Snowshoeing to Nine Corner Lake
As best as I could gather from weather reports the Southern Adirondacks had gotten close to 8 inches, so I took my snowshoes along hoping that they could be used. It was sunny when I left, but in the hour it took to get to my destination it had changed to partly cloudy. The temperature at the trailhead was about 28 degrees, perfect weather for a winter hike. The snow was about 4 - 6 inches so I put on the snowshoes and wore them for all of the 6 miles (round trip) I traveled. With that small amount of snow the trail was muddy at times and even had standing water in places. Most of what I followed this day were marked snowmobile trails, but I was the first to pass through most of the areas since snowfall. I followed a trail that brings you to the West side of Nine Corner Lake, a trail that I had never followed before. This first photo is at the trailhead along Rte 29A a couple miles West of intersection of Rte 10.
According to the topo map the total elevation change over the whole route was well under 100 feet, which proved to be the case during the hike. The trail to the lake follows a wide ravine with higher elevation on the North side. It is a very quiet and peaceful area, just challenging enough to keep my attention, but nothing that caused me any problems. As you can see from the next photograph, it is an open area, that was logged many years ago, so there are few very large trees. As with most of the Adirondacks, there are numbers of large erratics (rocks left when the glaciers moved through) but none with trees growing on top that I saw, which is usually quite common in the Adirondacks.
At about 2 1/2 miles from the trailhead you get your first glance of Nine Corner Lake through the trees as the land drops away towards the shore to the North. From here it is still a bit of a hike with some uphill until you get to the shoreline. In places the trail is quite narrow as it roughly follows a ledge 100 feet in from the shoreline, but this quickly flattens out and a number of opening along the shore offer photo opportunities. There were tracks of a dog going along the ice that I incorporated into the first photo. which was taken from the South shore of the lake facing West.
The ice itself was not yet thick enough to support a person and I ended up standing on some bent over brush with the tripod on the ice to take the photograph. As you can see the sun came out just as I got to the lake, but after only a few minutes it disappeared and the wind came up making it noticeably colder. I was well dressed for the day, and in fact I was quite sweaty by the end of my trip as I probably wore too heavy of an outer jacket for the amount of heat that I generated snowshoeing.
The next photograph is the best of the day. It was taken at about the midway point of the South shore, again facing West, just before I started heading back. I was using a Canon Digital Rebel XT with only a skylight filter.
Soon after I took this photograph the sky started to cloud over and most of the way back was so overcast that is started to look like twilight in midday. I covered the 3 miles back in a bit under 1 hour as I was following the trail that I had broken on the way in.
This is the first hike of the winter, and I hope to get out and enjoy the beauty of nature many more times before Spring arrives again. Let me know if you want to come along!
Dave
posted by Dave Waite | 5:12 PM
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