. I ate supper by the lake, sitting on a rock, and slept in the lean-to that night. The loons were calling a lot through the night, which was very nice.
On Monday morning I got going about 6 and was back on the water before 7. I paddled around the headland on the way back down the lake and found a couple of areas that would make good campsites if all of the lean-tos were full. I took the canoe out at the foot of the path up to the road and carried everything up where the going was easy. Then I walked down the road, got the bike and trailer out of the woods and rode back up to where the canoe was. I visited a spot where the road runs by Racquette Lake where I found a huge hemlock and then I stopped at Death Falls, which I had never visited though I had seen it in the guide books and on maps. It’s not marked anymore, except that the road is closed off with a gate. It was a short walk in and not much of a destination, but now I know what I was missing. I reached Blue Mountain Lake by mid-morning and called home again, since I had left a message the day before and wasn’t sure it had been received. On my way out near Lake Durant I met a fellow who took my picture and said he would make me famous. He said he is a freelancer working for Adirondack magazine, which I am not sure I have heard of. I stopped at Rock Lake and carried the canoe down the hill. The water level was also high here, and the small beaches along the southeast corner were flooded. The big beach was still there and I waded over to the southern point and discovered a designated campsite there which I had never known about. I also found a fishing lure with two triple hooks on the lake bottom, and I was glad I hadn’t stepped on it. I checked out the island, which was not very accessible, and headed back up the lake to the put-in. The stream by the put-in was interesting traveling in the canoe since it was too narrow to use the paddle, but I found my way back to the trail after a bit. On the way down I passed a group of people with a canoe and a lot of camping gear sitting by the trail register, although there were no cars in the parking area. I thought someone must be coming to pick them up but when I came back two or three hours later they were still there. I didn’t ask if they needed a ride since I wasn’t able to offer them one. I saw a strip canoe being towed behind a van that was somehow heading south on 28 and north on 30 as I was going north on 28 and south on 30. This confuses me even though I was there, but that is the way the road is marked. It was the only other strip canoe I saw all week. I stopped to eat a late lunch by the cemetery at the corner of Cedar River Rd which is one of my favorite places to eat since it has the most comfortable kind of guardrail and I can get far enough off the main highway to be safely out of the way of traffic. I filled my water bottles at the Indian Lake town hall, got a little more food at the One Stop and headed for Indian Lake Dam Rd. I was planning to hide my canoe there that night and put in the next day to paddle down the lake, but the state and private lands were not marked by the dam and I couldn’t tell where I was allowed to go. If I went far enough back that I was sure I was on state land I got into a spruce thicket and a swamp, so I decided to abandon that part of the plan and move on to Chimney Mountain. About 3 miles from the mountain my rear shifter cable broke right at the bar-end lever, so I had to tie the remaining cable around the bike frame and lock the rear derailleur in place. I chose the third-lowest sprocket out of 9, figuring that would be the best compromise. I should have been carrying a spare cable but I had never broken one before so I didn’t think to. In future i will carry more parts with me. I still had 3 working speeds on the front shifter so I was able to get by, just not quite as comfortably. I hid the canoe and trailer in the woods on state land where the road turns to gravel and loaded what I needed for the night on the bike. Once I got to Chimney Mountain I parked the bike by the payment box and paid for 2 days of parking. I got pretty hot climbing the mountain even though I tried to take it very slowly and deliberately, so when I got to the top it took me a while to cool off. No one else was on the mountain since I didn’t start up it till about 6. It was a beautiful evening with perfectly still air. While eating supper on one of the rocks near the chimney I was visited by a very odd-looking insect that sat on my dry bag for a long time. I took a couple of close up photos of it, the actual size is about 1/2” long not counting the antennae. I was happy to see that there was still a Camp Here disk on the tree in the are where I camped before, so I set up my tent without the rain fly and then headed over to the true summit. The air was so still that from the summit I could hear rushing water from the valley to the northeast if I went over to that edge. The moon came up and peeped through the clouds a few times, and it seemed a lot bigger and closer than it looks in the pictures. I headed back to the camping area and went to sleep pretty soon. In the night the moon came through the clouds a lot more and the light was very pretty several times when I woke up. I heard an owl of a kind I am not accustomed to. It startled me when it made a sort of scream-like call but then it settled down to more normal hooting.
On Tuesday morning I got up and packed the tent right away because I thought it was supposed to rain. I went over to the summit again and as I arrived I saw that the sunrise was spectacular. I took a lot of pictures and looked at it for a while and then I turned around to see what I could see in other directions and there right behind me the way I had come was a huge rainbow. I couldn’t get it all in one frame, and both it and the sunrise colors faded pretty soon as the sun rose above the cloud layer, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have seen. As I was eating breakfast up near the chimney it began to sprinkle so I got under a large overhang to finish eating. Then I packed up everything and headed along the end of the rift valley to Eagle Cave. I put my stuff inside the opening to stay dry and crawled in. The first part didn’t seem as tight of a squeeze as I remembered it from 3 years ago, and someone had left a rope so I was able to go down the 12’ or so bank of rock into the inner part of the cave. I traveled around all of the parts that I could get to without having to crawl, since I didn’t have long pants with me and my knees are not up to a lot of it. There was one lower part that looked pretty tight, and another place with a vertical crack of maybe 20 feet deep that I couldn’t access, but I enjoyed looking around the main parts. Then I looked at some other smaller caves along below the Eagle Cave entrance for a while and headed out around 10. Another party came up just as I was leaving but I didn’t see them, only heard their voices. On the way down the rocks were a bit damp and I held my dry bag with my tent and clothes behind me while walking down the rock slabs to be a landing pad in case I slipped. I was relieved to find my bike where I had left it, and as I was heading over to it a charter bus pulled up and poured out a whole herd of people. The driver was curious about the mountain and asked me some questions, and said he would like to bring his granddaughter there. I hope they will go, I think it would be a great place for kids. I headed back up the road and found the canoe where I had left it, hidden with some dead beech branches I had found that still had the leaves on them. I got everything hooked up and headed back up the hills. I had to walk the bike a bit more and I couldn’t pedal faster than about 15 mph on the downhills, but overall it wasn’t too bad with only 3 speeds. I went back to Indian Lake village in the hope that the hardware store there might have bike parts, and I was very pleased to find that they did. I also had to buy a pair of wire cutters since the ones on my folding pliers were not up to cutting cable and the spare cables they had were universal types with a different end on each end of each cable. I am very grateful to Pine’s Country Store True Value Hardware for having what I needed. If they hadn’t I would have had to go home through Inlet to go to the bike shop. Once I got everything back to rights I went over to the tourism building by Adirondack Lake and filled my bottles again and tried to get my hands clean. They were having some sort of quilting group meeting so the place was busy. On my way down to the put-in on Indian Lake I stopped at the picnic tables at the overlook on top of the hill just out of town and had a