Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Tahawus, Newcomb, and Long Lake





































We spent a 10 days in a part of the Adirondack Park that we were not very familiar in the area around the town of Newcomb, NY which is in the geographic center of the ADK’s. 

We did a bunch of hiking and paddling there including some of both near the excellent SUNY ESF Adirondack Interpretive Center. One of the more memorable moments of this trip was when a pair of bear cubs crossed our path right between two of boats while we were carrying them on a canoe carry between lakes, no sign of the mamma bear but you can be sure we were quite cautious after the sighting!  We didn’t make it all the way to to the great camp at Santanoni Preserve but not because we didn’t try. The great lodge is a 10 mile round trip hike from the gate house, we thought that we could trim some of this distance by using a new rough cut trail that is partially completed from a nearby campground but were surprised to find ourselves at the gate house area when we reached the end of the new trail. We did check out the Sananoni gate house (3 times) and hiked to the farm area of the preserve which is also very interesting. We are hoping to get back another time to get out and see the great lodge itself. We hiked several trails beautiful areas nearby including Goodnow Mountain and it’s fire tower. Another area nearby that we explored was Tahawus and the Upper Works trailhead area including paddling the amazing Henderson Lake, some of the best mountain views from a boat in the ADK’s.  We found ourselves making trips back to the town of Long Lake a few times, usually for groceries at Northern Borne but also stopped at Hoss’s country store and had some amazing luck to catch the last hour of the Long Lake Town Library’s annual book sale.