The ‘other’ Saddleback

Follow the tape for a sure-fire return trip

By Tim Rowland

Jay Mountain is not the tallest peak in the Jay Range. That honor goes to Saddleback, barely, which sits in relative anonymity between more celebrated massifs of Jay to the North and Hurricane to the south. It also sits in the shadow of THE Saddleback, of High Peaks fame. If it’s possible for something 3,616 feet tall to fade into the wallpaper, Saddleback succeeds admirably.

It is reachable by a bushwhack from Jay Mountain, but after soaking in the spectacular Jay Ridge, most people figure, why bother? A shorter approach is available off of Jay Mountain Road, an unreliable, washout-prone ribbon of infrastructure, whose countenance changes more often than Lady Bracknell. If you catch it on a good day, fine, you can drive up to the Saddleback jumping-off point in a passenger car, but don’t count on it.

Classically, Saddleback was approached by climbing little Frenyea Mountain first, a stout bump with some impressive views from its south-facing cliffs. But as the days shortened, it seemed more logical to skirt Frenyea to the east, which would have the added advantage of allowing a motor vehicle to do more of the climbing in this rugged sector of the Adirondacks.

So I hopped in my favorite beater, a 2002 silver 4-cylinder Toyota Camry, and dared Jay Mountain Road to do its worst. I wore noise-canceling headphones, so if I lost a muffler at least I wouldn’t know about it until after the hike.

I parked 2.7 miles east of the junction with Styles Brook Road, in a wide spot with room for about three cars, identifiable by a piece of pink surveyor tape on a birch. I followed the contour around the foot of Frenyea through some relatively open woods until it was safely aft, then activated the compass which showed Saddleback to be due north. Easy enough. Except that, also due north, was a bit of a swamp lower down and nest of blowdown higher up.

It got so intense that I finally decided that due north could go hang itself and crossed from the west side of the ridge to the east, where I found myself on some steep ground that may have been open not so long ago, but today is repopulating with a tangle  of witch hazel, birch saplings, striped maple and other Les Misérables of the bushwhacking world.  

This battle went on for another 20 minutes when through the scrub appeared that most marvelous of sights, a bulbous grassy ridge with multiple open rock faces. Getting there was another matter. After a dip into a wet area, the ground climbed very steeply, and everytime it seemed I was about to reach one of the aforementioned faces it seemed to move just a bit higher, always out of reach. Scrub always appeared just in time to block a promising route, thin soil gave way beneath my boot and every shrubby handhold turned out to be rotten or full of stickers.

[To those very few people reading this who understand the upcoming plot twist, just cool your jets, I’m getting to it. No need to scroll down to leave a hilarious comment at my expense.]

Anyway, it was a real battle, but so worth it. When views did start to appear they eased the pain of scrambling from one rock outcropping up to the next.

Lake Champlain, closer than I might have expected, appeared in the East. A few brushstrokes of buttery yellow leaves remained on the aspen and birch in the valley between Saddleback and Hurricane, its fire tower just visible beneath the dark clouds. The High Peaks ranges dominated the southern horizon like ranks of marching soldiers, and as a cherry on the sundae, a bald eagle soared below my perch.

These, the best views, are not at the true summit. A snip of pink tape and a bit of a herd path through the balsam point the way to the top, but after you arrive at a gravel bare spot with nice views of Whiteface in the west there’s little reason to press on save for braggin’ rights and an obstructed view of the Jay ridge. For all the difficulty, the route was not long, scarcely 1.75 miles achieved in about an hour and a half.

Still, I was not relishing what was certain to be a precarious slip and slide fest back down the way I’d come. So when I noticed another bit of tape several feet to the right of my own route, there seemed to be no added harm in descending in that direction.

Flagging and wispy herd paths often appear on trailless peaks, and usually they peter out after a few paces. But here, the grass seemed to have been rather aggressively trampled as it picked its way over stable ground down through the rocky face. Here was another bit of tape, and another, as the route remained constant and civilized.

Then, like an icepick to the heart, I suffered a rare spasm of clarity. Cartoon-like, my brain raced in reverse at warp speed, back to the top, then back to the dicy climb through the rocks, back to the blowdown, back to the swamp, back to the parking  lot where my imagery zoomed in on that tape on the birch tree I’d noticed when I parked the car.

No. It couldn’t be. Could it? It could.

The herd path was faint, particularly under the fallen leaves, but it remained followable and consistently marked all the way back to Jay Mountain Road where it spit me out not 20 yards from the 2002 silver 4-cylinder Toyota Camry.

I sat on the trunk for a while, not really feeling anger or happiness, just with a dim bovine consciousness of the events of the afternoon. If you still want the heroism that comes with accomplishing a mighty bushwhack, you can still do so. But next time I’m taking that path.

Key stats

• Distance:  3.4 miles round trip
• Elevation: 3,616 feet
• Elevation gain: 1,280 feet