speedy lunch since it wasn’t raining at the time. The bus from earlier in the day was parked up there too, I guess there wasn’t room for him in the parking lot all day at Chimney Mountain. Right after I packed up my food bag and left the rain began to pour down heavily, and it continued all the way down the lake. I had to stop every mile or so to bail out the canoe, which had 2 or 3 gallons of water in it each time. Shortly before I got to where I hid the bike and put the canoe in the lake the rain stopped. I had tried to put everything important in the dry bags but I had forgotten that my cell phone was in a ziploc type bag in a pocket of the backpack, and the bag leaked enough to get the phone wet. When I got home I was able to leave the phone on a shelf to dry out and after a couple of days I was able to plug it in and once it charged it seems to be its old self again. It’s an old flip phone so it wouldn’t have been a big loss but it’s nice not to have to replace it since I rarely use it anyway. I will make sure to keep my phone in a dry bag in future. My tent, sleeping bag and extra clothes were all in the dry bags so they were fine. I hid the bike and trailer in the woods at the same spot I did two years ago and carried the canoe and camping stuff down 100 yards or so to the lake. Once I had paddled up to the cove where I camp I headed up the hill and found a spot that I think was legal, though I am not completely sure. I used my paddle to measure the distance, though that was somewhat approximate. I measured that I was 140 feet from the edge of the woods, and then there was another 30-40 feet of beach before the water began, so I hope that counted as being 150’ from the lake. On this trip I had a tarp, which is a new thing for me, and this was the only place I set it up. I found a dead fallen tree and cut a piece with a fork on the end to use to hold one end of the tarp up higher since the ground dropped off at one side of the campsite. Having a folding saw was also a new thing for me, and I found it very handy. Previously I have just had a penknife and a butterknife, neither of which would have been much help in this situation. I set up a clothesline with another piece of paracord under the tarp and used it to hang up some of the things that had gotten wet in the downpour, most importantly the foam sleeping pad which was too big to put in a bag. It is not absorbent but it had some water on the surface so I unrolled it and draped it over the line. Then I went down to the beach and looked around, and found a rock that made a comfortable angle to lean back against and moved some of the smaller rocks from in front of it so I could sit on the sand. It was quite comfortable with a bit of padding, and I sat there and read and watched the clouds rising off the hills around the lake. I paddled over to a little rocky island to the south of Camp Island that I could see from the beach but it was too windy to land easily so I didn’t try. Finally it began to sprinkle and I went back to the tent for the rest of the evening. At some point in the night another longer period of heavy rain began, and I was glad to have the tarp as well as the tent fly, and then later in the night the rain stopped and the wind became very strong. I looked out with a flashlight and I could see that the downhill side of the tarp was bellied in and the uphill side was bellied out, but nothing came loose. A few things fell off the clothesline but everything that stayed up was pretty well dry by morning with the help of the wind.
On Wednesday I got up at 5:40 and headed up the lake toward Baldface Mountain. The wind had died down to a light breeze, but about a mile up the lake it picked up a lot of strength and at times I had to paddle as hard as I could just to keep from getting blown backwards. I started out wearing my fleece leggings and jacket but about halfway up the lake it began to rain again and I took them off to keep them dry(ish) but luckily I had gotten warmed up by then from the exercise. I stopped at Paradise Beach to check out the picnic area, and I finally made it to Norman’s Cove and that picnic area around 7:50. I ate breakfast at the picnic table on the beach since the one on the point was too exposed to the wind. I paddled across and went up the trail but could not linger long at the top because of the wind. I took a couple of pictures and went back down, and thought about what to do next. My plan had been to go further north and then loop around west to the Lake Store and get some more cheese and some other food, and I decided to go ahead with it. The wind began to become less as I headed out, and I made it about to the northern end of the section of private land off Jerry Savarie Rd. Then I crossed to the west side and headed south, looking at every dock to try to find the sign for the Lake Store landing. When I did find it it was very well marked, and the sun was beginning to come through while the wind had dropped to a pleasant breeze. I tied the canoe to the dock and got out onto it, which is a new skill for me. The walk up to the road was easy with a little stone stairway and some driveways, and it’s a very short distance along the road to the store. It was a new experience to get supplies by water, and I enjoyed it. The guys at the store had seen me going by the day before in the rain, but I had been too wet to go in the store then. Once I left the dock the day had become very pleasant and I spent the afternoon gunkholing around the islands and shoreline from around Kirpen’s Island down to Crotched Pond Island. I revisited my favorite islands from two years ago and also found some other ones that I really liked, and a nice bit of cliff with a view from about 30 feet up in an inlet. It was great to have more time to explore in this whole area, and there is still more there I would like to see another time. My last stop was at a very fun archipelago between Crotched Pond and Camp islands, with cute little beaches and rock outcroppings. At about 6 I decided to head for camp and watch the moon rise from the beach there. When I got to the cove I found 6 canoes and 3 large matching tents set up on the beach. I landed further down the cove to loop around to my site and see that it hadn’t been messed with. The people who had come in the canoes were eating supper by the stone fireplace in the woods, so I could hear them shouting but I don’t think most of them saw me. They seemed to be mostly kids. I got back in the canoe and paddled as fast as I could the 4 miles or so down to the campground HQ to see if they would do anything about the illegal camping on the beach. It took me almost an hour as I was rather tired from the paddling I had already done that day. I talked to a man in the booth at the campground office and he said that someone had told them at 4 o’clock to move into the woods 150 feet or leave and they had said they would, but that he thinks people just tell the staff what they want to hear, and he didn’t seem surprised that they had still been there at 6:30. He said there was no one to go out then but that someone would be out about 8:30 or 9 in the morning. I headed back up the lake and got back to camp about 9. The people were all on the beach and were getting into their tents. Two of them spoke to me as I approached, and we had a brief but polite conversation. I didn’t mention the illegality of what they were doing as I didn’t have any authority. They told me they were from Deerfoot Lodge, which is a Christian summer camp located between Speculator and Indian Lake, and that they had a bunch of 9 to 12-year-olds with them and would be leaving early in the morning. They said they had been planning to climb Baldface Mountain that day but did not have time to get there. It seems probable to me that the people who run Deerfoot are deliberately gaming the system, knowing that there is no enforcement at night on the lake so they can camp where they please. This does not seem to me to set a good example for the kids they serve, but that is just my opinion and it is none of my business. When I got back I looked up their website and it says a lot about promoting personal growth and responsibility, among other things. On the positive side they seemed friendly and they did not leave a mess when they left. I wonder if they had a permit for their group of 12. The weather that night was quite peaceful in contrast to the previous one, and the moonlight was very bright on my tent wall at times. With the benefit of hindsight I should have just paddled to a nearby area out of earshot and spent the evening in a restful way rather than wasting the effort of paddling all the way down the lake and back, but I didn’t know that at the time.
