The Buck (Mountain) stops here

A lesson on names and places

By Tim Rowland

It is my studied opinion, three 19th-century men named Ezra Cobble, Phinius Haystack and Charles K. Owlshead went around naming Adirondack mountains after themselves.

Well, apparently Pearl Buck was up here too.

This has been the Year of the Buck for me, climbing three Buck Mountains in, respectively, Long Lake, North Hudson and Lake George.

This has been difficult for us at Adirondack Explorer magazine. We chose appropriate maps from our files, and as it happened an Outings Guide story about Buck Mountain (Long Lake) wound up with the map of Buck Mountain (Lake George). 

Oh, deer.

Long Lake partisans gently pointed out the mistake, as did a friend in Keene Valley who wondered if it hadn’t been done on purpose to see how many readers were paying attention. 

At least, so far as we know, no one got lost because of it.

Nevertheless, as we say in the media business, the Explorer apologizes for the error and accepts full responsibility.

A multitude of Bucks

But we blame the government, which places no limits on the number of mountains that may share the same moniker. This is not allowed with towns, for obvious reasons (the town of Wilmington was originally named Dansville in 1821 until it was changed a year later when someone pointed out that Dansville in the western part of the state had first-mover status).

We might forgive our early settlers, who lacked our systems of transportation and communication. In the shadow of Haystack Mountain in northern Essex County, they might have lived their whole lives without visiting (or even knowing of) the Haystack 20-some miles to the south. 

But come on. You can stand on The Cobble in the Sentinels and see Cobble Lookout in the Stephensons—a mere stone’s throw away—so it doesn’t seem our forebearers were striving for creativity.

Which brings us back to those Bucks. I knew of four, one of which is near Paul Smiths and on private property.

Long Lake’s Buck is a relatively easy 1.2-mile one-way hike with a 500-foot elevation gain. It features some truly impressive wooden staircases to make stone ledges more manageable, and a fire tower with a splendid view of Little Tupper Lake.

Lake George’s Buck Mountain is 3.3 miles, much of it steep, with a 2,000-foot elevation gain and expansive lake views.

Buck Mountain in North Hudson is a bushwhack accessed from the Shingletree Pond trailhead on Route 9. It is just shy of 3 miles and 1,100 feet of climb, most of which is a short but intense scramble.

Mountains of the same name

But as we at the magazine were getting our Bucks in a row, it occurred to us there might be others still. So, I enlisted the help of John Sasso, Adirondack place-name guru and administrator of the popular Facebook page “History and Legends of the Adirondacks.”

He provided a spreadsheet of named mountains in New York from the U.S. Board of Geographic Names.

The state’s No. 1 named mountain is Pine, an un-Adirondack-sounding label, probably because most of our evergreens are balsam, spruce and fir. There are 41 Pine Mountains in New York, seven more than the second-most popular mountain name, Roundtop.

Partisans of France’s King Charles the Bald might cry foul since adding up Bald Mountain (27) along with bald derivatives Baldy, (3) Baldface (7) and Bald Pate (2) would have given Bald the silver medal.

There are some other interesting points on the list, at least to my mind. There are only two Saddlebacks, both in Essex County. There are three Arabs and five Pisgahs (the Hebrew word for “summit”), but only two Baptists.

Also landing in the Top 10 were East Mountain (20), South Mountain (21) and West Mountain (22)—but here in the North Country there are just seven North Mountains.

You can take this down a lot of different mountainous rabbit holes, obviously, like the all-dessert range: Blueberry (3), Pumpkin (2), Gooseberry (4), Cranberry (5), Cherry (3), Honey (4), Huckleberry (6), Maple (7), Berry (2), Bunn (2) and Crumb (3).

How many Bucks?

But how many Buck Mountains are there? There are, count ’em, 27, making Buck the third most popular mountain name in the Empire State. Vindication!

The fault was not ours; it was the state’s for allowing this Buck population to multiply beyond reason.

But do we at the Explorer hide behind the shortcomings of faceless bureaucrats?

We do not. We will do our best next time to have the right map with the right mountain because—and shame on you if you didn’t see this one coming—the Bucks stop here.