My New Hiking Buddy/The destroyer of our nice things

About two weeks ago, we welcomed a new friend into our apartment. Craigslist made him seem nice enough, nice enough for us to overlook the whole "7 month old" part of the ad. We had looked around for a few weeks for a dog, after finding a husky/timberwolf mix on craigslist, we had our sights set on something with husky in it. The first few dog opportunities we found fell through, and then, well, then there was Benji . The ad was posted in Vermont; we figured it couldn't be much more than an hour so we called the ad-placer and decided to meet them later that same day. We told them on the phone we were a little more than an hour away, but after mapquesting the address we realized it would take about twice as long as we thought it would to get there. Nevertheless, we drove out through the developing snow storm to find our new friend. Halfway to our destination, the roads were getting a little icy, my Subaru AWD kicked in as always and we couldn't have felt any safer. Can't say the same for the newer Chevy 4x4 Truck in front of us that looked as if it would careen off the road at any given moment. After nearly two hours of driving, we arrived in a small little town, Windsor, VT. As we drove in I couldn't help but feel a sense of familiarity, and a minute later we realized why. For our final 2d assignment at art school, we were assigned a landscape painting to accompany a piece of classical music (the feeling evoked from the painting was meant to mimic that of the music). It was our last final due and all of us were sleep deprived (and mentally deprived) from an overwhelming semester of art school, so we decided we'd drive (from CT) to Vermont to do our projects. We drove without much of a destination in mind, the only guide was the compass on my watch which I made sure stayed pointing North. It was in the same small of Windsor, Vermont that we would park in a high school parking lot and sleep four to the trunk of a honda civic in late December (we woke up freezing, despite the mass amounts of blankets we brought) and wake up to the sunrise over Mt. Ascutney in the distance. We figured the two events were a bit of a coincidence, so we overlooked them and concentrated on finding our dogs address. After much turning around back and forth on the main street of the town, we finally found our road - at the end of which was the exact area where I had chosen to paint my landscape . We assumed this was some kind of awesome form of good luck - if it was, it hasn't shown itself yet (kidding, wait, am i?). We met Benji (he barked at us at first, then we realized he just wanted to play). He had a hell of a lot of energy but I figured that was for the best since Rachel doesn't enjoy wrestling with me as much as a teenage Husky - Border Collie mix would. We talked to the owner for a while and paid a small adoption fee, and then we were back on our way. We stopped at a little farmer's market on the way back and picked up some awesome cream cheese dip - the five minutes we spent with Benji in the car had us returning to one sad looking puppy. We drove the rest of the way home and introduced him to the Adirondacks. He seemed to enjoy everything about our apartment, everything except our possessions - he kept to chewing on just his chew toys which we thought was great for his age. My nalgene bottles cap would prove us wrong the next day. After reprimanding him thoroughly and trying to teach him chewing was wrong, I guess he got it in his head that just chewing up my stuff was wrong. We left him home for a little while the next day since we had a lab class, and returned to find that he had made hasty work out of most of the contents of Rachel's brand new North Face pack (as well as the side pockets and straps of it) and of her favorite pair of shoes. He's getting a little better about all the chewing, or at least he was, until today. Maybe he decided he'd send off his chewing fit with a bang - at least we hope it's over. We came to the car after a short class period to find my brand new water purifier demolished (it was still in the package and we thought it was well out of his reach). Then the worst of it came. When I went to pull on my seat belt, I reached up to nothing. He had chewed right through the belt and had apparently sent it flying right back into the retraction system. I drove seatbeltless (one of the few times in my life) to the Subaru dealer down the road only to receive some even worse news - they wanted to charge me $350 for a new driver's side seatbelt. After my initial shock of hearing this, I pulled myself together and checked out craigslist - the first guy I talked to told me he could take it out of the car he was selling for scraps for $30. Wow. Dealerships sure are legitimate places of business. We're trying to figure out the best way to deal with his chewing, and we're still loving him unconditionally and taking him snowshoeing as much as possible. Let's just hope the BPA in the nalgene bottles doesn't affect him too much.