On Thursday morning the Deerfoot group left about 8 AM, and I ate breakfast on the beach and waited for the authorities to show up. Two men in a boat arrived at about 9:15 and one of them stayed in the boat and talked with me while the other one went around and looked to see that everything was put to rights. The man in the boat asked me if they had left anything around and I said no, other than a bandage on the beach that looked to have fallen off from someone, perhaps not even someone in the group. The group had used the fireplace for cooking again that morning and I told him the fire was not extinguished, but the man in the boat said he was not worried about that since it was contained. I asked him if it would be permissible for me to make a fire in it, even though it was not in a legal camping area and he said that if I wanted to make a fire to cook a hot dog he wouldn’t have a problem with it. I don’t carry hot dogs, but I assume that his statement would extend to other things too, within reason. I also asked him about using a saw to cut dead trees that had fallen in trails and he said that was fine as long as it was dead and down. He asked me if I was camping nearby and I told him I thought I was at a legal distance but I wasn’t totally sure and he said he wasn’t going to measure it, and when his colleague returned he also declined to measure and they left, taking the bandage and a forlorn-looking piece of cloth that the man found somewhere with them in their trash bucket. They were both wearing work boots so I pushed their boat off the beach, and that was the last I saw of them. By that time it was warming up nicely so I headed off to check out the rocky island south of Camp again and then visited the Moose Island picnic area with the shallow sandy channel and mini-islands. It was all very nice, and while I was there I noticed again a couple of small cliffy areas on Moose Mountain that I had seen before. I decided to go over and try to find them, and on the way I found a cute little double waterfall coming down a 6 foot cliff into the lake. I climbed up on it and took some pictures and then headed down the lake a short ways to where I could get a compass bearing from me to the landing beach below Moose Mountain to the cliff. It seemed like it was very close to due east, so I paddled in to the beach. I couldn’t see the mountain from the beach but I headed east into the woods using the little clip-on compass which was all I had with me. In the boulder field below the cliffs I found a huge slab standing up on a narrow side, and a stone sticking out that looked like an unhappy animal face. I went up and down and around the cliffs and finally found a place where I could hold some branches back with one hand and take pictures with the other. I got a couple of fairly clear shots across the lake with the islands in the foreground and the Watch Hill beach behind them. I came back down and headed down the lake to the pair of little unnamed islands at the south end of the main group and looked around at them and then headed back to camp to spend some time resting. I lay on the beach and read my book and gongoozled at the passing watercraft for a couple of hours, and then a pair of large dogs came running down the trail onto the beach and gave me quite a surprise. Luckily they did not seem interested in me, and after a few minutes their owners followed them more slowly out of the woods. I read a little longer and then decided to leave the beach to them for a while and headed up the west side of the lake. The stable flies were very aggressive all of a sudden once I got out on the water and while I could kill them pretty fast with the flyswatter I was not able to operate it and the paddle at the same time, so my progress was rather slow. I headed across the lake to see if the flies were only along that side, but they were out in the middle too. I saw what looked like another rocky area on a hill behind Paradise Beach and tried to find it but failed, but while I was in the woods I found a tree with a lot of gone-by oyster mushrooms and one clump of fresh ones, so I took some of those with me. Luckily I had finished eating the raisins I had brought with me and I had the cardboard can they came in still in my food bag, and I was able to fit all of the mushrooms in there once I got back to the canoe. I went over to the Crotched Pond trail and followed it for half a mile or so. The stream was full of small cascades and it made a very pleasant sound all along the valley there. I headed back to the archipelago in time to watch the sun set while eating supper. The rock wall was angled perfectly to face the sunset so I sat on the beach and leaned against it while I ate and took pictures of the sunset and its reflection in the main lake and in the reflecting pool on the island. The mushrooms made a great addition to that night’s bagel sandwiches. As the light faded I went back to my home beach which was empty again and waited for the moon to rise. The mosquitoes came out before the moon did, but as long as I kept walking around they weren’t too bad. The moon looked huge and orange as it rose, but again the camera made it seem smaller than it felt in person. It was really beautiful, especially when it first came up and was still close to the ground so it looked even bigger. I took a final swim and then went up to the tent and went to sleep.
