Little River Portage by Larry Beahan

 Bernie Suskevitch, the ranger at Wanakena said, "Why sure.  You can make it through from Star Lake to Aldrich, now.  May be a few blowdowns.”

“Great!”

“Old Mister Schuler died.  He left his place to Clarkson University.  They sold it to the State.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Lot of people want to try it.  You'll be the first ones."

By golly, that was just what I was looking for, the chance to be first on something.  But I hadn't paid enough attention to the blowdown part.  It would have been smart to ask Bernie a few more questions.

I called my son, Nick, in Vermont. "Lets sneak-in a canoe trip, before the black flies wake-up."

"Great.  Where to?"

"I just got off the phone with Bernie Suskevitch, the ranger at Wanakena.  That Schuler inholding, the one that blocked the Little River portage, it belongs to the state now.  We can paddle past Grampa's old camp."

"Let's do it."

 We met at the Cranberry Lake Inn on a Friday night early in May.  The weather was damp and blustery.  The Inn had a “For Sale” sign.  An elderly couple were stretching out a meal in the dining room and two fishermen were watching TV with the barmaid.  A waitress greeted us with, "Sorry, no prime rib tonight."

We enjoyed our spaghetti and meatballs and caught each other up on family doings.  These outings with my kids are better than visiting at home.  They let us live together 24 hours a day; eat, sleep, paddle, hike, argue and talk.  If you do that with a stranger for a few days, they get to be like family.  With family they become people again, not just voices at the other end of “your preferred-long-distance-carrier.”

After dinner, the manager fiddled with the electric heater in our room so that it finally warmed up enough to take off our pile and fleece.  We poured over topo maps for the Oswegatchie and Little Rivers.  Nick agreed to my plan, a first time trip from Star Lake to Aldrich portaging the falls of the Little River.  In route we would pass the site of the old Yousey logging camp where Nick's grand dad was born. That accomplished, we would paddle the East branch of the Oswegatchie on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.  We thought we might make it a distance above High Falls in that much time.

Next morning, we were ordering pancakes at the Stone Manor Diner across from the Inn.  I said, "We ought to stop at Wanakena and let Suskevitch know we are actually going to do this trip."

"Sure," Nick answered.  He wasn't paying much attention.  He was busy negotiating for fruit in our pancakes.  The cook was all out of blueberries but she offered to try adding strawberry-sundae-topping to the batter.  These pancakes gave us plenty of carbohydrates but if you are ever in that situation consider having the strawberries on top instead of inside.

At Wanakena, Bernie was cordial and enthusiastic.  He came out of his front-porch office into the light rain with a cud of tobacco in his cheek.  He inspected our canoe and us in our big rubber boots, Gore-Tex hats, and rain suits and our canoe.  He spat and wished us well.

"We're going in off Young's Road back of Star Lake," I said.

"You'll be the first ones."

Nick asked, "Any special way to do the portage?"

"Keep an eye out for what's left of the footbridge.  Then get out at the concrete abutments of the old Schuler Road Bridge beyond that.  You best get out there on the North side.  Some folks got lost on them roads down on the south side last year."

"With a canoe?" I asked.

                                                    Larry Beahan and Canoe

"No.  Walking.  You ought to walk up the road to take a look at the Schuler cabin."

That seemed to pin things down.  We presumed we could carry up the road to the cabin, keep on going and put in below the falls, a big presumption.  We had read Paul Jamison's excellent description of the Little River.  He paddled up the river from Aldrich to the western edge of the inholding and he also paddled down to its other edge from Star Lake.  But he had never traversed the forbidden segment itself so he did not describe what lay between.

We had not bothered to ask Bernie whether he had inspected that in-between part, either.  He must have felt that he had covered that point, by conceding to us the honor of being first.  Playing the bold voyageurs as we did, he probably thought that we thought we knew what we were getting into.

I had tucked in the back of my mind an image of the Schuler inholding road. As I remembered, it looped briefly from the river at the inholding bridge, back to the river beyond the falls, while its main route ran past Readaway Ponds up to Star Lake.  It seemed a royal road past the falls and a bailout option if it did not work as a portage.

We drove the Coffin's Mills road out of Oswegatchie Village to Aldrich.  We planned to drop one of our two cars along the woods road that follows the bed of the old Carthage and Adirondack Railroad.  The road parallels a stretch of the Little River, near Aldrich, before bearing off to Streeter Lake.  The road was, ominously, gated.  There were signs giving mileage, prohibiting camping and warning of wind damage.

As we drove back toward Star Lake, I said, "Nice name, Coffin's Mills.  Sounds grim."

"No.  It's just a common New England name, " Nick said.  I was reassured.  At least he wasn't spooked.

