Hiking in William West Durant’s ‘stomping grounds’

Hiking through history on Sawyer Mountain, located halfway between Indian Lake and Blue Mountain Lake

By Tim Rowland

Last week I was down in the land of William West Durant, the ne’er-do-well developer of Adirondack Great Camps and squanderer of family fortunes who wound up growing mushrooms and finally earning a few bucks performing lowly title searches in county courthouses, dying “poor but not unhappy” despite a stormy financial and legal legacy.

Son of the railroad magnate Thomas Durant, William West Durant built and proceeded to lose, due to one financial calamity or another, the legendary Camp Uncas, Camp Pine Knot and Great Camp Sagamore.

The Durant family was usually in the driver’s seat where fleecing was concerned, but in his building endeavors the son was routinely out-tycooned by the likes of J.P. Morgan and Alfred Vanderbilt, who snapped up Durant’s architectural treasures at fire-sale prices.

Another of his getaways included a country club and nine-hole golf course that he also lost as he was filing for bankruptcy in the early 1900s.

Looking for a short hike

While it was work that delivered me to the region, I am never so foolish as to schedule a full day that does not leave time for a little hike. But with a couple hours of interviews, shorter autumn days and a long drive home, short would have to be the key.

Sawyer, a family friendly mountain located on Routes 28/30 between Indian Lake and Blue Mountain Lake fit the bill. Coming from Blue Mountain Lake, the trailhead to this little, 2,000-foot peak is on the right. On a high-autumn weekday, there was nothing resembling a crowd, and what hikers there were tended to be locals emerging from their bunkers as the seasonal crowds melted away.

The route up Sawyer Mountain is a little over a mile with an elevation gain of 575 feet, which to me puts it in the less-than-moderately-steep category. If you want a workout, you’ll have to run or hop on one foot or something.

Sawyer’s woods

The forest is dominated by beech in all its disease- and insect-addled splendor. Poor beech. Once the queen of the forest, its specimens are now mostly scarred by cankers, and new growth considered junk trees by foresters. As if that wasn’t enough, a new beech leaf disease is assailing the species from the south

The forest also has a goodly population of white ash, which in relative terms will soon be gone due to the encroaching emerald ash borer — you wonder what this forest will look like 50 years from now if two of its main inhabitants are gone.

There are other hardwoods to be sure, and in one spot the roots of a mammoth yellow birch provide natural stairsteps for ascending hikers. Otherwise, the hike is notable for great beds of ferns that always seem to green up against the brown fallen leaves.

The trail is in good shape, with minimal mud or erosion-exposed roots and rocks. It seems to have benefitted from crowd-sourced maintenance, viz., when a tree falls, hikers simply go around it until the re-route becomes the main trail. In some places you might notice that the tree itself has rotted away, leaving odd little parentheses in the trail skirting nothing at all.

There are a couple of steep sections, but they only last for a few feet at a time; this would be a great snowshoe  in the coming months. As you get closer to the summit, the trail follows a spine of smooth, exposed bedrock that on a wet fall day can be slippery with all the leaves. Pay attention, because the leaves can hide the wet rock — although in most cases the trail has been worn along the fringes of the rock for the convenience of those who do not enjoy face-planting on anorthosite. 

Near the top, a small overlook made better in the de-leafed fall and winter is reached by a (very) short spur to the left. The summit is treed in, but the path continues down to the best overlook off toward Blue Mountain and some other lakes and crags to the northwest — William West Durant’s old stomping grounds. From here, it is easy to see why he was not unhappy, even though he was broke.