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trackless walk to Lake Edward
Saturday, August 14 2021
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I woke up at some point in the night (it was still early, not quite midnight) and went outside to piss and could hear the distinctive call of a loon coming from a distance in the west that was likely Lake Edward. Supposedly loons nest occasionally on the rocky island in Woodworth Lake, but we've yet to hear one there.
This morning I ate a faux chicken wrap and drank a can of cold-brewed coffee while sitting in my foldable Walmart chair. Life was good, although there were some hiccups related to our pre-modern camping conditions. There's no collecting of rain water despite our cabin's beautiful roof, so there's no way to get clean when your poop goes pear-shaped in the woods. I've been able to stay clean using moist leaves and rotting wood, but Gretchen is a little more helpless in such situations. I saw her sniffing one of her fingers and grimacing as she prepared to make herself breakfast. "We don't have any soap!" she complained. "Use dirt!" I said. Unfortunately, they don't teach how to maintain hygiene in these conditions in school.
After we'd had our breakfast, we decided to do some exploring along the north shoreline of Lake Woodworth (most of which is in our parcel). There's actually a pretty good trail from our cabin down to the lake, and it forks near the bottom into one branch that ends near where our dock will go and another that ends near a stone causeway across the brook that drains the lake (just downstream from a small beaver dam). The great thing about the north end of the lake is that it features a large triangular bay hidden behind the rocky island that loons supposedly nest on, and that whole bay is within our parcel. We cannot build anything on that bay, but we could arrange some stones or something to make a good place for someone to launch a kyak or begin a swim. Again, the feeling we were having was the opposite of buyer's remorse.
Beyond the stone causeway is camping area featuring a picnic table, a permanent steel barbecue grill, and a robust stone fire circle. Evidently this was one of the camping areas back when Woodworth Lake belonged to a local Boy Scout troop. It's interesting and perhaps useful for guests who want to camp, though I don't quite get how much it delights Gretchen.
We continued through the north from there, following a trail marked with red plastic disks. We took it all the way to where our parcel ended and property belonging to Adirondack State Park began. There were a couple babbling brooks in the area, one draining Woodworth Lake and one coming from the highlands to the east. We could've, had we had the time, followed these downstream and eventually made it to Lake Edward. (Back in 2013, we'd followed the other end of this system up from its mouth on Lake Edward, but never made it as far as Woodworth Lake.)
Gretchen was curious about the trees, and I pointed out the few species present: American beech, sugar maple, yellow birch, red maple, and hemlock. That's about it. There are also a number of white ashes near the cabin, and, interestingly, these don't yet seem much affected by the emerald ash borer.
We continued our exploring on the east shore of the lake, trying to find where our boundary with our neighbor Joel is located. We never found any marker of this boundary, and eventually we came upon a cluster of gun targets on the north side of a swampy arm of the lake. There was a wooden walkway allowing us to cross the swamp (though in one place, where we crossed a beaver channel, we had to wade), and on the other side we found where Joel and friends fired their guns. There were lots of .22 shells on the ground, though it was otherwise tidy.
As thunderstorms approached, we headed back to our cabin, where we had a noon meeting scheduled with the head builder guy Joe. We needed to talk more about things like gutters and routing wires to the upstairs bedroom. Joe also brought a possible solution to the confusion over our porch expectations in light of what actually got built. One of the decks was to have a roof over it and no screen, but instead we got a screened-in porch and two roofless decks. (Joe insists that's what we agreed to.) As a musician, Joe carries a portable open-sided tent on a fold-out frame that collapses down to the size of a golf bag. He demonstrated it on one of our roofless decks, and it really seemed like a possible solution. But of course I've been thinking of other, more elegant solutions, such as a fan-fold roof mounted on tracks that can be rolled out as needed.
Gretchen was trying to be a gracious host despite the cabin's obvious limitations. She put out chips, pistachios, and various dips, and even tried to get Joe to drink one of my IPAs. To this, Joe thought he detected an ethnicity in Gretchen's food generousness, which reminded him of his Italian family. Evidently this is a Mediterranean thing (further north, all they care about is getting guests drunk).
After we'd figured out where the conduits connecting the second floor to the basement run and after Joe considered the possibility of finishing our second floor bedroom for us, Joe headed off to visit his mother at an old folks' home, and Gretchen and I had some much-needed downtime, with her reading her Walmart book and me visiting my usual internet haunts (AT&T cell service works great from the second floor).
[REDACTED]
Late this afternoon, Gretchen and I decided to attempt to walk through the forest to Lake Edward, which lay roughly 3000 feet to the west of our cabin. That doesn't sound too far, but there's no trail to follow; the entire route is trackless wilderness, unbroken by roads or other human artifacts. Furthermore, the terrain can get rough at times, with steep drop-offs and jumbles of massive granite boulders. There are also wetlands and swaths of dense undergrowth.
