On our second day in the Adirondacks, waking up at our camp site on Saranac Lake, we fired up our little one-burner camping stove to make breakfast. Dylan, Addison, Evan and I had bowls of oatmeal and fresh fruit before setting out in our canoes for an hour-long paddle to Ampersand Mountain.
The view on the paddle to Ampersand Mountain.
We parked our canoes on a secluded beach and made our way to the foot of Ampersand. The climb started normally enough, following a slowly winding path, occasionally strewn with rocks and stones.
Then, friends, things took a turn.
Let me preface all of this by saying that I've hiked mountains in Colorado and Alaska, and also hiked Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in Scotland and the United Kingdom. I'm not so much a slouch when it comes to a good hike. But Ampersand? To quote a seasoned hiker we talked to the next day: "Ampersand is a bitch."
The meandering paths turned into straight up inclines, sometimes covered in mud and craggy boulders on what was supposed to be our casual afternoon hike. We went straight up with every step for fifteen minutes, then a half an hour, then well over an hour. Then two hours. Straight on, straight up, over rocks and boulders. It kept going.
Three-quarters of the way up the mountain I was convinced that the hike was over for me. "You guys, seriously, I think I'm just going to park my butt here and you can get me on the way down," I said.
Addison, Evan, and Dylan just smiled. They didn't say anything. I sighed and kept on marching up the mountain.
The view from the top made every aching and protesting muscle and tendon on the way up well worth it.
Addison and Evan near the top of Ampersand.
A view from the top.
Addison and Evan, engaged to be married next year, share a kiss near the peak.
Your faithful blogger, Josh H., at the top, totally grungy and washed out by the sun in this pic.
Addison, Evan, and Dylan after our ascent.
We made our descent, reclaimed our canoes, and paddled back to our site.
We made it back to our site just in time to watch the sun set. Addison built another roaring fire and we cooked dinner, afterward lazing around the fire pit to chat and eat s'mores until bedtime.
That night, however, we had a surprise visitor in our campsite.
In the middle of the night Dylan woke up in our tent, sure that he'd heard something outside. He quickly determined that it wasn't Addison or Evan and lifted his head to peek out of the tent's screen window. There, a matter of feet away, stood a brown bear, sniffing around our camp.
We had hung every last morsel of our food that wasn't canned (and stashed our canned goods out of sight), but the bear evidently recognized a human settlement and associated it with food. The bear huffed around the picnic table and then toddled over toward our tent. Dylan's eyes widened as the bear sniffed at our canvas dwelling. Dylan made a noise inside the tent and the bear stopped in its tracks. Without further fanfare it dawdled off back to the forest.
But not, of course, before chomping into our roll of aluminum foil sitting on the picnic table.
See those tear marks in the foil? Yep, bear teeth. Our clever little brown bear must have associated aluminum foil with food and took a nibble. (The jaw span is almost as wide as the roll of foil, by the way.) Not finding any food, the bear must have decided that our camp was no longer very interesting.
The next morning Dylan and I awoke early and decided to take the canoe out around the bay of the lake where we stayed. The stillness, quiet, and beauty of it all was a nice contrast to life in Manhattan.
The bear's visit was the hot topic of conversation and speculation back at camp during breakfast. When we'd finished eating we struck our site, taking everything down and doing our best to leave no trace that we'd ever been there.
We packed
everything back into our canoes and paddled to a meeting place where
the camping outfitters picked us up.
Soon we were back in our car after grabbing sandwiches and milk shakes, starting what would be a six-and-a-half hour drive back to New York City.
