A Big, Long Day In The Mountains

Lake Colden

On a recent Monday, son Ned and I set off on the biggest single-day hike of either of our lifetimes. We tramped from Adirondack Loj near Lake Placid to Avalanche Pass, Avalanche Lake, Lake Colden, the Opalescent River, Feldspar Brook, Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, and the summit of Mt. Marcy, then back to our car, dropping more than three thousand feet in elevation in the process, via the long, rocky, eroded Van Hoevenberg trail. We started hiking at 7:43 a.m.. We signed out at the trail register at 10:58 p.m.. Research in advance had suggested we would be walking nearly seventeen miles, an ambitious goal. I hadn’t hiked that many miles in a day in these mountains in forty years! Ned’s GPS recorded a trek of 21.9 miles. Whichever figure is accurate, we rejoiced in, and at times suffered through, a long, hard, thrilling day on the trail.

Here’s a selection of photos from a journey we’ll long remember.

Ned arriving at Avalanche Pass and Avalanche Lake.

Avalanche Lake, looking back the way we’d come.

Lake Colden

Lake Colden, looking from the dam back the way we’d come.

Crossing the Opalescent River just upstream from Lake Colden.

Feldspar Brook, below Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds.

Arriving at Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, source of the Hudson River. Theodore Roosevelt was sitting here having lunch on a September day in 1901 when news reached him that William McKinley was dying. In a matter of hours, the forty-two-year-old Roosevelt would be President of the United States.

Ned on the right, me on the left, at Lake Tear, with Mt. Marcy rising in the distance.

Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, looking toward Mt. Marcy, highest peak in New York State.

Looking down to Lake Tear from high on Mt. Marcy.

Looking up toward the Mt. Marcy summit during the ascent.

View toward Mt. Haystack from high on Mt. Marcy.

View from high on Mt. Marcy, looking south and east toward Elk Lake.

Elk Lake from high on Mt. Marcy

Mt. Marcy summit (5,344 feet above sea level)

Ed and Ned just arrived on top of Mt. Marcy in late afternoon.

Mt. Marcy summit view

Ned and I begin our descent of Mt. Marcy in beautiful evening light.

This section of trail typifies the steep, rocky Van Hoevenberg Trail that serves as the most popular route up and down Mt. Marcy. Hiking one careful footstep at a time along this eroded trail on weary legs, mile after mile, some of it in the dark, posed challenges for mind as well as body.

Ned and I emerged from the pitch-black woods jubilant and weary just before 11 pm. We returned home about midnight, celebrated briefly with the rest of the household, and then collapsed in our beds. What a day!

Catching Up On Recent Fun And Photos

Algonquin Peak summit

Nearly a year—-a busy and eventful year—-has passed since I last shared words and images here. Time to do a little catching up! What follows are images collected since my preceding post, along with a few words to go with them. The photo above shows the summit of Algonquin Peak, second highest mountain in the Adirondacks. I climbed it with my son, Ned, in June. Drinking too little water during the hot, steep climb, I felt dizzy and faint near the top, a dramatic reminder about the importance of drinking generous amounts of fluid on the trail.

Mountain sandwort

The wildflower above, flourishing in a crack in the bedrock on the Algonquin summit, is mountain sandwort. Nate Greene, the Summit Steward, was doing a marvelous job of welcoming hikers while reminding them to keep off the hardy but fragile alpine plants and the scant soil they grow in.

View from Hopkins Mountain

Ned and I climbed Hopkins Mountain from a trailhead near Keene Valley in May. This was our first big hike of the summer. The photo immediately below was from our next hike, which followed the Nun-da-ga-o Ridge near Keene. Heavy smoke from Canadian wildfires helped define the ranges.

