Climbing Seventy Mountain, (close to Death)

By Tim Rowland

I was near Death on Halloween, but could not quite pull it off.

Death Mountain in the town of Lewis is one of the last public parts of the Jay Wilderness that I have yet to explore, and an unseasonably warm last day of October seemed like the perfect time to scratch it off the list. But after leaving my water bottle on the kitchen table (“That’s a good place for it,” my sarcasm-prone grandma would have said) and suffering from one of those random, just-not-yourself days that come with age, I decided Death could wait.

But close to Death is a shorter, easier hike up Seventy Mountain, a 2,200-foot eminence that’s part of the Jay Wilderness. Even on an off day it seemed attainable.

Seventy Mountain is reached by taking Wells Hill Road in the hamlet of Lewis to Seventy Road, which will turn to dirt and get a bit rough before terminating at a DEC parking lot for the Fay Mountain tract of the Taylor Pond Wild Forest.

Although Seventy Mountain is right there for the taking — scarcely a mile from the parking lot — no one ever climbs it because there are too many other ripe targets with superior views in the neighborhood, including Fay, Bald and MacDonough.

These are all trailless bushwhacks, and maybe a point in Seventy’s favor is that it’s the only climb of the bunch that is neither hard nor tricky. Cross the dirt road and work your way west up the drainage that immediately presents itself. The climb is moderately steep, rising up and over several benches as it approaches the saddle between Bald and Seventy.

The route becomes narrower and more irritating as it reaches its high point, thanks to a challenging set of boulders that have to be picked through. As some point, about 0.6 miles up the drainage, you will likely decide that the considerable steepness of the mountain flank to your right is less bothersome than the messy boulders, hobblebush and blowdown in the bottom land, and you will make a hard right and point yourself to the three little knobs that represent the Seventy Mountain summit.

The summit is actually behind you now, but turning any sooner would have brought you face-to-face with Seventy’s prodigious cliffs. From the saddle, the summit ridge is scarcely a tenth of a mile away, and once you’re up there you’ll be free to prowl around and see what there is to see with minimal climbing. 

There are some views from the cliff-tops, but they are somewhat hemmed in by the profile of the taller Bald to the south and Fay to the east. If you’ve ever been the shortest person at Lollapalooza, you’ll know the feeling.

But Seventy’s summit is quite attractive, a mix of hardwoods and evergreens with a clean forest floor that has the feel of a manicured park. Perhaps the best reason to climb Seventy though is to see the Cracked Egg Erratic on the eastern end of the ridge, a motor-home-sized boulder split down the middle that you can’t miss.

After tagging the treed-in summit and enjoying some obstructed views of Bluff Mountain to the north, I descended down the northern side of the mountain, opposite the flank I had climbed. This route meandered through a lovely white-birch forest, where maybe three of every four trees were snowy white totems.

Pretty soon the route north runs into private property, forcing a hard right turn back to an abandoned extension of Seventy Road. The timber company’s emphatic no trespassing signs at this juncture brag that this is a “managed forest.” If they say so. But the reedy, scoured private lands compare poorly to the grand, protected forestlands of the state. Managed forests in my experience look best when owned by country squires and research universities; when profits are at stake the results seem less enchanting for some reason.

From here it was an easy half mile walk along the ghost of the old road back to the parking lot, but there were still some sights to see, including a nice view of Fay Mountain over Hathaway Swamp. The route covered about 2.5 miles with a 632-foot elevation gain in total solitude and with some pleasant, if not outstanding, scenery. Not bad for having cheated Death.