On Friday I had been planning to have a quiet morning, pack up early and hit the road by noon, but the morning was so perfectly calm and misty that I succumbed to temptation and headed up to Baldface Mountain again. I woke up late, about 6:45, and headed out by 7. By 8 I had reached the picnic area in Norman’s Cove and ate some breakfast there, using my map as a tablecloth since the picnic table was very wet. When I got to the top the mist was starting to lift and I figured I could stay till 9:30 and still have a chance of getting going in time. I took my last bagel with some cheese and more mushrooms up to the top with me along with an orange and ate them while sitting on a nice little stone seat by the edge of the cliff. A chipmunk kept poking his head out at me and then finally got bolder and came out on the shelf below me to watch what I was doing. Some chickadees and a nuthatch also came by once I was sitting still. I picked up some orange peels that had been scattered around at some point in the last couple of days and kept watching as the view grew larger. In a while the mist lifted enough so I could see across the lake, and then pretty soon it was time to go. On the way down I stopped for a couple of minutes and used the folding saw to cut some branches off a tree that had fallen across the path, since the Summer Recreation fellow had said that would be okay. I met one party heading up as I was going down and they asked about the canoe. A lot of people commented on it on this trip, especially when I was in towns. I didn’t try to hide it when I was around the lake this year, I just put it far enough up on shore to be safe from waves and it was always there when I came back, which was nice. Once I got back to the cove I paddled fairly fast back down the lake, making stops at the comma island and Paradise Beach to cool off quickly in the water as the day was becoming quite warm. What wind there was was with me, so that helped too. I got back to Watch Hill beach and found some day users who had probably come down the trail, as I did not see any boats. I landed at the west end of the beach close to my campsite, went up the hill and packed everything away. When I came back to the beach a bunch of kayakers had also arrived and we talked briefly before I left. On the way down the lake I met an older gentleman fishing from the rocky shoreline, but otherwise it was pretty deserted till I got into the SW arm and found a few boatloads of people fishing. I got back to the put-in and got myself organized and ready to roll just before 1 o’clock. I was planning to make it to Nobleboro before dark, so I knew I had to keep moving. The DOT has been putting in lots of my favorite kind of guardrails all along Route 30 and Route 8 where I was that day, so there were good places to stop for a snack when needed. I ate some lunch and got wet again at Mason Lake, where there were a couple of very nice picnic tables and a large pullout. I arrived in Speculator and came to the Big M where I got a little more food and asked if there was a pay phone that worked anywhere in town. The lady at Customer Service said no, not anymore, so I went to the post office across the parking lot and then to the Chamber of Commerce and they all concurred, so I headed south on 30 into the rest of downtown Speculator to see if I could find a small business owner who would take pity on me and let me use their phone for a few dollars. Just after I passed the main intersection I heard a honk and thought I must have broken a traffic rule, but I couldn’t tell what it was. A moment later Swamp Booger and his wife pulled up in front of me. They had seen me at the intersection while they were on their way back to Lewey Lake from paddling Fall Stream. We talked about our trips and other things for a few minutes and then Swamp Booger very generously let me use his phone to call home and tell them I was doing fine and was on my way. After they headed back toward Lewey Lake I followed the road down to the lake to see the rest of the bustling metropolis, and then headed out west on Route 8 toward my last stop. The rest of the afternoon was uneventful, though rather warm. I was planning to stop at the site of the old hiker suspension bridge over West Canada Creek just east of Nobleboro but I missed the turnoff and when I came down the hill at 6:20 and realized I had gone too far I decided I didn’t want to backtrack, so I kept going west after looking at the map. I went south on Gray-Wilmurt Road, right at the edge of my map, and followed it along for almost a mile along the water to a piece of state land which I was pleased to find was marked when I got there. Just 50 feet from the beginning of state land there was a place where the road shoulder stayed level all the way into the woods with no ditch, so I was able to leave the road without having to take the canoe off the trailer. I unhitched the trailer from the bike and moved everything a short way into the woods and then headed toward West Canada Creek to see if I could find a place to get in the water. At first there was a deep gulf or gorge, (I am not sure of the distinction in some cases) that I could not climb into, but there was a herd path along the edge and after a bit the sides got lower and I was able to walk down. The sun was low in the sky and shining right into the gulf, so it was very pretty. I was able to splash around in a backwater out of the main current, which was quite swift. There were lots of handy rocks around too. Once I felt a little fresher I went back up and moved my bike and the trailer with the canoe further into the woods to a place I thought was 150’ from the road, the creek and the private land boundary. I set up a quick camp and then went back to explore the gulf a bit more before the sun set. After eating supper in the tent to stay away from the mosquitoes I hung my food bag and settled in for the night.
On Saturday I got everything back out to the road about 7 and after stopping for a quick photo off the bridge over the creek I headed west again on Route 8. I turned onto 365 and headed for Hinckley Lake, but there was nowhere to get to the water till after I had passed the dam and came to a road with a bridge and an unposted area that looked like an informal canoe launching area. It was already a warm day and it was still somewhat early. I headed for Rome and when I got there I went through downtown, hoping to find a place to fill my water bottles. They were doing some paving and had ground out some 18” wide and 3” deep troughs right across the road in several places, possibly as speed control devices, I don’t know. Both the cars and I had to slow down almost to a stop to cross them. I had to back up once to let a backhoe off the street into a parking area while we were waiting for the flagman to let us through, but the shoulders were clear so it was not too hard. I didn’t find anywhere that looked like it would have a drinking fountain or a public restroom, so I stopped at a garage sale a few miles out of town and the folks there were kind enough to fill my bottles. We talked for a bit and I headed out again. I stopped at a place called the Book Barn on my way into Camden that I had seen before but never had time to visit, and it was interesting. It looked to me like a sound stage for a horror movie set in an abandoned flea market, as it was very dimly lit inside and full of random stuff for sale mixed with dead leaves that appeared to have blown in and pieces of the building that had fallen off, and the smell of mildew was very pervasive. I would not recommend it as a source of books but it was certainly worth a visit if you like bizarre places. I felt a little sick as I was coming through Camden, but in Williamstown I was able to cool off under the bridge and then I felt better. I stopped for a last dip in Pineville, in the Salmon River, and made it home at about 3. When I got in the thermometer read 85 and my mother said it got up to 89 that afternoon. I had about a quarter of a bag of chocolate chips left in my food bag and when I was unpacking and putting things away I found that they had melted together into a semi-liquid state. I was lucky to have an east wind that day which helped me get home, and the southern route I took was less hilly than if I had come home the way I went out.
Overall on this trip I traveled 291 miles on the bicycle with daily average speeds ranging from 10.21 MPH on the day I left Chimney Mountain with only 3 speeds working up to 13.17 MPH on the day I came home. The first day was the longest at 94 miles. The new trailer definitely pulled more smoothly and I was able to coast downhill faster than I could with the old one, getting up to 38 MPH on one occasion. I had to adjust the load to get the right amount of tongue weight, but then it seemed to handle very nicely. I was very lucky to have fair winds on both of my highest-mileage days and the weather overall was very nice. I will hope to return to Indian Lake in two or three years, as there are some other places I would like to visit in the meantime.