View from Nun-da-ga-o Ridge

View from Esther Mountain summit to Moose and McKenzie Mountains

Ned and I climbed Esther and Whiteface Mountains one day in July. Canadian wildfire smoke lightly clouded the air. The two high mountains in the view from Esther (above) are McKenzie and Moose. Below is a photo showing the top of Whiteface. Sometimes a late start brings advantages. One for us was having the normally busy summit of Whiteface all to ourselves. The automobile road that ascends most of the way to the summit had closed for the day, and everyone was gone. Another bonus: on the way down through darkening woods, we were serenaded by the swirling, rising, flute-like songs of Swainson’s thrushes. And at one point, I stopped for a rest and found myself surrounded by boreal chickadees.

Hiker Ned Kanze enjoying the Whiteface Mountain summit on a quiet July evening

Ned and I also did some paddling in canoes this summer. Our best trip was a day spent on wild, remote Lake Lila. The first photo below shows Lila from the summit of Mt. Frederica. The second pictures a Lila loon, rearing up in the middle of a splash bath.

Lake Lila from the summit of Mt. Frederica

Common loon on Lake Lila

Speaking of loons, here are additional images of them from summer 2023, shot from a solo kayak.

Common loon pair in misty, smoky light

Common loon staff meeting

Common loon family spending a quiet morning at home

Common loon adult with hatchlings

Common loon carrying a fish to feed one of its young

Loons weren’t the only birds I photographed this year. Here are more.

Female ruby-throated hummingbird visiting a cardinal-flower (I was photographing the flower when the bird showed up)

Great blue heron coming in for a landing at its nest

Three baby flickers poking out of nest hole in a dead American elm

Barn swallow deciding which mouthful of mud to grab for nest-building

Common yellowthroat male in speckled alder

Chestnut-sided warbler male in speckled alder

Chestnut-sided warbler male close-up

Male bobolink on a fencepost

Male boblink

Male red-winged blackbird

Red-eyed vireo portrait

While we’re on a red theme, let’s visit a red fox family I photographed last May. Friends discovered the fox den and kindly granted permission to set up a blind and shoot from their property.

Mother red fox arriving at the den where pups await

Mother red fox nursing her pups

Red fox pups at den

Mother red fox losing her cool as pups run off

Mother fox enjoying a stretch while her offspring pile up in a rumble

Mother fox studying a low-flying airplane

Red fox portrait

Let’s move on to a few “herps,” which in the lingo of naturalists are amphibians and reptiles. Just a few images: an eastern newt found in the wandering juvenile eft stage of its development on Cascade Mountain; two shots of male American toads singing in a pond near our house; two common garter snakes basking on a warm rock at John Dillon Park, near Long Lake; and a timber rattlesnake that Ned and I went looking for on a sunny late May morning on the Lake Champlain side of the Adirondacks. We spent about an hour with the snake, keeping a safe distance from it. The handsome black-and-gold reptile rattled at our approach but relaxed after we showed ourselves harmless. It cruised the forest floor as we followed and eventually disappeared under a bush.

Eastern newt in terrestrial eft stage

American toad male singing

Another American toad male singing

Two common garter snakes basking on a warm rock at John Dillon Park

Timber rattlesnake (black phase)

Let’s wrap up this miscellany of animals with one fish and two insects: a brook trout in murky water, the murk giving the image the feel of a watercolor painting; a spring azure butterfly, feeding on and likely pollinating a wild strawberry flower; and a pair of painted dancer damselflies, intimately coupled.

Brook trout

Spring azure butterfly on wild strawberry flower

Variable dancer damselflies mating at Minnow Pond, Blue Mountain Lake

Before shifting to flowering plants, let’s honor Kingdom Fungi. The wet summer of 2023 made for a fabulous display in the woods of mushrooms and other fungi. Worldwide, one hundred and fifty thousand are fungi have been distinguished and given names, out of an estimated global total of somewhere between 2 and 4 million species. Their tremendous diversity is my weak excuse for knowing only a few of them. I aim to do better in the future. Two mushrooms are pictured here: the much-feared and ominously named destroying angel, among the most poisonous and one that turns up not only in the woods but in schoolyards, on playing fields, and on suburban lawns; and a small orange gilled mushroom, identity unknown. I close out this section with a photograph of a lichen colony. Lichens are compound organisms that include a multicellular fungus, a photobiont (an alga or a cyanobacterium), and one or more yeasts.

