Three days in the Five Ponds
Journal of a canoeist lost in a wilderness idyll
By Brian Mann, Explorer Correspondent
Since coming to the Adirondacks, I’d been hearing about the
classic canoe route that begins on the Bog River Flow and
winds through the Five Ponds Wilderness toward Cranberry
Lake. This northwestern section of the Park contains some of the
most remote forests and rivers in the East. The Adirondack Council
has proposed creating a 409,000-acre Bob Marshall Great Wilderness
in the area. One spring weekend, I checked it out with David
Sommerstein, a colleague at North Country Public Radio.
DAY ONE
Driving down the gravel road past
Horseshoe Lake, the morning seems handmade.
It’s just warm enough that we can
rest our elbows out the open windows of
the truck, but cool enough that there’s not a
black fly or a mosquito in sight. My partner
is new to the North Country, new to paddling
in the Adirondacks. For two weeks
we’ve been swapping excited e-mails and
phone calls, working out the details of our
escape. Now it’s Friday morning, and
ahead of us lies a long weekend, a pristine
lake, and a pair of winding rivers.
We’re heading for the Bog River, which
will take us west through Lows Lake. Then
we’ll face the long carry to the headwaters
of the Oswegatchie River. After that we’ll
follow the river, curving north toward
Cranberry Lake. In all, we’ll canoe and
hike through 50 miles of wild country that
Paul Jamieson, the canoe guidebook
author, called “a picture gallery of the
North Woods.”
The put-in is a strip of muddy beach at
Lower Lows Dam. The confinement was
first built by millionaire August Low in the
late 1800s to generate electricity for his
camp and his various industries. The dam
also created one of the finest stretches of
flat water in the Adirondacks, famous for
loons and pristine views. After loading the
canoe, we’re off, sliding upstream against
the soft current. Almost at once we are surrounded
by compositions of fern and rock
and dark water. I stroke easily in the stern,
listening to the rich variety of bird calls.
My eye catches on the steepling white
pines and the vivid, mottled mosses.
Here’s a little secret, something David
doesn’t know. I’m a lousy outdoorsman.
Well, not lousy, maybe, but definitely forgetful.
I see a view or a plant and I get so
ab-sorbed that I forget everything else.
First thing you know I’ve lost the tent poles
or the map or the trail. This morning, I
pause to write happily in my journal about
loon cries and the white-blossoming shadbush
along the shore. What I’m forgetting
is wind. Lows Lake, 11 miles long, is
famous for sudden zephyrs that tip canoes
and swamp guideboats. I’ve read the warnings
and should be paying attention, but at
midday we’re only halfway up the lake and
there’s already a stiff headwind. Nasty
curls of white sweep around the boat as our
bow lifts and drops with a frightening thud.
We dig and fight to keep our direction, as
the water turns slate gray and the clouds
scud past.
Fortunately, I’ve done a bit of research
and know to keep to the north shore, where
it’s possible to hide behind a pair of T-shaped juts of land. Paddling in the lee of
these peninsulas, we work our way slowly
to the west end of the lake. “I was a little
nervous when the waves looked like they
were about to start coming in the boat,”
David confides later. “We slogged through
it, though, out on that wide, open water.”
All my life I’ve wanted to be the sort of
woodsman who doesn’t slog, who doesn’t
trip over his own two feet, but I love being
out there so much that I often get distracted.
Maybe that’s why Verplanck Colvin,
who first explored this country in the late
1800s, once wrote that a good map sometimes
gives a better sense of a place than a
firsthand look. A map, he said, is a collection
of ideas.
That night––after the first short carry
––we camp at Big Deer Pond. Finally, I
start to slow down. I stop writing in my
journal. I stop rubbernecking. David and I
just sit for a while, listening to the chirruping
frogs and the wind.
DAY TWO
Here’s the thing about maps. On a piece
of paper, the crossing from Lows Lake to
the Oswegatchie River looks harmless. It’s
a few inches of delicate blue lines. On some
level, I understand that it’s really a matter of
miles. I understand that the boat and all our
gear have to be lifted on our backs and carried
through a tangle of witchhobble and
alder. This area—known as the Five Ponds
Wilderness—was hit in 1995 by a huge
windstorm. Swaths of mighty pine and
hemlock were tossed around like Lincoln
Logs. Helicopters were used to evacuate
fishermen and campers. As we struggle
along, the forest is a gray snarl of snapped
timber. “It’s just all chopped right off,”
David says, pausing to catch his breath,
“like someone took a huge weed-whacker
and cut everything right off.”