Benji's List of Destruction

• Rachel's Backpack
• 3 Tubes of Chapstick
• My Subaru Nalgene's Cap
• Rachel's Nalgene
• Water Purifier
• Seatbelt
• Rachels Shoes
• My Teva Sandals made of Cork and Leather (Tasty!)
• He threw up some of the sandal and we just caught him trying to get it out of the trash can that we got rid of the cleaner - upper materials in. Hey! Get out of there!
• His nice leash
• A notebook made of sugar cane fiber

I'm also gonna give a "shout out" to "The Health Nut" who is giving away a BPA free Nalgene over at her blog.

Post #3: NY to VT by ice

Well, here I am on my third post. Seems momentous, but who knows, I can't say I know a whole lot about blogging. A couple of weeks ago we decided to take a drive through the Vermont countryside. It has a nice air to it, something about the scenery evokes the same feelings as the countryside of France does. We left early in the day in search of a farmers market or an orchard with a store open more than just seasonally. We got on the road and drove through the dacks for a little while, wondering when we'd be hitting the Vermont border. I had set google maps to avoid any ferry crossings (here's my car on the ferry over the summer) over Lake Champlain knowing we wouldn't have much luck with the seasonal ferry (Champlain freezes pretty darn quickly in the winter, as we found out). So after getting to Ticonderoga, we were a little worried. I finally followed a sign pointing to where the ferry would be in any other season - We reached the Lake to find a guy sitting on the tailgate of his truck staring out at the lake. We asked him if he knew where we might be able to cross. He chuckled, pointed at our side of the lake and dragged his finger through the air until it fell pointing at the other side of the lake. My heart kind of dropped, I've been in love with my Subaru since the day I got it - the fact that I had a dream about my car falling through an icy lake a month prior didn't make me feel too much better. I hopped out of the car and wandered out to a Ford truck parked halfway between NY and VT, an area I was more comfortable with when it was water. I was reassured that people "had been doin' it for weeks," and that I'd be fine. I jogged (or whatever you wanna call trying to walk fast on ice) back to my car and hopped in. I turned on the ignition and started driving. I'm used to snowshoeing across ice covered ponds - even there the cracks you hear beneath you sound like muted gunshots. The car did awesome (to no ones surprise, Subaru's AWD is best, you know), but getting to that other side was relieving. We drove up to the Orchard we had planned on going to only to be told that (despite what it said online), they were closed for the season. I figured I'd find a little health food store or market somewhere and try to scope out a specific type of maple syrup instead, called "Northern Comfort" that I had read about in an outdoors magazine a while back. We ended up driving out and heading into a few small towns to check out the area as well. We saw an awesome little dam in one of the towns that was creating a sweet glacial looking buildup near the falls. Didn't take any pictures of it, but now I'm wishing I did. We drove back down a ways to a small town in VT about 20 miles away from our apartment and headed back home, unfortunately without any luck finding the maple syrup.

Trip Report (Indian Head and Rainbow Falls), 2/21/2009

I got a chance to go up to the AMR (Adirondack Mountain Reserve) to do some snowshoeing a few weeks ago with ACC ROCX, my schools group of outdoors enthusiasts. We left ACC around 7:30, the drive would be about an hour and twenty minutes to the AMR parking lot. When we arrived, the weather was perfect - the sky blue and the temperature just around -4°C (about 25°F). We planned a couple of short hikes within the preserve; first we would hit Rainbow Falls and eat lunch, then move onto Indian Head, a cliff offering up some of the best views of the Dacks I have seen to date. We hiked in to the AMR from the parking lot (about 0.95 miles), strapped into our snowshoes and set out. The wind on the road to the reserve had been blistering, but tree cover helped us out as we started towards our destinations. We hiked up Lake Road another 2.7 miles until we reached a dam and a bridge crossing over Lower Ausable Lake. Mt. Colvin and Sawteeth loomed over the area, jutting more than 2000 feet up from the base of the lake. We stopped for a minute and hydrated, then crossed the bridge approaching the falls . It was a short hike to Rainbow Falls , I would say (by estimation) somewhere around half of a mile. The falls were beautiful. They had become icy cascades of blue, and formed over top of each other like something from a story book. We spent a few more minutes here and then descended back to the dam where we ate a quick lunch (some trail mix I whipped up earlier that morning from cereal and raisins and a clif bar), and headed up to Indian Head. Indian Falls would provide the best views of the day. Lower Ausable Lake cut between Colvin and Sawteeth in an awesome fashion. Much of the great range was visible to the North, though my attention was drawn mostly to the sprawl of the southeast scenery. We hiked back to the parking lot a satisfied bunch and caculated the whole RT to be just under ten miles. For dinner we all went to the Noonmark Diner where I hungrily munched down grilled cheese and a veggie burger.

