mardi 21 avril 2020

NYS Recreation Circulars

My late father-in-law grew up in Syracuse and, before he enlisted in WWII, was an avid hiker, etc. in the Adirondacks. I inherited a copy of Recreation Circular 8, The Trails to Marcy, by A. S. Hopkins, dated 1941, and really enjoyed reading it.
The other day I was searching for something on Google and, to my surprise, this circular (and the others in the series) came up! In their goal of digitizing everything, they had googled this document and put it on their free download site, so I downloaded it and have been reading it. https://www.google.com/books/edition...AQAAIAAJ?hl=en
The circulars then published are:
1 - State Parks and Reservations (not included in the download)
2 - Public Use of the Forest Preserve, by C. R. Pettis, 1920
3 - Adirondack Highways, by C. R. Pettis
4 - Catskill Highways, by C. R. Pettis, 1920
5 - St. Lawrence Reservation, by Arthur B. Strough, 1919
6 - Lake George, by A. S. Hopkins, 1920
7 - Adirondack Canoe Routes, by William G. Howard, 1940
8 - The Trails to Marcy, by A. S. Hopkins, 1941
9 - Catskill Trails, by W. D. Mulholland, 1938
10- Lake Placid Trails, by W. D. Mulholland, 1932

Maps seem to have been included in some of these, but were not scanned by Google. Trying to follow the trail descriptions was an enjoyable challenge, because many of them have changed. Three typical example are of winter trails in #10:
1. Heart Lake Loop from the Olympic Stadium past John Brown farm, up to the ADK Lodge, past Rock Falls, down to Bear Cub, and back to the Stadium (24.1 miles)
2. Whiteface Mt. Loop from the Olympic Stadium, across frozen Mirror Lake and Lake Placid to Undercliff, up to and cross the Franklin Falls Trail to Whiteface, ascend Esther, cross Wilmington Trail to Whiteface, go to the Sunrise Notch Trail, pass Connery Pond, cross Mirror Lake and back to start (29.5 miles)
3. Sentinel Range Loop (I won't describe it here except that again it begins and ends at the Olympic Stadium and goes along the West Branch of the Ausable River and (I guess) along the now current Jackrabbit Trail). (22.35 miles)

I would really like to find these trails (on paper) but am hampered by a) trails don't exist anymore; b) landmarks such as "Old Lumber Camp" and "trail splits, red trail goes right, take the blue trail", etc.; and c) I don't have access to an appropriate map (I have older and newer ones).


Aucun commentaire:

Enregistrer un commentaire