Destroying angel mushroom (extremely poisonous)

Handsome but unidentified orange mushrooms (perhaps a kind of waxcap)

A world of lichens in a knot-hole

Our quick tour of recent nature photos winds down with a selection of wild flowering plants, placed here in the order I found them; three images of moving water in a summer where rain fell heavily; and finally, a dramatic sunset at our house, one that occurred in a season rich in dramatic sunsets.

Carolina spring-beauty

Showy ladyslippers (photographed just outside the Adirondack Park)

Sheep laurel

Rose pogonia

Calopogon (Grass Pink) orchid

White-fringed orchid

Common (white) water-lily in pewter-colored light

Turtlehead

Raquette Falls

Chubb River below Wanika Falls

Wanika Falls (middle leap)

Sunset on the Saranac River

When Winterberries Can't Wait

It’s a crisp fall day. Most of the leaves are gone, and for American robins in the Adirondacks, most of the fruits that might incline them to linger before flying South are gone, too. But then a robin spies a patch of winterberry, a kind of holly. Winterberry’s name derives from the fact, perhaps dubious, that birds and other wild things show so little interest in its fruits that the fruits hang on into winter.

To eat, or not to eat? The robin above seems to pause for a moment to ponder a winterberry’s appeal. It hasn’t read the book that says birds don’t like to eat them.

So the robin grabs a fruit and takes a millisecond to ponder. Winterberries are hollies, and holly fruits are poisonous to humans, so maybe the robin is wise to consider its next move.

Down goes the fruit.

Another? Yes, why not?

Down goes another, and another, and another. The only frugivores eating winterberries along the Saranac River at a faster clip these days are black bears. I don’t see the big omnivorous carnivores do it. As far as I can tell, the bears seem to gorge at night. But mornings, I find large and surprisingly tidy piles of bear scats, scats full of winterberry seeds and winterberries in various stages of digestion, on the damp ground under the bushes.

Robins feeding robins attract other robins. So it goes in the winterberry patch. What to do after you’ve wolfed down all the fruit a hungry bird can reasonably swallow? Perhaps you sit in a bush and look handsome and relish your good fortune.

Fifteen January Minutes In The Life Of An Adirondack Mink

Out bursts the mink (female or male I’m not sure) from its den in a riverbank. The first thing it does is scan and sniff, likely surveying for danger. Finding none, the mink hurls itself toward the water, becoming briefly airborne.

Reaching the edge of an ice shelf, cold inky black liquid looming beyond, the mink pauses. Is it scouting again for danger or hesitating to plunge into ice-water? Both, or neither? Only the mink knows.

The chocolate-colored member of the weasel family decides it’s going in. I watch it swim across about thirty feet of open water, heading for a shelf of ice on the far shore.

Emerging from liquid water onto solid, the mink shakes. Water scatters in all directions. The animal fluffs its coat. Then it pauses to have a look at the photographer sitting nearby. The photographer tries not to twitch. The mink seems to decide he poses no threat. It turns and begins peering into the water, looking, I suspect, for light flashing off of fish scales.

Suddenly the mink propels itself forward. With a plunk it is gone. I count. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five. Up pops the mink. It’s got something in its mouth. Only later when I study the photos do I see that its catch this time is a rock bass. Earlier it caught a small sucker.

The mink labors toward the ice shelf along the far shore. A strong current pushes the animal downstream, away from its den. It zigs and zags, making course adjustments so that it can exit the river close to the mouth of its den. Reaching ice, it hurtles up and out and forward, flinging globs of water. The animal moves so fast I can hardly make sense of its movements. In a few bounds it has closed the distance between the river and the den opening and disappeared inside.

What the mink is doing in its hiding place I can’t say. This is early January. It’s likely too early for the animal to be feeding young. I’m guessing the mink is simply dining in private, away from the prying eyes of passing hawks, eagles, owls, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, mail carriers, UPS couriers, and photographers. Eating the fish out in the open would be risky. About five minutes pass. The mink emerges again. It bounds to the water’s edge and starts the sequence anew.

