Talking Treks - Part 1 - Long Lake to Tupper

Loader and I decided that we would do a series of joint posts about the various treks that we took. While there are no end to the trip combinations in the Daks, there was only a finite number of trips that scouts could choose to do from our camp. Most had been pioneered by the great Ken Smith. He had them pretty well planned out with sample itineraries and daily mileages. I picked Long Lake to Tupper to write up first because it was the very first trek I ever did as a camper.

Very Poorly drawn route.  This was actually the best attempt out of 3 or 4!  Contrary to the red line, your would actually canoe up Long Lake, and not carry the canoes along the shore line for 10+ miles.

The most memorable trip I had on Long Lake was covered here.  Overall, this is a solid trek.  Many groups opt to shorten it and get picked up on the Raquette river, but if you do the whole thing, it is a decent 45 miles or so, on some pretty good sized bodies of water.  

Long Lake is a pretty popular place in the Daks.  There is usually quite a bit of other traffic on the lake, to include float planes.  Even though this next story probably should have been in the previous post, I just remembered it as I was typing, so it goes here.

After the Weebs and I had left the woods during our little trip to the high peaks, we ended up going into Long Lake and taking a ride on a float plane.  Instead of going on the usual brief hop, we elected to go on a longer flight and just pay by the hour.  It turned out to be a great decision.  First, our pilot was quite a character.  At this point I had my pilot's license, but I had only flown a little over a hundred hours.  This guy had likely flown thousands of hours.  He also had this super dry sense of humor.  Before we got on the plane he asked us if we were feeling OK and then he responded that he felt pretty dizzy.  I wish I could remember some of the other great one-liners he had, they were all great and flawlessly delivered.  He flew us over Long Lake and then over into Old Forge, where he was negotiating some deal with another float plane operator.  Weebs and I had a great time hanging out at this other float plane base, there is always lots of fun stuff that accompanies big toys.  Plus, there was a very friendly Golden Retriever that was doing its best to demolish a piece of wood panelling.  He was really into it, just tearing into it, but taking frequent breaks to play with us.  

After the little trip to the other float plane base he showed us some of the fun stuff you can do with a float plane.  First, we landed in a small pond, way too small to take off going straight.  So, he showed us that you could crank around the lake in a big fast turn and get airborne that way.  It really was awesome, sort of like doing doughnuts, but in an airplane rather than a car.  We were both pinned to the outside of the curve and one float came out of the water before the other one did.  He showed us other different sorts of takeoffs and landings, each one quite exciting and just a bit scary.  Through it all, he was the picture of calm.  Even as we were doing 60+ mph in a tight curve around this small pond with trees flashing by in the windows, he was sitting back calmly in his seat, one hand on the yoke.  If I had to guess, his pulse was probably a solid 50-60 beats per minute while Weebs and I were probably both in triple digits!  

All good things have to come to an end though, when we landed it was to settle up.  This is when he delivered perhaps his best line, "It's only free, if we don't make it back!"  

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Anyway, back to the main point.  Long Lake is extremely beautiful.  I think much of the shoreline is owned by the State, so there are not a lot of houses on the Lake, just lots of wild land.  Even though it is a big lake, it is quite sheltered, so there is not a lot of wind.  Perhaps the roughest part of a canoe trek is paddling into a big wind.  It is exciting at first, because there are usually some good sized waves, but it is just really tiring.  You try not to take breaks either, because you will lose the little progress you had made. 

If it's windy, Long Lake is a cruel introduction to canoeing.  There are really no places to take a break and you are canoeing the whole length of the lake.  Any breaks you take you tend to drift southward back the way you came.  It's baptism by fire, but that's not always a bad thing.  I recall less state land (or more private housing) than the Voyageur, but perhaps that's just because I used to dream about owning one of the sprawling estates that dotted the shore here and there.  And there was time to dream.  Most beginner canoeists will zig-zag.  Until you learn to steer by using the J-stroke and not using the paddle in the stern as a rudder this is par for the course.  Some scouts and adults never learn on a whole trek even though we demonstrate and stress it often.

On a nice sunny day, with little wind, taking breaks is one of the highlights of the trek!  It is inevitable that any group of paddlers will go at slightly different speeds, so we would get pretty spread out on the big lakes.  Particularly in the beginning, when most people are getting used to paddling.  There is a great deal of zig zagging and yelling going on.  Most of the yelling involves the paddler in the front yelling at the paddler in the back to steer properly.  Similarly, the paddler in the back always retorts back that the person in the front is not paddling hard enough.  Naturally, I preferred to paddle my canoe solo.  My general plan of attack involved paddling for 50 minutes and resting for 10.  This made for a good pace.  

The pull out for the first day is at the end of Long Lake, just before you enter the Raquette river.  The first night is usually the toughest because scouts have to figure out how to set up tents, how the stoves work, purifying water etc.  It only gets easier after that though.  The first night is tough too, because you are operating on a bit of a sleep deficit.

