Adirondack High Peaks Memorial Day By Larry Beahan

Brilliant blue sky, little white snowflakes in the air and no bugs. It’s a perfect day to hike Mount Marcy’s Klondike Trail, roll huge rocks into place, chop blow-down and whack brush so that hikers may ascend at their ease. Marcy, at 5250 feet, is the tallest of the High Peaks. Its rocky summit is the highest spot in New York State. At its foot, two dozen of us assemble in South Meadow off the road to ADK Loj (Adirondack Mountain Club’s lodge---the club has a spelling system of its own). There is a sign on a small tent, in front of which are stacked 25-pound steel pry bars, long-handled shovels and broad-billed mattocks. The sign reads:

ADK NIAGARA CHAPTER

MEMORIAL DAY

KLONDIKE TRAIL WORK WEEKEND

 For something like 20 years, Clark Hall spark-plugged this tradition. On Memorial Day weekend, ADK’s Niagara Chapter comes to work and play on Marcy, the mountain that the Mohawks call Tahawus or Cloud Splitter.  Now that Clark has to watch from above the clouds split by Tahawus, Jim Wulf, his old hiking pal, is trail boss. We continue the job and the fun in Clark’s name.  We Beahans are well represented. I’m here with two grown sons, Nick and Teck, and a good-sized grandson, Alex.  Alex’s sister, Angie, his mother, Cindy and grandmother Lyn are sleeping-in at the motel. Their assignment is to join us at South Meadow with lunch.

We shake hands with some of our own old hiking buddies. One says to me, “I was just over to Glasby Pond and hiked Cat Mountain. Remember that trip?”

  “Yeah, I remember.  We could hear beavers talking inside the lodge. They still doin’ that?” I answer.

“Nah, but they’re still workin’,” he says.

Teck reminisces with two other guys about climbing Mount La Plata and Harvard in Colorado with Clark years ago.  I remember I could only eat a quarter of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich up there at 14,000 feet but it was worth it for the spectacular view.

Jim shows us the list of jobs that need doing, “Pick out what appeals to yah, and grab your tools,” he says.

 It’s a long complicated list: Brush Trimmers, Drainage Cleaners, Blowdown Lumberjacks, Rock Work Project, Move Outhouse, Lean-to Roof Removal of Moss, Trail Blazers, Potluck Cookout.   I’m most interested in this last item and read the details, Potluck Cookout at Peter and Marilyn Gillespie’s. Hmm, includes “hot hors d’oeuvres.” Sounds delicious.

“ Jim,” I say. “It’s too complicated. Just tell us what to do. Only thing is we have to meet our women folk back here at South Meadow for lunch.”

A dark cloud passes over Jim’s face. A glint flashes off his round glasses as his jaw tightens and a sharper tone creeps into his voice. “That’ll be a long walk back here to South Meadow. We are workin’ our way the two and a half miles into the lean–to for noon. Everyone will meet there. Up there, we got to roll stones down the slope to fill the mud holes and then we have to dig a pit to move the outhouse to.”

I exchange glances with the boys. If Jim wants us at the lean-to at noon, what will we do about the girls? They are planning to meet us here at South Meadow for lunch. What about lunch?  “I got a sandwich, half a cucumber and some raisins and walnuts we can split,” I suggest.

They don’t look too interested.

Teck says, “I can walk back. It’ll be OK. We have to consider, that we said we’d meet ‘em.”

Nick says, “Two round trips, two-and-a-half miles each way, ten miles? That’s awful considerate. They’ll understand if we don’t show.”

Of course Cindy is not his wife.

Teck shrugs and leaves it up in the air.

The three of us take three pry bars, and young Alex picks up a shovel. “We’ll go right in and start rollin’ rocks,” I tell Jim. The sunshine flows back into his face. We start up the trail, closed in tightly on either side by bushy greenery. Here the trail on the forest floor is barely an eight-inch-wide swath cut through a heavy layer of moss. Ahead, Marcy’s summit is buried behind hills that are covered in the dense canopies of tree tops.

Son-of-a-gun, this pry bar must weigh 50 pounds, plus my backpack is full of emergency gear, plus I’m not getting any younger. I yell back to Chuck, another old guy panting his way up, “This trail is a lot steeper than it used to be.”  

When he gets his breath he wheezes back, “I noticed that.”

Alex trots along. He doesn’t notice the steepness.

When Nick is signing us in at the DEC trail registry, he leans his pry bar against the trunk of a mighty oak, and since his bar looks considerably smaller than mine, I make a quick switch. One of our crew, passing us, says “Be careful. It’s easy to lose those things. Stuck in the ground, they look just like a tree.”

Hmm, easy to lose huh! That’s an interesting solution, I think to myself.