Initially the going was slow because of that undertgrowth, which forced us to keep ducking in order to pass beneath limbs. I tried to stay on a line of highlands that begin with the knoll our cabin sits near the top of and continues generally westward to a bay in Lake Edward's northeast (the same bay we tried to reach Woodworth Lake from back in 2013). I was using my phone to plot our progress, and without that it would've been difficult to maintain the motivation to keep going, particularly as we crossed rough terrain. Gretchen kept expressing concern about Ramona, who is ten years old and sometimes seems a little uncomfortable in her gait. But Ramona was keeping up well enough, I thought.
Eventually I could see more light coming in from the west than would've been the case had the forest continued, and then we were at the lake. We arrived near the mouth of the brook carrying water from Woodworth Lake (43.123571N, 74.351948W). Just before that water entered the lake, it passed through a surprisingly-high beaver pond held back by a dam made mostly of muck. We continued westward along the shore until we found a granite boulder that could serve as a dock, and there Gretchen took off her clothes and jumped into the water for a swim, joined immediately by Neville (who particularly likes swimming after extended physical activity). Ramona, by contrast, was happy just to lie on the ground in the shade. I don't really swim, but I do like to wade into the water, but wading here wasn't too pleasant, as this shallow arm of the lake had a bottom of slimy muck. There was a line cleared of such muck (probably by beavers) but it was hard to find. Swimming in this water made all of us (particularly Neville) dirtier than we'd started out as, so perhaps any permanent trail to Lake Edward should arrive at a different spot on its shoreline. Meanwhile, off on the treeline between the bay we were on and the main body of Lake Edward, we saw a single blue heron high on a branch, perhaps watching us with amusement.
After we'd had enough satisfaction from having walked to Lake Edward from our cabin, we started our trek back home. I'd apparently been confused by looking at Google Maps' topographic layer and thought that if we headed immediately to the top of the nearest highlands and stayed high, it would take us straight back to our cabin. But I should've done what I'd told Gretchen I thought we were doing, that is, heading due east no matter what the terrain did. My trajectory took us southeastward, which actually made for pretty good hiking until we encounted some a line of swampiness that we had to get around. The muck there almost cost me my flip-flops, which were now too slimy to wear; I had to carry them while walking barefoot through the wilderness. It wasn't far from there that we came out onto Woodworth Lake Road a good half mile or more from our cabin. By this point Gretchen was irritated with my navigation, wondering why I hadn't discussed this trajectory with her so she could've weighed in on it. (She attributed my failure to do so on my "maleness.") But to me, this route just sort of happened. Had I had a compass, perhaps I would've done better. But my stupid Android phone doesn't include a compass app by default.
Back at the house, I devoured a peanut noodle dish while Gretchen kept chiding me to drink more water. After some more very pleasant downtime out on the cabin's decks, we packed up our stuff and started our two hour drive back to Hurley.
Back at the house in Hurley as I worked to put things away, I happened to notice a horrifyingly-thick layer of black mold on the drywall at the top of the stairway down to the basement. We'd installed splits in all the rooms down there to keep mold at bay, but we hadn't done anything to reduce the humidity of the hallway outside those rooms, and all the cold air from those rooms had apparently made the mold in the hallway even worse. It was so bad that I had to take immediate action, so I spent a good half hour with dilute bleach scrubbing the walls and ceiling until they merely looked dirty instead of revolting.
When I went to dump the bleach-water on Dug Hill Road (to minimize its environmental impact), I happened to notice two trails of leaked fluid that had evidently come from the Subaru. Jesus Christ, what was wrong with the car now? And would I be able to depend on it the week Gretchen would soon be spending in Portland, Oregon? I ended up having to take a xanax to deal with the unexpected stress.
By then, Powerful, who would be staying here this weekend, had arrived from wherever he'd been. He looked like he'd gained some weight. Seeing me dealing with the mold, he showed us some splotches of mold in his basement room, though he says he'll be dealing with those. Gretchen got some sort of anti-mold spray called Concrobium; perhaps that will actually work.
A lycopod "forest" during our walk this morning.
Approximate map of our afternoon walk from the cabin to Lake Edward and back today.
Neville and Gretchen in the bay of Lake Edward today. Note the heron in the tree on the skyline. Click to enlarge.
A nest of granite boulders at 43.1182383N, 74.3509233W on our walk back from Lake Edward today.
Click to enlarge.
Neville spilled his water at the cabin after the walk to Lake Edward.
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