I recall one year finding a few fresh water mussels at the campground the first night.  So the next year we went looking for them.  My trek group must have spent a good two hours searching the shallow water for a mussel bed and must have thought I was having them on after a while.  We pretty much gave up.  Later that evening I was demonstrating how to gunwale jump and I fell in - and landed in a bed of hundreds of mussels.  We gathered as much as we could, put a pot on the stove, filled it with water, covered it with foil which we poked holes into.  An makeshift steamer!  Once the water boiled we would steam about ten mussels at a time and on another stove we were melting butter and of course we had hot sauce because I always brought hot sauce to cover up the taste of most evening meals.  We ate like Kings that night on fresh seafood with melted butter and hot sauce.  Quite good.  Stupidly we threw our empty and unopened shells into the water leaving an olfactory beacon for bears.  Another trek that summer had had their food supply attacked by bears at the same campsite.  Though the Quackers had floated his food out from shore in canoes, the lake will always bring it back in.  So his group woke up to the sound of bears pulling canoes out of the water and having a feast.  I understand the temptation as there is precious little in the way of a good tree for bear bag hanging, but hang one we def. did, with no problems.  

The second and third day are both on the Raquette River.  This is some very pleasant paddling.  The river is typically 20 to 40 feet across at any given location, and there is a gentle current that you are paddling with, not against.  Here, when you take a break you still gently glide along closer to your destination.  

Midway through the second day, you reach the falls and a mandatory carry.  This is a pretty tough carry, it is a mile and half long over some pretty tough terrain with some hills tossed in for good measure. My preferred method was to carry my pack and the canoe.  Although it added to the overall weight, you could balance the canoe on the top of your pack and it was far more pleasant than carrying the canoe without the pack.  Without the pack, you rested the thwart, a metal cross piece on the top of your shoulders.  To make it a bit more pleasant, you would try to lash a life jacket in place to add a bit of padding.  After about 5 or 6 steps, the life jacket would often come loose or shift position and the thwart would bite into your shoulders.  When carrying a canoe with two people, you have very little visibility.  You get to see what the inside of a canoe looks like, and the ground beneath your feet, but that is it.  At first, the person in front will try to helpfully call out when an obstacle is coming, but after the first 5 minutes, both participants are pretty pissed off and it becomes a stumbling march in silence.  Every so often the silence is pierced by one scout telling the other scout that he needs to take a rest.  This is accompanied by both scouts doing their best to throw the canoe to the ground without injuring themselves, but almost no concern to the other scout.  Taking breaks just makes the whole thing take longer though.  

Finally, you reach the other end.  It is very pleasant with a sandy beach and the last of the rapids makes a good swimming hole.  However, before the scouts can swim, they have to walk the mile and half back to pick up their paddles and backpacks.  So, it ends up being a 4.5 mile trip altogether.  Not surprisingly, this kills a good part of the day.  Our groups would usually eat lunch and goof off for a bit at the end of the carry.  The rest of the day consisted of a bit more paddling and then making camp.

The Ranger house at the end of this carry is amazing.  Another place I dreamed about someday living.  

The third day involves paddling the rest of the river and then entering into Tupper Lake.  Tupper Lake is much wider than Long Lake and usually has some pretty good wind and waves.  It is a bit of a shock after the easy pleasant paddling on the river, but still quite nice.  At this point, the group is generally performing pretty well and understands what needs to be done each night.  On the first two nights, particularly the first, it is mainly me performing all the tasks.  As the trek goes on, the scouts learn to do everything and just need a bit of supervision.  

I can't believe you forgot to mention the Oxbow.  Many a beer have been consumed by us while making stupid oxbow jokes.  The Wxbow is a place where the Racquette river turns into Simon Pond.  If you don't make the turn you end up in the Oxbow - a series of twists and turns and intersecting channels that reached mythical proportions.  Of course nobody got stuck in it because there's a huge floating buoy with a sign which reads, "Don't enter the Oxbow" or something to that effect.

Nobody I know ever went the wrong way.

As you exit the Racquette you have to cross Simon Pond on your way to Tupper Lake.  The wind could be mega fierce here.  I always hated this part.  (Most Voyageurs hated most canoe trips and would rather have done a 90/10 ratio of backpacking to canoeing, though most Summers the reverse ended up being true.)  Really, the trek should have ended that night as the next day was all too quick to get to the pick up point at the South end of Tupper.   

The fourth day is spent paddling down to the end of the lake, near the pick-up.  Ken Smith designed every single one of the treks to have a very short last day.  So short, that you could easily finish the trek on the fourth day just by paddling or hiking an extra hour or two.  One of my favorite drivers was a guy we called Sarge.  He was in his 60s or 70s, but still quite spry and still had a very keen mind.  We called him Sarge, because he would often hang out with us younger guys, and make sure we didn't get into too much trouble, like a good sergeant! Plus, it was a cool nickname.  

Most of the time, the same driver that dropped you off on the first day would pick you up on the last day.  If Sarge was my driver, I would always tell him to pick me up at around 10.  This was a lie.  We both knew it.  It didn't matter what time I told Sarge, we both knew the real deal.  It was a race to see who could get to the pickup first.  So even if I told Sarge to pick me up at 10 and reached the takeout at 7:30, Sarge would be there, and would have been there for awhile.  Sarge probably picked me up more often than any other driver, and I never once beat him to the pickup spot.  What was great is that it was never discussed.  Even after the 20th time of telling Sarge to pick me up a 10, he would nod and say "see you then" with total sincerity.  

One of the great things about being picked up early is at the very bottom of Tupper Lake, there is a small road (421) that veers west away from Route 30.  If you take this road a couple hundred feet, there is a great little swimming hole with a rock slide where a river feeds into Tupper.  A great way to end the trip!

The ride back to camp is usually a couple of hours and everyone is very quiet.  Most of the group either naps or watches the scenery go by.

I'll try to mix it up and talk about a backpacking trip next.  However, we did far more canoeing treks than backpacking treks, so there will be more posts about canoeing than backpacking.