We loaded our 17 foot Kevlar Wenona with enough gear to get us through the night, in a pinch.  We put it into the water where the Little River passes under Young's Road.  Within fifty yards we were lifting over and working around blowdowns.  Within one hundred and fifty we were in what seemed to us an impenetrable jungle growing out of the water.

"See that yellow blaze?" Nick said.  "Maybe that's a portage “ around this stuff."

"Maybe, let's take a look."

We looked and we looked and we climbed blowdown and crawled over slash left from salvage logging and we found no clear way by land or water.  Here and there we found patches of yellow paint and some sections of skid road.  We got separated.  Near somebody's old camp, Nick finally found water that bore some resemblance to river but seemed to have no way to get to it.  We found each other, using our whistles, went back for the canoe and by turns threaded and wrestled it through blowdown, slash and brush into water.  Later we realized that those yellow blazes had nothing to do with a portage.  They were State property lines.

                                                              Little River Blowdown

There followed a peaceful interlude of paddling with only a few ordinary blowdowns and strainers.  We never did identify Tamarack Creek that should have joined the river at about our second put-in.  We also did not see the remains of the old footbridge.  We did start to hear some roaring water and we noted the walls of the riverbank rising into a canyon ahead.  Then, we saw what remained of the Schuler Road Bridge.  Marvelously alerted by that roar, we exited just above the bridge and began our carry.  The 1500 pace canoe carry, on the road, was a pleasant contrast to the bushwhack.

As we walked along under the canoe something about the lay of the land made me wonder if I had read the map correctly.  I said, "Do you suppose this road runs right down to the river on the other side of the falls?"

"I thought you said you saw that on a map somewhere."

"In Jamison's book...there looks like a kind of a loop of road from the bridge, back to the river," I answered.

"I hope you saw right."

A more careful look, later, showed that the loop was above the falls not around them. 

At the height-of-land we came out from under our canoe and set our packs down.  We understood, right away, why old man Schuler was reluctant to share this place.  It's an eagle's nest perched high above the roaring water of the falls.  The cabin is without a roof but a few paces off the veranda and you are on a rocky outcrop.  There, below, white foaming water pours out of a jagged rock crevasse.  Downstream, boulders keep the water churning for a quarter of a mile.  Green forest surrounds it all.

The sun had broken through and dried the grass tolerably.  We took out bagels and cheddar cheese and we lay down to refresh ourselves.  The view and our anticipated victory added relish to the meal.

A road does seem to continue on past the cabin down river.  We hoisted our burdens and started on, negotiating one or two more blowdowns before finding the road to dead end in the woods.  So we carried back to the cabin and did some scouting without our packs and canoe.  A path leads from the cabin to a spring half way down the canyon wall.  An aluminum dipper still hangs at the spring.  We worked our way to the canyon floor and bolder-hopped out into the river to get a full view of the waterfall.  The rushing waters and giant rocks are a soothing, hypnotic sight.  They held us there in awe for twenty minutes as we pondered how to get past them and the rapids that stretched beyond.

                                           Nick Beahan below Schuler Falls in the Little River

The tangled shore looked almost as tough as the tumbling river.  We retreated up the canyon still dimly hoping for some road access to the river.  We did find a road that looked promising.  We followed it as it branched off the Schuler Road a few hundred yards north of the cabin.  But several blowdowns later we came to its end, in woods.  By then it was 3:30, so we decided to carry out by the road to Star Lake.  It was about a mile and would not have been a bad carry except for our disappointment and weariness.

We stopped off at Wanakena.  Bernie broke away from the gathering at the Saturday Barbecue in the little park in front of his house.  A light misty rain had begun again so the group were mostly huddled in the shelter.

"Did you make it?" he called as he approached.

"Nope," Nick responded.

"What happened?"

"It's a jungle from Young's Road over towards Schuler's," I put in.

"That so?  It was all cleared out last year."

I shook my head, "It's a terrible mess now."

 "And there's no way to get past the rapids, once you are around the falls," Nick added.

"You don't say.  Well that's valuable information.  Thanks, for letting me know."

"I wouldn't advise anyone else to go that way, `til it’s cleared out a little better," I said.

"I don't know if they are going to do anything about that.  You might want to write to the Unit Manager at Potsdam and see what you can get them to do."

"Have you ever been through there?" Nick asked.

Bernie moved the tobacco to his other cheek.  "No never have.  Been to both ends.  Not this year, though."

"We're going to try the Oswegatchie tomorrow." I said.

"That should be a lot easier, `til you get up above High Falls.  Had some people come through from Lowe's Lake the other day.  The portage was clear but the river was pretty bad up above the falls."

