There is a story about the architect Le Corbusier who built a house for his elderly parents in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland in 1912. On moving day (it’s unclear whether they wanted to move, or the son simply had Maman and Papa packed up with the fondue pots and found them later in a crate marked “misc. stuff”), the rickety parents wandered into the backyard in search of fresh air and perhaps some lawn chairs to recline on while they took in their new mountain views. Corbusier, however, had foreseen just such behavior, and, with the advanced intelligence of a 25 year-old, obviously knew better than the people who had raised him. The parents found their new garden with the stunning vistas completely surrounded by a high wall. Swiss prisons have shorter walls. There were, though, a few thin slits cut out high up in the masonry, perhaps in case a trebuchet had to be disarmed by archers. The parents could only see the view if they piled up some of the moving crates and stood on them tippy-toe. “It’s to protect you, parents,” Corbusier might have said (or might not have, as this story might not be completely accurate). “The view will be lost if you see it all the time; its beauty will disappear within days.”
Reservoir
Readers–those who made it this far–are now probably wondering what this convoluted first paragraph has to do with anything. But that is exactly the point: Right in front of us is our own incredible landscape, the Rensselaer Plateau. But for many, its beauty has long disappeared, lost to time, it’s now little more than just a big lump in the road to be driven over on the way to Albany or Troy.
Day 1
“We usually have to drive much farther to hike,” said one couple from Poestenkill. “This is right in our backyard.” Red County vans were transporting twelve hikers through the foggy morning two weekends back, from Walter Kersch’s Pine Ridge Cross-Country Ski Area in East Poestenkill to Garfield Road in Stephentown, the trailhead of the Rensselaer Plateau Alliance’s (RPA) 8th annual Plateau Traverse Hike.
Indeed, the 35 mile (some would say shorter, others might argue it felt closer to twice that) two-day hike did go through a few backyards. A few generous landowners were kind enough to give the RPA permission to cross their properties, but much of the land this year is open to the public.
The reason for that, explained RPA Executive Director Jim Bonesteel, as he led the pack on day 1 up the southern escarpment of the plateau, is because of the new Cowee Forest land which was purchased by The Conservation Fund this summer. Of the 23,053 acres now permanently protected from developers, 15,000 acres are in Rensselaer County and over 9,000 acres are situated on the Plateau.
The origins of the Plateau took place hundreds of millions of years ago, going through various formations (at one time the Taconic Mountains, which the plateau was part of, was taller than the Himalaya Mountains today) and deformations along the way before ending up with what is left there now. According to the RPA, the “Plateau is estimated to be the fifth largest forested region in New York State. Its forests still exist in relatively large continuous blocks with few dividing roads.”
On the first day of the hike there were just a few parts where the path crossed or walked along roads (Tinnley Road and Route 43 in Stephentown, Bower, Kipple and Taborton Roads in Sand Lake, a few feet of Plank Road in East Poestenkill). The feeling one gets while there is alternately of being in the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and, actually, a wooded back yard. Then it seems to start all over again, with stretches of open canopy uplands, forested uplands, open peatlands, and other wetlands going on and on.
The Plateau, however, all began to resemble wetland about halfway into day 1, because of the rain which wasn’t invited but showed up anyway. When you have wet feet, everything seems to resemble a swamp. Luckily, the hiking party included the ecologist Dr. David Hunt of Grafton, who, wet or dry, can still differentiate one part of the Plateau from the next, even when it’s covered in a sheet of fog. Dr. Hunt is exactly the type of guy you want on a hike through a place you need to rediscover in order to see it anew again. His expertise is the ecology of Rensselaer County, and he’s a sort of walking Google of pretty much everything forest and wetland related in the area. This is made all the more interesting in that Dr. Hunt doesn’t use Google (or computers, email, cell phones, GPS—while hiking, he carries in one hand an extraordinarily heavy metal clipboard packed with maps and other documents, plotting with a pencil the path, as well as various denning sites, scat piles, and other points of interest along the way). You can pick up pretty much anything out of the dirt, from nuts to newts and Hunt will usually be able to tell you about it, starting with its Latin name. Those spotted red newts (Notophthalmus viridescens), by the way, can live to over ten years, so yes, you are probably seeing the same ones over and over, year after year. You might as well introduce yourself. Only some mushrooms seemed to stump Dr. Hunt. “Let’s just agree to call it a fungus,” said Bonesteel, quickly resolving the problem of what some unknown growth coming out of a tree stump was called.
There were two casualties by the first half of day 1. RPA staff brought in water, lemonade, and homemade brownies to Bauer Road and took out two hikers, one with sore knees, the other with a boot blowout. They would both return for day two, and as Part II of day 1 was largely a difficult bushwhacking slog over the slippery rock piles of Poestenkill, they didn’t miss too much. In fact it was difficult to see anything toward the end of Saturday, with the forest light even more diffused by the grey clouds, so it was with some pleasure when the group stumbled out of the woods onto Plank Road to find RPA President Fred DeMay sitting on a pickup truck tailgate in the Pine Ridge parking lot with a barbecue going. “Who’s hungry?” asked DeMay.
The more adventurous camped overnight along the banks of the Poestenkill River at the ski area, a big fire for warmth. The less adventurous went home to cold beer, hot showers, and their own beds. Life is so often made up of such difficult choices.
Day 2
“There’s ice on the tents,” said a NY Times photographer who had driven up from the warm city to take pictures of the Sunday portion of the hike for New York State Tourism.
The cold left right about the time the photographer turned back with regret. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said as she left to continue her mission of documenting the spectacular parts of the Empire State.
Nick Conrad, of the Rensselaer Land Trust, aided by Star-bright, a ten year old part Golden Retriever, part “everything else,” guided the way to the first destination of day 2, Dyken Pond in Grafton.
Have you been to the Dyken Pond Environmental Education Center in a while? Ever? Or like some us, have you been driving by that sign on Route 2 into Cropseyville for years and years and not seeing it anymore? It’s stunningly gorgeous, but might have been lost to the sights of some because it’s basically sitting in their back yards. Or maybe you went and the lake was filled with the noise of obnoxious motor boats? