North Country Vacation

  On the way off the summit of Algonquin we had a great view of Heart Lake with Mt. Jo next to it and in the distance, Whiteface Mountain.  I went up Mt. Jo in November of 1994 with a four-year-old and then recommended it too several high school seniors on a trip I chaperoned in 2014.  The four-year-old had no complaints once she got to take of her socks at the start; the seniors might as well have been on a death march up Everest.

  I wanted to bike up Whiteface on the toll road, I’d been up it on a bus on the senior trip and read many accounts of people doing it, Gail ran a race up once.  When we got to Wilmington for the turn to the toll road I was on my own and Gail was off to see what the town had to offer on a Saturday morning.  I stashed my panniers on the side of the road, climbed past Santa’s Village in North Pole, NY, past the turnoff to the NY State Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, and was half a mile from finding out if bicycles have to pay the toll when I heard a spoke break on my rear wheel.  That’s pretty much a trip ender.  I was able to release my rear brakes and adjust some other spokes to true the wheel enough that it would go around, but now I had over two miles down a steep road followed by 30 miles of steady downhill riding without a back brake.  In the past when a spoke broke that led to others breaking soon after. 

  I made it down the mountain road well enough, humiliated that a runner passed me, but with just front brakes I had to maintain a speed of about 5 mph.  I found Gail and we headed slowly for the ferry on Lake Champlain, I figured I could hitch a ride with one of the many pickups passing us if the wheel collapsed, but it held and I never had to slam on the front brakes enough to send me flying over the handlebars. 

  That was all ahead, first I had to figure out how to get up this rock ledge on Wright.  I knew when I saw it that the yellow markers on the rock weren’t the way to go.  Glad I figured it out though, Wright is “only” 4680’, but it has another exposed top for 360- degree views and I had a little time there to myself on that clear summer day.  Just down from the peak there was a crew of field researchers taking transits of plant growth.  The steward we talked with on Algonquin said re-vegetation is so successful in some places the bolts for their grids they measure can’t be found with metal detectors because they are buried in plant matter.

  
  We got a bit of fall color on some of our hikes and rides.  This was from near the trail to Marcy Dam.