Exploring the untouched wilderness of Hoffman Notch

By Tim Rowland

Not 50 yards into the trail through Hoffman Notch, my Explorer colleague Mike Lynch said “I don’t think we’re going to be seeing too many people on the trail today.”

Call him Nostradamus if you must, but he was spot on about that. Eight miles, nary a soul. The trail just has that look of one traveled very occasionally by hikers who aren’t real sure they want to be there in the first place.

Still, Hoffman Notch is iconic in its own way, an Adirondack jaunt that everyone wants to have done, but no one wants to do. So Mike, along with my friend from Westport, Dave McNamara, and I decided to give it a shot to see what all the non-fuss was about.

We put up a brave “Who’s afraid of Hoffman Notch?” front, but its reputation had preceded it. First, it has no grand mountaintop vista to attract the peakbaggers. Second, you need to spot a car at one end or the other. Third (and here we were going by hearsay that would have been inadmissible in court, but sticks in your mind nevertheless) the trail is so faint it disappears in places, there’s blowdown at every turn, high water can make stream crossings impassable and the lands are ravaged by beavers the size of tanks capable of flooding great swaths of the trail.

We made some calls, and Mike got some mild assurances from the 46ers who had done bridge work on the trail in past seasons that it ought to be good to go, so we left a car on the Blue Ridge Road at the trail’s northern terminus and drove to the southern trailhead west of Schroon Lake on Loch Muller Road.

The final dirt-road approach to the trailhead was washed out, adding a few tenths to the advertised 7.4-mile hike (some mild rerouting seems to have made the trail a half-mile longer), but this would prove to be the only real foible of the day; the trail itself was fine — occasional blowdown, but nothing more than you would find on any other remote ADK trail, no beaver damage and no problematic stream crossings.

The trail is indeed faint in spots, and as Dave noted, it is probably harder in summer when shrubbery grows in, but we only got off the main drag a time or two. It’s well-marked with faded yellow medallions, and since it remains sandwiched between two stupendous ridges for just about all of its length, going too far astray is pretty much out of the question.

South-to-north is the standard approach, only because it sheds about 450 feet in elevation in this direction. But this occurs over such a lengthy distance that no matter which way you choose, there’s nothing that would really resemble climbing.

For a half-mile from the Loch Muller trailhead, the trail descends into a lowland before starting a long, gradual ascent to Big Marsh, the main advertised feature of the route. Those who are armed with one vehicle only typically make this their destination on an out-and-back hike.

Climbing mildly out of the lowlands, the trail joins a tranquil brook whose dark pools and slight riffles were set off handsomely by conical balsams and grassy glades.

The secondary main attraction were the sprays of wildflowers basking in the brief weeks of sunshine before the leaves in the canopy unfurl — spring beauties, trout lilies and red and white trillium were companions along the length of the hike.

The stream widens into marshes and alder thickets, punctuated by emphatic beaver dams and lodges. For a moose, this is the Golden Corral of dining opportunities, and sure enough, massive footprints in the soft earth assured us we were not alone. 

Big Marsh, reached at the four-mile mark, is actually Big Lake, a sizable body of water that looks out at Texas Ridge and Hoffman Mountain. The trail was a bit sketchy along the lake, but gathers itself as it leaves the water and climbs ever so gently to the route’s 1,750-foot high point.

Here the water pools with no apparent destination and great stands of hardwood that never knew the loggers’ saws feature some enormous specimens of maple and yellow birch that have been afforded the dignity of dying of old age.

At every turn are those rocky comedians known as glacial erratics that wound up in all sorts of unlikely attitudes as the Ice Age melted away. 

Big Marsh is the midpoint of the hike, and to the north the terrain is entirely different. Notch Brook is wilder and as disorganized as an English major as it crashes down the notably steeper topography. The rock and gravel is of a ghostly, chalky color, entirely different from the gold, bronze and copper stones common to, say, Feldspar Brook in the Peaks.

As the trail descends, the soaring cliffs close in on either side like a vice. On high, you can hear the terrible shrieks of raptors you cannot see, a sharp contrast to the joyful and delicate ephemerals that continue to line the path.

At five miles in, trail maps and narratives have the trail crossing the brook and following its east bank for a quarter mile before crossing back. Happily this is no longer the case; the trail remains on the western bank, eliminating the need for problematic stream crossings.

Magnificent white cedars hug the streambed in this region, and as the cliffs recede, bits of rusted hardware and cans indicate the progress-of-man’s high water point as it encroached up the notch. (Sort of; this route was an active snowmobile trail up to 1972.) 

Somewhere along the line, the footpath had become an old woods road descending out of the notch until the brook exhausts itself and spills out into a broad, beaver-assisted flow. Trail rerouting and new bridging have alleviated what had been a problem spot for hikers in the past — something of a relief for us, as we had feared hiking a full seven miles and then having to turn around and go back.

As we pierced one last cedar forest before emerging on the highway, we noted that Mike had been right — there had not been even a rumor of another human. But with the glaring trail problems of the past no longer an issue, there’s no longer an excuse for avoiding this remote and overlooked part of the park. Yes, I know. Somewhere a beaver is saying “Hold my beer.”