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Indian Lake Revisited, 8/14-8/20 2016
I charged off like the proverbial herd of turtles on the morning of Sunday the 14th just before 7 AM. The overnight low had been in the mid 70s so I didn’t need my fleece shirt like I usually do early in the morning. It was a hot day, but cloudy most of the time and the wind was from the west which helped me along. I stopped for a quick immersion at the reservoir in Redfield and the stream at Swancott Mill, and that helped me stay cooler. Once I got to West Leyden I went to Boonville instead of the way I have always gone through Constableville. I started going that way because it was the suggested route from Google Maps back in 2009, and I never looked into it as carefully as I should have. In Boonville I got slightly lost and traveled an extra mile or so but came out where I wanted to be, at the beginning of Moose River Rd. There is a nice park there, and a cemetery with some very bizarre architecture, but I didn’t get pictures of any of it since I wanted to save space on my camera. I soon came to a sign that said PAVEMENT ENDS and wondered if I should turn back, as dirt roads really slow me down with the trailer and canoe, but I decided to press on and see what happened. I came to a very nice steel deck bridge over the Black River, which is much smaller at that point than where I normally cross it in Port Leyden. After that there were a few steep climbs that I had to walk, but soon it leveled out pretty well. After several miles I came out at the intersection on the other Moose River Rd that I have always taken that runs from Port Leyden to McKeever. This new route saved me 2 or 3 miles and avoided some of the worst hills on my old route, so I will use it in the future. A few miles from McKeever I found a frog in the road with a piece of grass in its mouth, and after it didn’t move when I nearly ran over it I went back to see if it was alive. It seemed to be just sitting there so I moved it off the pavement. My mother says she thinks it is a wood frog after seeing the pictures. The Moose was as high as I have seen it in all of the summers I’ve been going by there, so I stayed out of the main current when I took a break there. I got into Old Forge about 3, filled up my water bottles at the visitor center, bought a sandwich to take along for supper and left a message at home saying I had arrived safely. After a stop in Inlet to refill bottles again at the park and get some things at the grocery I arrived at 8th Lake somewhat after 6. There were a couple of sprinkles along the way but no real rain. Instead of putting in at the parking pullout (which was full of cars) I hid my bike and trailer behind some spruces very close to the road about 1/4 mile down the road and carried my stuff down to the water, a short but steep and brushy trip. The lean-to on the island and the one on the shore next to it were both occupied by a large party from what I could see across the water so I headed up the lake and found the lean-to by the carry trail empty. I ate supper by the lake, sitting on a rock, and slept in the lean-to that night. The loons were calling a lot through the night, which was very nice.
On Monday morning I got going about 6 and was back on the water before 7. I paddled around the headland on the way back down the lake and found a couple of areas that would make good campsites if all of the lean-tos were full. I took the canoe out at the foot of the path up to the road and carried everything up where the going was easy. Then I walked down the road, got the bike and trailer out of the woods and rode back up to where the canoe was. I visited a spot where the road runs by Racquette Lake where I found a huge hemlock and then I stopped at Death Falls, which I had never visited though I had seen it in the guide books and on maps. It’s not marked anymore, except that the road is closed off with a gate. It was a short walk in and not much of a destination, but now I know what I was missing. I reached Blue Mountain Lake by mid-morning and called home again, since I had left a message the day before and wasn’t sure it had been received. On my way out near Lake Durant I met a fellow who took my picture and said he would make me famous. He said he is a freelancer working for Adirondack magazine, which I am not sure I have heard of. I stopped at Rock Lake and carried the canoe down the hill. The water level was also high here, and the small beaches along the southeast corner were flooded. The big beach was still there and I waded over to the southern point and discovered a designated campsite there which I had never known about. I also found a fishing lure with two triple hooks on the lake bottom, and I was glad I hadn’t stepped on it. I checked out the island, which was not very accessible, and headed back up the lake to the put-in. The stream by the put-in was interesting traveling in the canoe since it was too narrow to use the paddle, but I found my way back to the trail after a bit. On the way down I passed a group of people with a canoe and a lot of camping gear sitting by the trail register, although there were no cars in the parking area. I thought someone must be coming to pick them up but when I came back two or three hours later they were still there. I didn’t ask if they needed a ride since I wasn’t able to offer them one. I saw a strip canoe being towed behind a van that was somehow heading south on 28 and north on 30 as I was going north on 28 and south on 30. This confuses me even though I was there, but that is the way the road is marked. It was the only other strip canoe I saw all week. I stopped to eat a late lunch by the cemetery at the corner of Cedar River Rd which is one of my favorite places to eat since it has the most comfortable kind of guardrail and I can get far enough off the main highway to be safely out of the way of traffic. I filled my water bottles at the Indian Lake town hall, got a little more food at the One Stop and headed for Indian Lake Dam Rd. I was planning to hide my canoe there that night and put in the next day to paddle down the lake, but the state and private lands were not marked by the dam and I couldn’t tell where I was allowed to go. If I went far enough back that I was sure I was on state land I got into a spruce thicket and a swamp, so I decided to abandon that part of the plan and move on to Chimney Mountain. About 3 miles from the mountain my rear shifter cable broke right at the bar-end lever, so I had to tie the remaining cable around the bike frame and lock the rear derailleur in place. I chose the third-lowest sprocket out of 9, figuring that would be the best compromise. I should have been carrying a spare cable but I had never broken one before so I didn’t think to. In future i will carry more parts with me. I still had 3 working speeds on the front shifter so I was able to get by, just not quite as comfortably. I hid the canoe and trailer in the woods on state land where the road turns to gravel and loaded what I needed for the night on the bike. Once I got to Chimney Mountain I parked the bike by the payment box and paid for 2 days of parking. I got pretty hot climbing the mountain even though I tried to take it very slowly and deliberately, so when I got to the top it took me a while to cool off. No one else was on the mountain since I didn’t start up it till about 6. It was a beautiful evening with perfectly still air. While eating supper on one of the rocks near the chimney I was visited by a very odd-looking insect that sat on my dry bag for a long time. I took a couple of close up photos of it, the actual size is about 1/2” long not counting the antennae. I was happy to see that there was still a Camp Here disk on the tree in the are where I camped before, so I set up my tent without the rain fly and then headed over to the true summit. The air was so still that from the summit I could hear rushing water from the valley to the northeast if I went over to that edge. The moon came up and peeped through the clouds a few times, and it seemed a lot bigger and closer than it looks in the pictures. I headed back to the camping area and went to sleep pretty soon. In the night the moon came through the clouds a lot more and the light was very pretty several times when I woke up. I heard an owl of a kind I am not accustomed to. It startled me when it made a sort of scream-like call but then it settled down to more normal hooting.