Two years before, Nick and I had looked at the far end of the Lowe's-Lake-Oswegatchie portage right after the disastrous microburst blowdown had devastated the area.  We could have walked the route five feet off the ground hopping from downed tree to downed tree but no one could have gotten a canoe through there then.  At least what we had been through along the Little River was nothing like that.

"We'll let you know if we come out alive," Nick added.

Bernie shook hands with us both and ducked for cover back toward the shelter, "See you."

Sunday the weather started bright and windy on the Oswegatchie but it was all clear paddling back and forth on its meanders.  We rested at High Rock to wonder at the uprooted trees and admire fiddleheads and little yellow flowers blooming, hawks sailing, herons cruising and little formations of ducks.  As we paddled, a couple of nice big deer watched us, unafraid as we watched them.

We camped at the lean-to just beyond Griffin's Rapids where the trail comes in from Cage Lake.  I had spent a night there ten years before with my older son, Teck, on a hike from Aldrich to Wanakena by way of Cage Lake.  An old map had led us to think that a bridge crossed the river there.  A couple of fishermen in a canoe graciously saved us from an October swim by providing ferry service.

On the present trip, Nick and I ran into rain Sunday night and most of Monday.  He was snug and dry in his tent, reading.  I was pacing back and forth in the lean-to, itching to do something.  Things looked even darker to me than they really were since I had forgotten my regular glasses and had to wear prescription sunglasses the whole time.

Nick said, "You know I slept in late this morning so that we'd be in the same time frame, in terms of perceived light."

"Thanks, a lot, Nick."

To pass the time, he read to us from the lean-to's thick logbook.  There were tales of floods, mosquitoes, campfires and good times.  One entry was particularly intriguing.  It was about someone being chased into a tree by a bear.  When the victim licked the bear in a fair fight we began to realize that the story was about as reliable as Nick's reason for sleeping in.

Late that morning, at my urging, we took off upstream in the rain.  It was still raining by mid afternoon and we were damp, so damp we could feel the mildew growing inside of our rain suits.  We voted and I won.  So we headed back for dry beds at the Cranberry Lake Inn.

By the time we came to the take-out at Inlet the weather had changed into a beautiful sunshiny day.  Just then the black flies came-to.  They bloomed in the sun and swarms descended upon us. We threw our canoe on the car roof.   Unable to lash it properly, for the bugs in our eyes, ears and mouths, we put one line over the canoe and dashed out of the swarming area.

The next day, Tuesday, we still had half a day so we put on head nets and walked back to explore the Little River portage sans canoe.  It is an easy walk from Star Lake, past the pretty Readaway ponds to the falls.

There we descended the canyon again and worked our way along the riverbank.  Back in the woods, for a time, there was a game path paralleling the water.  Spruce brush, boulders and blowdown covered most of the route past the rapids.  Walking was difficult enough not to tempt us to try that way with the canoe until someone had been through there with an axe and a crosscut saw, us if necessary.

The river is rough almost all the half-mile from the falls to the site of the Yousey camp.  The 1916 New York Oswegatchie Quadrangle shows the camp on the south bank opposite a small brook near which a road, from Star Lake to Aldrich, crosses the Little River.  I think we found that brook which, my Uncle Raymond says, was "Sometimes known as Beahan Creek." (Perhaps it was so known by him and his little cousin Bessie.)

Raymond remembered fishing behind a dam and from a corduroy bridge across the river.  Jamison describes, "a rock reef clear across the stream bed,” as "the signal that you have nearly reached the W. edge of the half mile wide private land."

Jamison's rock reef is there.  I suspect that it is the remains of the dam and the bridge.  But there is little else to suggest that a road once crossed the river there.

We wanted to cross to the camp on the south side of the river but lots of water was pouring through.  The river is thirty to forty feet wide there and up to four or five feet deep.  It was too chilly for a swim so we left that for next time.

We had a great farewell dinner at the Twin Spruce, which appears to be the first new restaurant in Star Lake in the last fifty years.  The french fries and apple pie there are the kind that are worth every bit of their cholesterol, the kind to die for.

As we shook hands to part, Nick said, "It wouldn't take much."

"You want to?"

"With a little help."

"I'll call that guy at the DEC, that Bernie told us about."

"You got to come along, too."

"Let's do it."

                        Uncle Raymond Beahan and a Cousin Leo on a Corduroy Bridge in the 1920's

This story is a part of our negotiations with the DEC to get rid of those strainers and to cut a portage around the falls of the Little River. If you want to get into the act, speak to Pat Whalen about it.  He's, the DEC Unit Management Planner for the Little River at 6739 U.S. Highway 11, Potsdam NY 13676.  Tell him you would like to make this trip and that you would particularly like to help saw through some of that blowdown.