Pictures not taken by me this time.

Old Trip Report (Winter ascent of Marcy, 1/3/2009)

Seeing as I meant to start up a blog a couple of months ago, I figured I'd make my first post about a day trip I made early in January.  I spent most of November and December planning some sort of an adventure for the holiday break.  I wanted to get out to Colorado to try my hand at some winter fourteeners or to get some backcountry snowboarding in with friends, but money was not on my side (nor was the prospect of wasting that much gas or money on a bus ticket that would prove itself more useful in the summertime).  So i opted to stay in the northeast.  I changed my plans to work themselves around a winter ascent of Mt. Marcy (5344' elevation), the highest point in New York.  Marcy is 14.8 miles RT, and is a hell of a tiring winter hike.  Some people take a day or two extra to camp out, but i figured I wouldn't have too much trouble doing it as a day hike (I did pack enough extra gear to be suited for an overnight, which ended up weighing me down 25 pounds or so, but I'm sure I wouldn't have regretted it had I run into any trouble up there).  The day itinerary fell into place as follows:

Saturday, January 3, 2009

4:30 AM:  Depart from Albany with too little sleep (oops).

-  Sometime between these two got pulled over by a cop with a mohawk in Lake George while trying to find a gas station, he was friendly and pointed me towards a gas station.

6:45 AM:  Arrive at Adirondack Loj.

7:00 AM:  Depart from ADK Loj via Van Hoevenberg Trail with light snow falling and headlamp on.

7:45 AM:  Got treated to a beautiful sunrise at Marcy Dam , 5.1 miles to go!

9:15 AM:  More Beautiful views from Indian Falls, got to see Algonquin and the Macintyre Range snowcapped and caked in clouds.  No wind cover was provided here and it served as a reminder as to what windchill can do to predicted temperatures..  3 Miles to Go!

10:10 AM:  Reached trail marker which happily informed me that only 1.2 miles remained.

-Reached Alpine Zone soon thereafter.  I didn't think crampons would be a realistic necessity, since my MSR Denali's have full crampons on the bottom and have served as truly awesome snowshoes thus far.  A badly bent trekking pole and a bummed leg would be a reminder of how nice they would have been up there.

11:10 - 11:30 AM:  Summit!  The only shelter from the wind was beneath the commemorative plaque.  I caught my breath here while staring into my surroundings and trying to pick out what I could through the nasty cloud cover.  I spent a couple of minutes on the roof of New York and decided to head back down.  This was the only point of the trip where I worried about staying on trail.  The entire alpine zone was caked in about an inch of very white ice, making object differentiation difficult.  I made a point of reference with lake tear of the clouds and finally picked out an obscured cairn and started the trickiest part of the descent.

12:00 AM:  Ate "lunch" (some clif bars and vegetarian beef jerky) at Indian Falls.  I took a well deserved breather and relished in the thought of my warm car sitting back at the bottom.

2:15 PM:  Reached Adirondack Loj, changed into some warm clothes, and fell into the backseat of my car.

Overall, the day went well.  I finished over an hour ahead of my original schedule.  We drove into Lake Placid to get food and then started the drive back down to Albany.  Marcy CAN be done as a day hike in any season, assuming you are in the right physical condition for it.  It is a strenuous hike, but the overall RT took just over 7 hours and was more than feasible for a day.

More pictures of the trip can be found here.