How Spotted Salamanders Beget More Spotted Salamanders

Spotted salamanders have the same motivations in life we have. They want to eat, be safe, and make sure the future includes more of their lineage. But instead of courting the way we do, they rise out of the soil after the ground thaws in spring, march to shallow ponds and quiet pools in brooks, and merge gametes. Spotted salamanders practice internal fertilization, but not in the way we tend to think of it. Males plop down little gelatinous pillars on the pond bottom, each topped with a packet of sperm. These curious structures are called spermatophores. When females enter the pond, males swim alongside them and encourage the females to pick up their spermatophores, not those installed by other guys. A persuaded female straddles a spermatophore, picks it up with the lips of her cloaca, and pulls the sperm packet inside.

Generally within two or three days, females lay gelatinous egg masses that might be the size of the average lemon. They usually cling to sticks or to the stems of aquatic plants. The masses may be clear or milky. In time most of them will turn green. Inside the egg masses are eggs. Let’s have a look.

I photographed the egg mass above with a compact underwater camera on April 26. You can see the gelatinous mass with the spherical eggs inside. Inside the eggs are embryos. Next let’s have a look at the same egg mass on April 29. Now we can see the embryos beginning to divide and develop.

Weeks went by before I photographed spotted salamander eggs again. I needed a new spot because the first pond had largely dried up—-one of the hazards of using tiny “vernal pools,” or temporary spring ponds, for nurseries. I did the best I could to rescue the stranded masses and place them in what little water remained. Below, see the eggs I photographed below in a different pond. Notice the jade-green color of the embryos, which are developing at a fast clip. The green comes from an alga that enters not only the egg masses and eggs but also the cells of the developing salamanders. It photosynthesizes and produces oxygen that helps the embryos survive and develop. Amazing!

My most recent photo session with spotted salamander eggs took place on June 12. Friends had told me about seeing an egg mass in a slender and slow-moving brook near their house. I investigated and found not one but five egg masses. The next two photos show what my trusty submersible camera was able to able to see inside the clearest of the masses. Note how the eyes and mouths of the salamander larvae are now developed, and how feathery external gills have sprouted from the sides of each larva’s head.

Once the larva are fully developed, they wriggle out of the goop that surrounds them and spend the summer swimming like fish or tadpoles and feeding as much as they can. Their appetites are formidable. Spotted salamander larva are known to devour their neighbors and siblings. Less than 10% will likely survive to leave the wet spots in late summer or the following spring. The final photo shows a larva that lived to sprout legs and take on adult form. I’m guessing this one is a few years old. With luck, it might live to be twenty or thirty!

A Weasel In Whiteface

It’s hard to imagine anything cuter and perkier in the winter woods than an ermine. This little weasel, Mustela erminea to scientists, is also known as the short-tailed weasel, for reasons obvious when you get to know its cousin, the long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata). The ermine’s cylindrical body is not much thicker than the average dinner sausage. The long-tailed weasel (which also turns white in winter) is chunkier and bigger overall. Whereas the ermine’s tail tends to measure about a third the length of the animal’s head and trunk, the long-tailed weasel’s tail tends to extend half or a little more the body length.

We attract ermines to our bird feeding station by putting out chicken carcasses once a week. Carcass feeding begins in late November after black bears have settled into their dens for winter, and in late winter, as the time nears for bears to emerge, we stop. We aim to feed songbirds, the occasional barred owl, ermines, and long-tailed weasels tidbits of meat, not big and potentially dangerous carnivores. The next photo shows an ermine in its brown warm-weather coat, trying to make off with a carcass. We chain the chicken down to the platform to prevent weasels and owls from making off with it.

What follows are a few more portraits of an ermine that visited us in January, 2021. In the final image, the ermine looks like it’s singing. White Christmas, perhaps?

Beautiful, Malodorous Shrubs Of Autumn

At our Adirondack place every autumn, the prettiest colors we see during a walk are often provided not by maple trees but by native shrubs in the genus Viburnum. I love viburnums, of which there are many kinds. I also concede they might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Why? Because, at the end of the growing season, they stink.

