Not long ago, I spent my spring weekends waiting for Dave to return from harassing Maine’s trout population. The dogs and I passed the time exploring Seven Islands Timber Company land in the Upper Magalloway Watershed. Cell phones, GPS, and ticks were unheard of, and decent printed maps were easier to come by in those days. The Maine gazetteer did such a fine job of documenting obscure and transient logging roads that I bought a second copy just to slice up and pocket the pages I needed. The gritty dogs by my side in those days pounded out some big miles between lakes Aziscohos and Parmachenee, never once getting lost or being late for the campfire. We were never tempted to take risks, except to share space with emerging black bear, twelve-hundred pound moose, and double hitch log trucks.
It’s been some time since Dave’s hassled the fish, and the ashes of those dogs have long been adrift in New Hampshire’s Nash Stream State Forest. Here in New York’s North Country, there are new lands to explore, new gadgets to employ, and a dog that hit his prime when he turned nine.
Today, he’d been waiting in the house for almost six hours by the time I returned. I let him outside, sans collars while I hurried inside, changed into the clothes I’d laid out, grabbed the action gear bag, the same old knobby-tire bike and rolled out.
Earlier, I had suggested to Dave that I’d take Walker to hike the Pinnacle, but the bright sun and retreating snow inspired me to take advantage of the bike to cover more distance. By the time we reached the trail head, we were ready for more action than the half-mile hike to the Pinnacle offered. We rolled over the ridge instead, and headed for a Jeep road junction I’d GPS-marked on a recent expedition. On that day, thick slush forced us to abandon the bike and walk. I had expected it though, and hitched boots to my hip pack in a fashion Dave called “dorky, but serviceable.” Walker and I made it as far as the junction before calling it quits on that trip. Today, I expected to explore the trail beyond it. If we were lucky, it would punch through to another trail we’d found on the east side of the mountain, forming a loop. We’d been methodically mapping these roads and trails in out-and-back trips for a month; today I aimed to connect the dots.
The Jeep road sloped down through yellow birch and aspen into a shaded valley that had hardly begun to thaw out. Slush sucked at the tires, but the frozen ground held firm. The bike was still helpful to keep up with Walker, but I’ll admit to some apprehension about the effort it would take to climb out of the valley if we needed to backtrack. This was no Seven Islands truck road, and I was packing a few more pounds and years than I had on those trips. When the descent finally ended, we encountered a seasonal brook that flooded the road. The prospect of wet feet would make either the loop effort or backtrack unpleasant, but the junction, just 50 yards ahead, taunted me as intently as summit fever afflicts its victims. Walker bounded through the water first, and in his wake I noticed a firm gravel surface beneath. I clipped in, rode downstream, and found him waiting at the limit of our previous experience. I thrust my right arm out and he charged up the new path: my dedicated partner, fearless companion, master navigator.
The old skid road was two decades into a healthy regeneration process, as the pioneer species slowly submitted to young forest trees. A tangle of pin cherry blow downs interspersed with blackberry bushes and maple saplings impeded my progress. Walker doubled back to check on me. “Pocket hunter,” I teased, each time I rewarded his apparent concern.
I pushed the bike through a mile of slush covered growth before ice seized the back wheel and suspension. It was against my better judgement to carry it, just one week after recovering from debilitating back pain. Nobody would steal the bike if I left it behind, I just needed to decide where we were headed. The GPS placed us within a mile of the intended connector trail, but our present path dissolved into the forest. Walker would happily agree to bushwhacking or backtracking, but standing listless and deliberating is not something he tolerates. He bowed impatiently and whined, as if to say “What next? Let’s Go!” I took ten steps off the trail just to give him a trajectory and stopped moving the moment he vanished. There was just enough cell service to text Dave. Someone ought to know how far I’d deviated from the original plan: “crossed the state forest boundary north of the Pinnacle, traveled east on a trail that dissolved, bike is frozen. Leaving it here to bushwhack 0.84 mi SE to mark 17,” which I hoped he would recognize as the limit of a previous excursion. Wet feet and a risky exit strategy motivated me to start jogging towards my lengthening shadow.
Walker disappeared into a wall of spruce, fir and cedar. I checked the handset for his location and realized we would have to tunnel through the thick cover to hit our target, which felt increasingly like hitting the head of a distant pin. Worse, the point I intended to reach should be on a ridge, and the closer we got without gaining elevation meant that we would be facing a ledge at the end. I sent Dave another message “frig this, we’re coming out on our backtrack. Gonna be late.” Walker sensed that I’d stopped, or maybe sensed that I was starting to walk in a circle, but he appeared out of nowhere and whined until I pocketed the phone and moved on. Maybe he just hates gadgets, and I can’t blame him for that, but he’s also been known to bark when I stop to read a map or check a compass. Perhaps he just has no patience for the ineptitude of human navigational sense.
We thrashed back to the bike for three reasons – I figured I could push it out as well as I’d pushed it in, and if I could get the wheels to turn it would hasten our retreat. Third and most importantly, it has lights. Those are a result of an incident last fall that ended in an effort to find Walker in the Adirondack woods after dark. He’d had the last laugh that day, as we rattled around in the dark while he was hobnobbing with the rich and famous of Upper St. Regis Lake.
This time, we made it back to the Jeep road well before nightfall. I even managed to free up enough moving parts to ride the bike back upstream, and up most of the climb to the Pinnacle trail head. I stopped on the dry, sunny landing and prepared to text our imminent success to Dave. Just then, the old Tacoma trundled up the road, redhead at the wheel, blond dog riding shotgun. Walker went into a frenzy of circles around Dave, as if to imply “we’re saved.” It seems Walker would rather we humans didn’t pretend to be so wily and wild. Maybe he was just miffed about missing his mid-afternoon nap. He’s sliding comfortably into his fuddyduddydom, and I have to admire the wisdom in that.
rascalchaser 