On Tuesday morning I got up and packed the tent right away because I thought it was supposed to rain. I went over to the summit again and as I arrived I saw that the sunrise was spectacular. I took a lot of pictures and looked at it for a while and then I turned around to see what I could see in other directions and there right behind me the way I had come was a huge rainbow. I couldn’t get it all in one frame, and both it and the sunrise colors faded pretty soon as the sun rose above the cloud layer, but it was one of the most beautiful things I have seen. As I was eating breakfast up near the chimney it began to sprinkle so I got under a large overhang to finish eating. Then I packed up everything and headed along the end of the rift valley to Eagle Cave. I put my stuff inside the opening to stay dry and crawled in. The first part didn’t seem as tight of a squeeze as I remembered it from 3 years ago, and someone had left a rope so I was able to go down the 12’ or so bank of rock into the inner part of the cave. I traveled around all of the parts that I could get to without having to crawl, since I didn’t have long pants with me and my knees are not up to a lot of it. There was one lower part that looked pretty tight, and another place with a vertical crack of maybe 20 feet deep that I couldn’t access, but I enjoyed looking around the main parts. Then I looked at some other smaller caves along below the Eagle Cave entrance for a while and headed out around 10. Another party came up just as I was leaving but I didn’t see them, only heard their voices. On the way down the rocks were a bit damp and I held my dry bag with my tent and clothes behind me while walking down the rock slabs to be a landing pad in case I slipped. I was relieved to find my bike where I had left it, and as I was heading over to it a charter bus pulled up and poured out a whole herd of people. The driver was curious about the mountain and asked me some questions, and said he would like to bring his granddaughter there. I hope they will go, I think it would be a great place for kids. I headed back up the road and found the canoe where I had left it, hidden with some dead beech branches I had found that still had the leaves on them. I got everything hooked up and headed back up the hills. I had to walk the bike a bit more and I couldn’t pedal faster than about 15 mph on the downhills, but overall it wasn’t too bad with only 3 speeds. I went back to Indian Lake village in the hope that the hardware store there might have bike parts, and I was very pleased to find that they did. I also had to buy a pair of wire cutters since the ones on my folding pliers were not up to cutting cable and the spare cables they had were universal types with a different end on each end of each cable. I am very grateful to Pine’s Country Store True Value Hardware for having what I needed. If they hadn’t I would have had to go home through Inlet to go to the bike shop. Once I got everything back to rights I went over to the tourism building by Adirondack Lake and filled my bottles again and tried to get my hands clean. They were having some sort of quilting group meeting so the place was busy. On my way down to the put-in on Indian Lake I stopped at the picnic tables at the overlook on top of the hill just out of town and had a speedy lunch since it wasn’t raining at the time. The bus from earlier in the day was parked up there too, I guess there wasn’t room for him in the parking lot all day at Chimney Mountain. Right after I packed up my food bag and left the rain began to pour down heavily, and it continued all the way down the lake. I had to stop every mile or so to bail out the canoe, which had 2 or 3 gallons of water in it each time. Shortly before I got to where I hid the bike and put the canoe in the lake the rain stopped. I had tried to put everything important in the dry bags but I had forgotten that my cell phone was in a ziploc type bag in a pocket of the backpack, and the bag leaked enough to get the phone wet. When I got home I was able to leave the phone on a shelf to dry out and after a couple of days I was able to plug it in and once it charged it seems to be its old self again. It’s an old flip phone so it wouldn’t have been a big loss but it’s nice not to have to replace it since I rarely use it anyway. I will make sure to keep my phone in a dry bag in future. My tent, sleeping bag and extra clothes were all in the dry bags so they were fine. I hid the bike and trailer in the woods at the same spot I did two years ago and carried the canoe and camping stuff down 100 yards or so to the lake. Once I had paddled up to the cove where I camp I headed up the hill and found a spot that I think was legal, though I am not completely sure. I used my paddle to measure the distance, though that was somewhat approximate. I measured that I was 140 feet from the edge of the woods, and then there was another 30-40 feet of beach before the water began, so I hope that counted as being 150’ from the lake. On this trip I had a tarp, which is a new thing for me, and this was the only place I set it up. I found a dead fallen tree and cut a piece with a fork on the end to use to hold one end of the tarp up higher since the ground dropped off at one side of the campsite. Having a folding saw was also a new thing for me, and I found it very handy. Previously I have just had a penknife and a butterknife, neither of which would have been much help in this situation. I set up a clothesline with another piece of paracord under the tarp and used it to hang up some of the things that had gotten wet in the downpour, most importantly the foam sleeping pad which was too big to put in a bag. It is not absorbent but it had some water on the surface so I unrolled it and draped it over the line. Then I went down to the beach and looked around, and found a rock that made a comfortable angle to lean back against and moved some of the smaller rocks from in front of it so I could sit on the sand. It was quite comfortable with a bit of padding, and I sat there and read and watched the clouds rising off the hills around the lake. I paddled over to a little rocky island to the south of Camp Island that I could see from the beach but it was too windy to land easily so I didn’t try. Finally it began to sprinkle and I went back to the tent for the rest of the evening. At some point in the night another longer period of heavy rain began, and I was glad to have the tarp as well as the tent fly, and then later in the night the rain stopped and the wind became very strong. I looked out with a flashlight and I could see that the downhill side of the tarp was bellied in and the uphill side was bellied out, but nothing came loose. A few things fell off the clothesline but everything that stayed up was pretty well dry by morning with the help of the wind.
On Wednesday I got up at 5:40 and headed up the lake toward Baldface Mountain. The wind had died down to a light breeze, but about a mile up the lake it picked up a lot of strength and at times I had to paddle as hard as I could just to keep from getting blown backwards. I started out wearing my fleece leggings and jacket but about halfway up the lake it began to rain again and I took them off to keep them dry(ish) but luckily I had gotten warmed up by then from the exercise. I stopped at Paradise Beach to check out the picnic area, and I finally made it to Norman’s Cove and that picnic area around 7:50. I ate breakfast at the picnic table on the beach since the one on the point was too exposed to the wind. I paddled across and went up the trail but could not linger long at the top because of the wind. I took a couple of pictures and went back down, and thought about what to do next. My plan had been to go further north and then loop around west to the Lake Store and get some more cheese and some other food, and I decided to go ahead with it. The wind began to become less as I headed out, and I made it about to the northern end of the section of private land off Jerry Savarie Rd. Then I crossed to the west side and headed south, looking at every dock to try to find the sign for the Lake Store landing. When I did find it it was very well marked, and the sun was beginning to come through while the wind had dropped to a pleasant breeze. I tied the canoe to the dock and got out onto it, which is a new skill for me. The walk up to the road was easy with a little stone stairway and some driveways, and it’s a very short distance along the road to the store. It was a new experience to get supplies by water, and I enjoyed it. The guys at the store had seen me going by the day before in the rain, but I had been too wet to go in the store then. Once I left the dock the day had become very pleasant and I spent the afternoon gunkholing around the islands and shoreline from around Kirpen’s Island down to Crotched Pond Island. I revisited my favorite islands from two years ago and also found some other ones that I really liked, and a nice bit of cliff with a view from about 30 feet up in an inlet. It was great to have more time to explore in this whole area, and there is still more there I would like to see another time. My last stop was at a very fun archipelago between Crotched Pond and Camp islands, with cute little beaches and rock outcroppings. At about 6 I decided to head for camp and watch the moon rise from the beach there. When I got to the cove I found 6 canoes and 3 large matching tents set up on the beach. I landed further down the cove to loop around to my site and see that it hadn’t been messed with. The people who had come in the canoes were eating supper by the stone fireplace in the woods, so I could hear them shouting but I don’t think most of them saw me. They seemed to be mostly kids. I got back in the canoe and paddled as fast as I could the 4 miles or so down to the campground HQ to see if they would do anything about the illegal camping on the beach. It took me almost an hour as I was rather tired from the paddling I had already done that day. I talked to a man in the booth at the campground office and he said that someone had told them at 4 o’clock to move into the woods 150 feet or leave and they had said they would, but that he thinks people just tell the staff what they want to hear, and he didn’t seem surprised that they had still been there at 6:30. He said there was no one to go out then but that someone would be out about 8:30 or 9 in the morning. I headed back up the lake and got back to camp about 9. The people were all on the beach and were getting into their tents. Two of them spoke to me as I approached, and we had a brief but polite conversation. I didn’t mention the illegality of what they were doing as I didn’t have any authority. They told me they were from Deerfoot Lodge, which is a Christian summer camp located between Speculator and Indian Lake, and that they had a bunch of 9 to 12-year-olds with them and would be leaving early in the morning. They said they had been planning to climb Baldface Mountain that day but did not have time to get there. It seems probable to me that the people who run Deerfoot are deliberately gaming the system, knowing that there is no enforcement at night on the lake so they can camp where they please. This does not seem to me to set a good example for the kids they serve, but that is just my opinion and it is none of my business. When I got back I looked up their website and it says a lot about promoting personal growth and responsibility, among other things. On the positive side they seemed friendly and they did not leave a mess when they left. I wonder if they had a permit for their group of 12. The weather that night was quite peaceful in contrast to the previous one, and the moonlight was very bright on my tent wall at times. With the benefit of hindsight I should have just paddled to a nearby area out of earshot and spent the evening in a restful way rather than wasting the effort of paddling all the way down the lake and back, but I didn’t know that at the time.
