Last month we carved out some time and spent another week in the woods camping, this time at Cranberry Lake in New York's Adirondack Park. The ADK's are our favorite place to camp and we try to spend a week there every summer. We've camped at a lot of the state campgrounds and had heard good things about Cranberry Lake but this was our first time there. The campground was fairly quiet even though there was a huge Ranger School reunion going on across the lake at Wanakena. We picked our site looking only at the online campground map and google satellite photos but it turned out to be just right. We had a small beach and were able to keep our boats right at the site. During our stay we paddled the local cove a bit and did an 8 mile paddle around the point into Brandy Brook Flow and Bear Mountain Flow. Cranberry Lake itself gets pretty windy but proved to be pretty nice keeping to the edges. We also did a 10 mile paddle on the Raquette River from Axton Landing to a place called The Crusher near the town of Tupper Lake. We ran into some vintage trailer friends who happened to also be camping there. They had sold their Shasta Compact a the end of last season and were camping in late 50's Trotwood Cub trailer that they had just restored. The Trotwood looked amazing and had lots of details rebuilt and customized to their preferences yet it still looked original inside. There are a lot of different approaches to bringing a vintage trailer back to life, my favorite is when folks create something that is functional to meet their needs yet at the same time looks true to the original. Our friends gave us a lead to some short hikes at Copper Falls and Rainbow Falls just a bit to the north and we spent an afternoon checking them out. One of the last days there a fast moving storm front blew through with severe winds and lightening, the wind knocked down the Shasta's awning without any damage. Our modern Coleman GeoSport dome shelter however didn't fair so well with some of the Y joint getting damaged beyond use. We were lucky that nothing happened to the trailer or boats. Another friend of ours was recently caught in a storm where several branches damaged his vintage Bonanza requiring some new sheet aluminum on the back section of roof. These two incidents are a good reminder to look up when choosing a campsite or lust where to position your trailer on a site. I also can't forget to mention the interesting, um, trailer at a house on the road into the campground, take a look at the last photo in this post above. I'm pretty sure there is a trailer in there someplace! Overall we had a great time and would definitely camp at Cranberry Lake again.