When viburnums prepare their leaves for autumn shedding, they begin to give off a bad smell. It borders on fecal. On September and October days I’ve sniffed colored leaves still attached to the bushes that produced them and found the odor already wafting. Blindfold me and take me for a hike in autumn, and I’ll tell you where viburnums grow. It wouldn’t be hard. The nose knows.

I’ve led groups of elementary school children on walks in the fall and had them get the giggles around viburnums. One boy burst into a big smile and shouted, “Somebody farted!” All the kids ran down the trail. The reek was astonishing. I couldn’t blame them.

Even the wood of viburnums stinks. Once my friend and one-time boss Warren Balgooyen, a naturalist extraordinaire, cut a section of Viburnum wood and bark for an exhibit he was creating. It was a great idea, but that small piece of wood reeked so badly that our nature center building became uninhabitable. Our fabulous office manager, a woman named Maureen Thompson, finally laid down the law. The Viburnum sample had to go.

Why the stench? As far as I can tell, nobody knows. I wonder if it could have adaptive value, enticing mammals, ones inspired to poop by the smell of the feces of those who have gone before them, to drop off free fertilizer. Members of the dog family such as coyotes and foxes seem especially motivated in this direction. This is only a guess.

What follows are images of Adirondack viburnums in autumn. Know that if you were standing with me as I took the photos, you might have wrinkled your nose.

Wild-raisin (Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides)

Wild raisin (Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides)

Nannyberry (Viburnum lentago)

Smooth arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum var. lucidum)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum opulus var. americanum)

Highbush cranberry (Viburnum opulus var. americanum)

Maple-leaved viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium)

Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides)

Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides)

Hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides)

Wild raisin (Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides) seeming to make a defiant hand gesture at winter as it approaches

Black Is Beautiful

A cool day in summer, and luckily for us in the Adirondacks we still enjoy some cool summer days, is a day you might get lucky and see a black bear. Think about it. If you had to walk around in July and August in a thick black wool coat, would you be day-active or nocturnal?

Black bears are actually both. But with a hot sun shining down and lots of people thronging into the woods, Adirondack black bears tend to discover their inner night owls.

The bear in the photo is big and probably a male. How big? I can only guess that this animal weighs several hundred pounds or maybe a little more. The average female weighs only a couple of hundred pounds, but some females and most males grow larger. The biggest black bears in the Northeast weigh more than the average grizzly bear at Yellowstone. That’s a sobering fact when you consider that black bears can run at astonishing speed, faster than gold medal winning Olympian sprinters. They’re highly adept climbers, too.

Fortunately, Adirondack black bears are generally peace-loving. If we avoid feeding them, they leave us alone. Seeing one is a rare treat. Most of my sightings have come in or near patches of blueberries heavy with fruit. A typical bear sighting consists of the back end of the animal as it makes a tactical retreat.

Return Of The Native

O, say can you see that huge bird in the sky? Today, it’s not only possible but likely that the UFO you spy is a bald eagle. Yet not so long ago, few might have believed you.

Bruce Behler’s Birdlife of the Adirondack Park, published by the Adirondack Mountain Club in 1978, which is about the time I started paying close attention to birds in the region, gives a bleak picture of the bald eagle’s status. “Breeding,” he writes, “very rare; probably no successful nests since 1971; possibly extirpated.” If you’re unfamiliar with the lingo of scarcity, “extirpated” means locally extinct.

My, how things have changed! A few days ago, driving a back road in the southern Adirondacks near Northville, I came upon a brawl over a deer carcass. Four bald eagles, including the handsome adult shown above, were squabbling over a gaping hide and rib cage with five or six ravens. (The ravens made such a racket as they fought and flew that in the midst of the commotion, I failed to make an exact count.) Two of the eagles I saw were black-and-white adults. Two were juveniles, brown mottled with white. Here’s a look at one of the juveniles as it flapped noisily directly over my head.