On Thursday morning the Deerfoot group left about 8 AM, and I ate breakfast on the beach and waited for the authorities to show up. Two men in a boat arrived at about 9:15 and one of them stayed in the boat and talked with me while the other one went around and looked to see that everything was put to rights. The man in the boat asked me if they had left anything around and I said no, other than a bandage on the beach that looked to have fallen off from someone, perhaps not even someone in the group. The group had used the fireplace for cooking again that morning and I told him the fire was not extinguished, but the man in the boat said he was not worried about that since it was contained. I asked him if it would be permissible for me to make a fire in it, even though it was not in a legal camping area and he said that if I wanted to make a fire to cook a hot dog he wouldn’t have a problem with it. I don’t carry hot dogs, but I assume that his statement would extend to other things too, within reason. I also asked him about using a saw to cut dead trees that had fallen in trails and he said that was fine as long as it was dead and down. He asked me if I was camping nearby and I told him I thought I was at a legal distance but I wasn’t totally sure and he said he wasn’t going to measure it, and when his colleague returned he also declined to measure and they left, taking the bandage and a forlorn-looking piece of cloth that the man found somewhere with them in their trash bucket. They were both wearing work boots so I pushed their boat off the beach, and that was the last I saw of them. By that time it was warming up nicely so I headed off to check out the rocky island south of Camp again and then visited the Moose Island picnic area with the shallow sandy channel and mini-islands. It was all very nice, and while I was there I noticed again a couple of small cliffy areas on Moose Mountain that I had seen before. I decided to go over and try to find them, and on the way I found a cute little double waterfall coming down a 6 foot cliff into the lake. I climbed up on it and took some pictures and then headed down the lake a short ways to where I could get a compass bearing from me to the landing beach below Moose Mountain to the cliff. It seemed like it was very close to due east, so I paddled in to the beach. I couldn’t see the mountain from the beach but I headed east into the woods using the little clip-on compass which was all I had with me. In the boulder field below the cliffs I found a huge slab standing up on a narrow side, and a stone sticking out that looked like an unhappy animal face. I went up and down and around the cliffs and finally found a place where I could hold some branches back with one hand and take pictures with the other. I got a couple of fairly clear shots across the lake with the islands in the foreground and the Watch Hill beach behind them. I came back down and headed down the lake to the pair of little unnamed islands at the south end of the main group and looked around at them and then headed back to camp to spend some time resting. I lay on the beach and read my book and gongoozled at the passing watercraft for a couple of hours, and then a pair of large dogs came running down the trail onto the beach and gave me quite a surprise. Luckily they did not seem interested in me, and after a few minutes their owners followed them more slowly out of the woods. I read a little longer and then decided to leave the beach to them for a while and headed up the west side of the lake. The stable flies were very aggressive all of a sudden once I got out on the water and while I could kill them pretty fast with the flyswatter I was not able to operate it and the paddle at the same time, so my progress was rather slow. I headed across the lake to see if the flies were only along that side, but they were out in the middle too. I saw what looked like another rocky area on a hill behind Paradise Beach and tried to find it but failed, but while I was in the woods I found a tree with a lot of gone-by oyster mushrooms and one clump of fresh ones, so I took some of those with me. Luckily I had finished eating the raisins I had brought with me and I had the cardboard can they came in still in my food bag, and I was able to fit all of the mushrooms in there once I got back to the canoe. I went over to the Crotched Pond trail and followed it for half a mile or so. The stream was full of small cascades and it made a very pleasant sound all along the valley there. I headed back to the archipelago in time to watch the sun set while eating supper. The rock wall was angled perfectly to face the sunset so I sat on the beach and leaned against it while I ate and took pictures of the sunset and its reflection in the main lake and in the reflecting pool on the island. The mushrooms made a great addition to that night’s bagel sandwiches. As the light faded I went back to my home beach which was empty again and waited for the moon to rise. The mosquitoes came out before the moon did, but as long as I kept walking around they weren’t too bad. The moon looked huge and orange as it rose, but again the camera made it seem smaller than it felt in person. It was really beautiful, especially when it first came up and was still close to the ground so it looked even bigger. I took a final swim and then went up to the tent and went to sleep.
