Baldface Mountain offers scavenger hunt of marvels

Bushwhack near Debar Mountain gives opportunity to work on compass skills

By Tom French

After seeing Anne LaBastille’s cabin at the Adirondack Experience, my 22-year-old daughter, Emma, has been reading Anne LaBastille’s “Woodswoman,” dreaming about living in a remote shack in the woods, and threatening to go solo backpacking near Cranberry Lake.  Having only car-camped her entire life, I knew it was time to up the game with our Adirondack adventures.

Barbara McMartin, writing in “Discover the Northern Adirondacks,” lists Baldface Mountain in the Debar Mountain Wild Forest as a bushwhack, so I was hoping to hone Emma’s orienteering and compass skills.  The guidebook talks about a 221º bearing from true north, 236º magnetic.  When Emma asked, “What’s magnetic north?” I dove into the lesson and prepared her for the hands-on instruction.  Alas, the bushwhack was flagged with an obvious herd path.

I’d wanted to climb the trailless Baldface Mountain ever since my buddy Doug Miller shared a picture of the trailhead guardian attached to a tree at the trailhead along the Port Kent and Hopkinton Turnpike (previously NY 99, now CR 26).  I gave him a hard time for not including me, but he said it was just a coda to kill time on his way home from Malone.  

Stories of the summit

According to McMartin, the mountain’s slopes were once occupied by a Charles Stickney and his cow – probably on the southern side near the Debar Meadows.  Based on McMartin’s copyrights and text, this must have been around the turn of the 20th century.  Stickney was in his teens and sick with tuberculosis.  Instead of staying on a porch, he moved to Baldface with a tent (and the cow) “after the April thaw” until “stormy November” for three summers until he was cured.  He wintered at the family homestead near Loon Lake.  McMartin writes that he had a “long life hunting and trapping.”  A search for more information suggests he married and may have been a mailing clerk in Saranac Lake.  Several articles described escapades with bears, otters, and bees.  Maybe he even poached one of those elk in the Debar Mountain Game Refuge.

Multiple sources, including Tim Rowland and Doug, had given me the impression that Baldface, rising 1,065 feet in .9 miles, was straight up.  As I feared, the trail quickly steepened and I was convinced the whole climb would be slog.  

Fortunately, we had pages from McMartin’s book to alert us to landmarks. At 320 yards, she described a yellow birch with a chest-high girth of 12.25 feet.  I’d turned on my phone’s geotracker (not that I rely on it in any way), and at about that distance, we found a ginormous yellow birch.  Emma and I tried to wrap our arms around it to touch fingers.  With a combined wingspan of 11 feet, we could not. 

A ‘scavenger hunt’

McMartin talked about significant stands of four-foot-high horse nettle and touch-me-nots.  We didn’t see any of that, but soon, our hike up the mountain became a game of scavenger hunt.  

McMartin’s “wall-like cliff” included a wide, yellow streak of mineral precipitates seeping from a fracture plane in the face (according to my friendly neighborhood geologist, Brian Carl). From a distance, we thought it might even contain stalactites.

Her “break” in the wall was a natural staircase up a narrow, eroded intrusion (a vertical dike), in the rock.  Clearly missed by some, the herd path rushes past, though the flagger clearly utilized this natural geologic feature.  We investigated both paths to confirm they rejoined above the ledge.

McMartin uses phrases such as “grade is moderate, gradually steepens, steep, and very steep” to describe the ascent to a “crest” where it levels off.  I would describe the climb as moderately steep to level with a couple short, steep sections.  It was not the “straight up” I had feared.  Maybe it was the game of scavenger hunt we were playing that allowed me a respite each time we stopped to check out one of nature’s marvels.

Multiple mounds of fuzz covered scat.  Fungi sparkling with sap.  Curls of paper birch bark with weird black appendages.  Webs of roots wrapping erratics.  Funnel-webs in woodpecker holes.  Hollow bubbles of pitch like the now discontinued Super Elastic Plastic Bubbles from when I was a kid.  Fern hollows and tree trunks of gargantuan size.  A pebble of quartz embedded in soft moss and aqua-colored rotting logs.  A fuzzy white caterpillar (hickory tussock moth) at the summit.  Suspected bear scat disguised as large piles of digested mountain ash berries, and views through birch stands down both sides of a ridge line that the trail follows along a relatively flat, last third of the hike.  After a surprisingly easy and relaxed 75 minutes, we reached the top.

Descending towards Debar Pond

Views from the 2,867-foot summit include the looming Debar to the West and Lake Titus to the north.  The Lodge at Debar Pond is behind some trees at the northern end of its namesake.  Unfortunately, it appears someone hauled up a battery-powered circular saw. Blade grooves and a flat chunk of missing anorthosite suggest someone may have been attempting to place an illegal plaque. Or looking for beryllium-10 for some cosmogenic isotopic dating (according to my friendly neighborhood geologist, it’s been a problem out west).  Whoever it was knew they were going to do it – why else would you carry up a power tool?

McMartin mentions a “subsidiary” summit directly to the south, which you might not notice.  Here was my chance to teach Emma how to use a compass, and she successfully identified north from south despite my efforts to trick her.  

Views from this rock face include Loon Mountain to the south with the Sables to left and numerous peaks along the horizon.  

It was too early for lunch, so we descended the mountain and tried to find McMartin’s alternative route.  I think we found where she may have diverged, but that would have been a true bushwhack.  No sign of it exists.

After returning to the car, we drove the three miles to the Debar Pond Lodge for lunch.  It was a crystal blue fall day with colored leaves reflecting on the flat surface of the lake.  We peered up to where we’d just been, the baldface hidden amongst the trees.  I guess I’ll have to toss some quarters in the backyard along various compass points for Emma to practice her bushwhacking skills.

The unofficial trailhead for Baldface is roughly 12.5 miles from Route 3 via Loon Lake or 2.3 miles from the intersection along Route 26 where Route 27 continues toward Mountain View.  Be sure to turn right toward Loon Lake.