It’s sort of surreal, stumbling along in
the middle of a wrecked forest, no water
anywhere in sight, carrying a bright-red
16-foot Kevlar canoe. But finally, after
four hours on the trail, we come to the
upper reaches of the Oswegatchie. Last
winter, I came home from skiing with a
bruise so big that my wife took a picture of
it. The whole time, she looked at me with
that expression, that “Why do you do it to
yourself?’’ look. Standing by the amber
water of the river, I think: This is why.
This, right here. The rest of that morning,
we play. We paddle the tightest oxbows in
the world, ducking under white pine logs,
scrambling over beaver dams. We lift the
boat a dozen times, splashing waist-deep
in the frosty stream.”
This part I am good at. Heaving, pulling
the boat, balancing barefoot on logs,
spooking beaver and river otters with our
gleeful shouts. It’s Huckleberry Finn stuff,
not outdoorsmanship. There’s a late lunch,
eaten while sprawled out in a meadow
above the river. “The black ribbon of the
Oswegat-chie,” David says, waxing poetic
as he munches on a carrot. “It just goes
back and forth and back and forth. The
water’s so clear but in this sort of teabrown
way. The white pines that stick up,
sort of scraping the sky, are really nice.”
The day is cloudless and mild. It lures
us on. We paddle until midafternoon.
Then, after setting up camp, we head off
on the trail that leads south into the heart
of the Five Ponds Wilderness, to Big Shallow
Pond and Washbowl. We hike along
dazzling creeks, tiptoe through sucking
bogs, scramble up hills so steep that trillium
and trout lilies are at eye level. We
march until fatigue makes us giddy. And
then farther until we’re still and somber, as
if measuring ourselves against the silence
of the forest.
There’s no more iconic spot in the Adirondacks
than the log lean-to at Big Shallow
Pond. We pause to rest as the late
afternoon sun slants across the water, not
so much lighting the grassy meadow as
filling it with color. How serene it is. How
far from civilization. “There’s just a good
stretch of nothing,” David remarks.
This is what we’ve come for. A good
stretch of nothing. Bob Marshall, the legendary
conservationist, defined a wilderness
as an undisturbed place large enough
so that you can walk across it for three
days. Here you can feel this kind of space.
You can feel it in the ache in your bones.
DAY THREE
In the morning, we wake up to find a
thin crust of ice covering our tent. David
cooks breakfast, pancakes this time. When
we’ve eaten and cleaned up, it’s time to go
swimming. High Falls is a wonderful cascade
that divides the Oswegatchie neatly
in half. The jumble of rocks is just big
enough to boil up a good flume. Right in
the middle, there’s a perfect, ice-cold
swimming hole. We leap in and feel the
current snatch our breath away, leaving
just enough wind for long, coyote howls.
A half-dozen times, we dive in and let
the water draw us over the first smooth
rocks. Then we crawl out and nap in the
morning sun. Our final day seems to evaporate.
The hours dissolve as we pack up
and paddle away downstream.
As we slip past Glasby Creek and Buck
Brook, the growing river does more of the
work, taking over for our aching backs.
The payoff for our long carry seems more
and more generous. The headwind on
Lows Lake seems a distant hardship. We
pause as a run of trout passes under the
boat, wave after wave of glinting life.
Then we rattle clumsily down through
Griffin Rapids, out into a broad valley,
thick with alders, busy with red-winged
blackbirds. Soon we come to High Rock,
the last place to get a lookout before the
trip is done. From here, after scrambling
up the pine-scented path, you can see how
the river turns and twists. It looks like a
child took a finger and traced a crazy path
through the russet meadow.
“I’m amazed,” David says. “Coming
through these oxbows, the wilderness
looks so vast. It looks like this valley goes
on forever. But then you get up here and it
looks sort of manageable.”
An easy couple of hours from the takeout,
it does seem manageable. It feels like
we could fold it all away – the river and
the low hills and the distant ponds – and
put it in a pocket. Maybe that’s what
Colvin meant with his talk of maps. Not
just a few lines or markings on a piece of
paper, but a living collection of ideas: the
memories of smells and sounds, the intimate
sense of distance and rugged earth,
and the perfect joy of passing through it.
Map by Nancy Bernstein
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