Bloomingdale Bog: An ideal outing in any season

Explore the unique ecology, feed the friendly birds while hiking, biking or skiing

By Tim Rowland

The Bloomingdale Bog trail is one of those slow, relaxed strolls, flat and undemanding, that locals have typically used to work off Sunday brunch, wrapping things up in plenty of time to catch the second half of the Bills game.

In some respects, it was the rail trail before there was the Adirondack Rail Trail, although today it seems more commonly hiked than biked. Since it is Adirondack Rail Trail-adjacent, however, it may become a bit more of a bicycling opportunity for cyclists who have ridden the Tupper-to-Placid route and are hungry for more. 

Hikers can take comfort that, unlike the more popular rail trail to the south, this one contains a number of natural speed bumps (roots, ditches, ballast etc.) that discourage nuisance-level speed. It also, needless to say, is a popular skiing destination.

The Bloomingdale Bog trail, originally a line of the Delaware and Hudson railroad, runs from Route 86, 2.5 miles north of Saranac Lake to Route 55, 1.5 miles west of the four-way stop in Bloomingdale. The official 3.7-mile (one way) sojourn is easily accomplished in the shortened November days. I say “official” because the rail bed continues on in either direction running from Saranac Lake to Onchiota. But as the name suggests, it is the Bloomingdale Bog that makes this section special.

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It is actually a series of bogs and fens that together comprise one of the largest such areas in New York despite having been abused by the hand of man in the forms of roads, railways, powerlines and a producer who tried to turn it into a spinach farm. For a fantastic explanatory video and drone footage visit the Northern Forest Atlas.

Start in Bloomingdale

 If you are on foot and don’t have time to hike the whole thing, I would suggest parking at the Route 55 trailhead and hiking south since most of the boggy goodness tends to be weighted to the north-middle of the trail, along with the canada jays that with very little coaxing will come land in the palm of your hand.

I am not going to insult the reader’s intelligence by suggesting the bog is prettiest in mid-November. What I will submit is that after the leaves have fallen and before the snow flies, when the mountains take on that flaccid, vaguely pinkish cast of gray — what the interior designers call “Ashes of Roses” but to me are more the color of drowned mice — the Bloomingdale Bog has color, contrast and visual interest superior to many other late-fall hikes.

So on a recent Sunday, Beth and I pedaled off from the Route 55 trailhead through a comely evergreen forest that soon began to give way to marshlands studded with the black spruce and bog plants that can somehow make a living in this low-nutrient environment.

Just shy of a mile in, you will cross Twobridge Brook, an attractive site where the still waters meander among tawny marsh grasses. Low mountains appear in the distance, as balsam, tamarack and cedar cling to the side of the old railbed, and after a time you become conscious of a presence — nothing you can put your finger on at first, but little shadows flitting across your peripheral vision.

Soon enough you will realize that these shadows have an agenda, and it involves food. They are Canada jays that will keep pace with you from a distance at first as they perform an avian background check, and if you are the nonmalignant sort they will soon close in and “head you off at the pass” in a shakedown kind of way, so if you have brought a little seed they will land on your fingers and eat from your outstretched palm. 

Leaving these avian panhandlers behind, we proceeded south where the bog widens to its full expanse. Here the thin forest jousts with the wetlands for purchase and a long and prosperous life, sometimes succeeding sometimes not. Dead, skeletal trunks and limbs rise from the still waters in a ghostly way, somewhat resembling the masts and rigging of a long-ago sunken fleet. Elsewhere, mature black spruce are getting by somehow, tattered bows and poodle-like tufts of needles on long thin trunks are evidence of trees that are making do, but that’s about it.

Then, young and optimistic, are bright green cones about the size of Christmas trees popping up through the marsh grasses, oblivious to the hard lessons learned by their elders.

These vignettes are inversely duplicated in the still black water, which dutifully reflects the trees along with the blue skies, yellow grasses and the rusty complexion of bog plants in fall. 

On that note, I tip my cap to late-19th century railroad engineers, it never in a million years would have occurred to me to lay a train track through the middle of such a watery, spongy environment as this, but if the alternative is blowing through a mountain flank you do what you have to.

Toward the south, beavers have created the need for chunky rock fill covered to varying degrees of success with fine gravel. With the ride turning bumpy, we turned around here, but continuing on would lead another half mile through beaver marshes and mixed hardwood forest to the southern trailhead on Route 86.

The ride back was more enjoyable with the low, piercing sun behind us, and safer too, since we could see roots and other flotsam and jetsam that we’d been blinded to on our way south. Even so, in several spots we got off and walked our bikes just so we could savor the splendid scene.  For November, it’s not bad at all.