 We crawl over the 20-inch diameter trunk of a beech tree blown down across the trail last winter. Big Mike comes up behind us with an ax balanced on his shoulder. We pause to watch his first few swings. Teck says, “Who wants to bet he’ll be through in under fifty chops.”

Mike’s flying chips were making that bet too clear. There were no takers.

We cross streams where Jim and Clark had, in previous years, supervised the building of small wooden bridges, and others where their carefully placed stepping stones had come to look like the glacier had set them just right.  I climb a step-like pattern of stones up a muddy gorge wall and think, how easy they make the climb. Easy if I wasn’t carrying this damn pry bar.

Higher up I’m sweating despite the cool temperature. We stop for a breather. I pull off a fleece sweatshirt, stow it in my pack and take a long drink from my canteen. We are in a stand of beautiful birch trees with their white bark shedding in broad streamers.  Teck, picking up a few sheets from the ground says, “I’m going to take some of this home for fire-starter.”

I say, “It looks like there’s enough for a canoe.”

 It’s really wet here. Some of the crew stops to use mattocks and shovels and open a water bar that is clogged. (A water bar is a rock or log channel built diagonally across the trail to route the flow of water off the trail.) Alex pitches in with his shovel and gets a big kick out of freeing the dammed-up water and guiding it away.

We come to the muddy downhill slope, just short of   Klondike lean-to and one of the guys says, “This is where Jim wants us to put rocks in to harden-up the trail.”

I check, “Are we almost to the lean-to?”

The guy says, “Yes,” and asks, “Have you been in there before?”

That gives me my opening and I get to brag, “Teck and I helped tear down the old lean-to and build the new one in 1989 and 1990. We were on snowshoes. We dragged tarpaper shingles out on kids’ little, plastic saucer-sleds.  There was a big ice storm and the woods were covered in it so the Rangers let us burn the wood. What a fire that was.”

Now, six of us set to work in this mire. We dig and pry boulders into place. We go into the woods, uphill, find rocks, and roll or lug them down the slope to fit them together in a jig-saw puzzle of a walkway. It is hard, dirty work, but pleasing when we  see a walkway develop through the mud. After a bit, Alex and I let the sturdier crew members work on, and we take up building a fence of fallen branches to divert people from the old path to our new one.

“Alex, stand there. I want to get a picture of you in front of our fence,” I call. Alex obliges with a pose and a smile.

            With the satisfaction of Inca stone masons or Roman road builders, we head up toward the lean-to. The bunch ahead of us has scrubbed the moss off the roof. Dave is down in the new privy pit. He calls, “Hey, let me have that pry bar. I got a rock down here.” 

            “Ok, but come up out of there a minute. I need to use the hole,” someone answers.

            Our family crew goes on to inspect the lean-to, take pictures and share the little bit of lunch we have between us. The boys find the lean-to diary filled with campers’ entries including one by Clark with a picture of us building the place. On the back wall, still bright and shiny, is the plaque that Clark put there with the name of my son’s missing brother, Jesse Beahan.  He was a good hiker and would have liked this place, I think. No one speaks.

            The girls meet us half way up and, in a batch of ferns, we share a sumptuous though belated lunch. We now speak of little things about Jess and his brothers, how when we had steak they rotated who goy to pick first and how Jess loved his share of the chocolate chip cookie dough raw.

            In the evening, all us Klondike workers gather at Marilyn and Peter Gillespie’s in Saranac Lake. They are from Buffalo but have retired to “Live the dream, a life in the Adirondacks.” Marilyn shows us the half dozen intricate and lovely quilts she has crafted and fills our ears with her  plans for summer canoeing trips. We tour the garage filled with ten canoes most of which Peter made himself, light-weight, wood-strip beauties.  The kitchen is jammed with cake, pie, beans, potato salad, vegetables, dip, macaroni, sliced fruit and cold chicken. Peter presides at the grill over Italian sausage, hot dogs and hamburgers. There is wine and beer and pop and tons and tons of conversation and good cheer.

            The work day behind us, we rise early on Sunday to play. We take the canoe out into Lake Placid with the sun barely up. Alex enjoys the fishing even without catching any fish. Teck and I enjoy the paddle. Then the whole family enjoys a climb up Whiteface Mountain.

In the old days we walked up this mountain and lengthened the trip with a detour onto Esther, one of Whiteface’s shoulders. That gave us two peaks to add to our list of 4600-footers conquered. Today is not quite like that. We drive up the mountain.  And only climb the final twenty-six-story-high rock scramble where the way has been eased by a more professional construction crew than ours.

We lounge in the sunshine to drink in the 100-mile view of green forest, blue lake and gray mountain. We are glad to be a family, together, in such a spectacular place.  Thanks Clark. See you later Jess.