To move from the nonexistence of the 1970s to the bald eagle bounty we enjoy in the Adirondacks today, the birds needed help. They got it from taxpayers and a New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation (DEC) program aimed at bringing back extirpated species (ones gone from NY but still surviving elsewhere) to their historic homes. The pesticide DDT is widely believed to have been the chief agent of the bird’s demise. It caused female eagles to lay eggs with shells so thin that when the mothers sat on them, they broke. Thanks in part to biologist Rachel Carson’s sounding the alarm and the environmental movement spurred on by her book, Silent Spring, DDT was banned. Years passed. The pesticide and its metabolites lingered, and still New York had no eagles.

Enter DEC’s Endangered Species Unit, led at the time by Peter Nye. Pete built a team and made arrangements to take hatchling eagles from Alaska, where the species remained abundant, and release them at hacking towers in wild, watery places in New York. The young birds were fed with the aid of puppets so that when they looked up at their benefactors, they saw reasonable facsimiles of adult eagles rather than humans. Young raptors and many other birds go through a process called imprinting. Their self-image seems to derive from the nursery maid who feeds them. If that nursery maid is an eagle or looks like an eagle, the young bird grows up to seek romance with fellow eagles. If it looks up and sees a friendly human feeding it, all may be well for several years. Then, when the eagle develops a white head and white tail and is ready to seek its first mate, it will go in search of a human. Of course, that’s a potentially dangerous situation, and it’s not a good formula for making baby eagles.

To move things along, in short, the program worked. By 1989, when the operations shut down, 198 young eagles, the majority Alaskan, had been set free in New York. Not all survived, but enough did to establish a breeding population. That population has been expanding and thrilling wildlife lovers ever since.

Minky Business

Wherever you are in North America, if you’re near water fresh, brackish, or salt, and if you’re not in the arid Southwest, you might see a mink out and about, pursuing its career as a lethal and highly effective carnivore. If you’re not listed on the mink’s menu of prey, an extensive selection that includes fish, crayfish, snakes, frogs, salamanders, mice, shrews, voles, muskrats, birds, and more, you might find the mink astonishingly handsome. I certainly do.

An Adirondack mink that has just caught a crayfish

A mink is a member of the weasel family, larger than an ermine or long-tailed weasel and smaller than a marten, fisher, or otter. An adult mink often measures about two feet from pink nose to tip of long, fluffy tail. The mink’s coat is chocolate brown, thick, glossy, and may look black when wet. A mink spends a good deal of its time in water hunting for prey, so it’s coat is wet a good deal of the time. Underneath the chin of nearly every American mink is a patch of white fur. Many mink also show white on the chest.

While a mink is often wet, it prefers to be dry. The following four photos show a mink in the water, a wet mink just out of the water, a mink drying off, and a mink fully dry and fluffy ready for its next round of hunting.

A longstanding mystery at our place along the Saranac River centered on who digs up and eats the eggs of snapping turtles. We love our snappers, agreeable creatures that virtually never snap unless you provoke them. Every year, we watch Mama Snappers haul themselves up on sand banks, dig vase shaped holes with their hind feet, and fill the holes with eggs. The eggs are white and leathery and look like ping pong balls. Almost immediately, at night in the dark, the nests are found by somebody or something. They’re dug up, and the embryos are devoured. But by whom? For years, we studied the plundered nests, seeking clues. Tracks were hard to come by. It seemed highly likely the raider was always, or almost always, the same animal. Time after time, the eggs were excavated and eaten in the same fashion.

Here’s what a plundered nest looks like.

And here’s a footprint in the sand, next to the scene of one of the crimes. The track, found and photographed in later summer 2019, cracked the case.

Here are tracks made by the same turtle-egg-plundering mastermind in snow. The track maker doesn’t eat turtles or their eggs in winter, as far as we can tell, but it does have a knack for finding frogs hibernating in submerged mud beneath the river ice and bringing them up for breakfast.

Alimentary, my dear Watson! Behold the Professor Moriarty of turtle nest raiders, flying high one January afternoon in the Adirondacks, setting out on its next adventure.