On Friday I had been planning to have a quiet morning, pack up early and hit the road by noon, but the morning was so perfectly calm and misty that I succumbed to temptation and headed up to Baldface Mountain again. I woke up late, about 6:45, and headed out by 7. By 8 I had reached the picnic area in Norman’s Cove and ate some breakfast there, using my map as a tablecloth since the picnic table was very wet. When I got to the top the mist was starting to lift and I figured I could stay till 9:30 and still have a chance of getting going in time. I took my last bagel with some cheese and more mushrooms up to the top with me along with an orange and ate them while sitting on a nice little stone seat by the edge of the cliff. A chipmunk kept poking his head out at me and then finally got bolder and came out on the shelf below me to watch what I was doing. Some chickadees and a nuthatch also came by once I was sitting still. I picked up some orange peels that had been scattered around at some point in the last couple of days and kept watching as the view grew larger. In a while the mist lifted enough so I could see across the lake, and then pretty soon it was time to go. On the way down I stopped for a couple of minutes and used the folding saw to cut some branches off a tree that had fallen across the path, since the Summer Recreation fellow had said that would be okay. I met one party heading up as I was going down and they asked about the canoe. A lot of people commented on it on this trip, especially when I was in towns. I didn’t try to hide it when I was around the lake this year, I just put it far enough up on shore to be safe from waves and it was always there when I came back, which was nice. Once I got back to the cove I paddled fairly fast back down the lake, making stops at the comma island and Paradise Beach to cool off quickly in the water as the day was becoming quite warm. What wind there was was with me, so that helped too. I got back to Watch Hill beach and found some day users who had probably come down the trail, as I did not see any boats. I landed at the west end of the beach close to my campsite, went up the hill and packed everything away. When I came back to the beach a bunch of kayakers had also arrived and we talked briefly before I left. On the way down the lake I met an older gentleman fishing from the rocky shoreline, but otherwise it was pretty deserted till I got into the SW arm and found a few boatloads of people fishing. I got back to the put-in and got myself organized and ready to roll just before 1 o’clock. I was planning to make it to Nobleboro before dark, so I knew I had to keep moving. The DOT has been putting in lots of my favorite kind of guardrails all along Route 30 and Route 8 where I was that day, so there were good places to stop for a snack when needed. I ate some lunch and got wet again at Mason Lake, where there were a couple of very nice picnic tables and a large pullout. I arrived in Speculator and came to the Big M where I got a little more food and asked if there was a pay phone that worked anywhere in town. The lady at Customer Service said no, not anymore, so I went to the post office across the parking lot and then to the Chamber of Commerce and they all concurred, so I headed south on 30 into the rest of downtown Speculator to see if I could find a small business owner who would take pity on me and let me use their phone for a few dollars. Just after I passed the main intersection I heard a honk and thought I must have broken a traffic rule, but I couldn’t tell what it was. A moment later Swamp Booger and his wife pulled up in front of me. They had seen me at the intersection while they were on their way back to Lewey Lake from paddling Fall Stream. We talked about our trips and other things for a few minutes and then Swamp Booger very generously let me use his phone to call home and tell them I was doing fine and was on my way. After they headed back toward Lewey Lake I followed the road down to the lake to see the rest of the bustling metropolis, and then headed out west on Route 8 toward my last stop. The rest of the afternoon was uneventful, though rather warm. I was planning to stop at the site of the old hiker suspension bridge over West Canada Creek just east of Nobleboro but I missed the turnoff and when I came down the hill at 6:20 and realized I had gone too far I decided I didn’t want to backtrack, so I kept going west after looking at the map. I went south on Gray-Wilmurt Road, right at the edge of my map, and followed it along for almost a mile along the water to a piece of state land which I was pleased to find was marked when I got there. Just 50 feet from the beginning of state land there was a place where the road shoulder stayed level all the way into the woods with no ditch, so I was able to leave the road without having to take the canoe off the trailer. I unhitched the trailer from the bike and moved everything a short way into the woods and then headed toward West Canada Creek to see if I could find a place to get in the water. At first there was a deep gulf or gorge, (I am not sure of the distinction in some cases) that I could not climb into, but there was a herd path along the edge and after a bit the sides got lower and I was able to walk down. The sun was low in the sky and shining right into the gulf, so it was very pretty. I was able to splash around in a backwater out of the main current, which was quite swift. There were lots of handy rocks around too. Once I felt a little fresher I went back up and moved my bike and the trailer with the canoe further into the woods to a place I thought was 150’ from the road, the creek and the private land boundary. I set up a quick camp and then went back to explore the gulf a bit more before the sun set. After eating supper in the tent to stay away from the mosquitoes I hung my food bag and settled in for the night.
On Saturday I got everything back out to the road about 7 and after stopping for a quick photo off the bridge over the creek I headed west again on Route 8. I turned onto 365 and headed for Hinckley Lake, but there was nowhere to get to the water till after I had passed the dam and came to a road with a bridge and an unposted area that looked like an informal canoe launching area. It was already a warm day and it was still somewhat early. I headed for Rome and when I got there I went through downtown, hoping to find a place to fill my water bottles. They were doing some paving and had ground out some 18” wide and 3” deep troughs right across the road in several places, possibly as speed control devices, I don’t know. Both the cars and I had to slow down almost to a stop to cross them. I had to back up once to let a backhoe off the street into a parking area while we were waiting for the flagman to let us through, but the shoulders were clear so it was not too hard. I didn’t find anywhere that looked like it would have a drinking fountain or a public restroom, so I stopped at a garage sale a few miles out of town and the folks there were kind enough to fill my bottles. We talked for a bit and I headed out again. I stopped at a place called the Book Barn on my way into Camden that I had seen before but never had time to visit, and it was interesting. It looked to me like a sound stage for a horror movie set in an abandoned flea market, as it was very dimly lit inside and full of random stuff for sale mixed with dead leaves that appeared to have blown in and pieces of the building that had fallen off, and the smell of mildew was very pervasive. I would not recommend it as a source of books but it was certainly worth a visit if you like bizarre places. I felt a little sick as I was coming through Camden, but in Williamstown I was able to cool off under the bridge and then I felt better. I stopped for a last dip in Pineville, in the Salmon River, and made it home at about 3. When I got in the thermometer read 85 and my mother said it got up to 89 that afternoon. I had about a quarter of a bag of chocolate chips left in my food bag and when I was unpacking and putting things away I found that they had melted together into a semi-liquid state. I was lucky to have an east wind that day which helped me get home, and the southern route I took was less hilly than if I had come home the way I went out.
Overall on this trip I traveled 291 miles on the bicycle with daily average speeds ranging from 10.21 MPH on the day I left Chimney Mountain with only 3 speeds working up to 13.17 MPH on the day I came home. The first day was the longest at 94 miles. The new trailer definitely pulled more smoothly and I was able to coast downhill faster than I could with the old one, getting up to 38 MPH on one occasion. I had to adjust the load to get the right amount of tongue weight, but then it seemed to handle very nicely. I was very lucky to have fair winds on both of my highest-mileage days and the weather overall was very nice. I will hope to return to Indian Lake in two or three years, as there are some other places I would like to visit in the meantime.
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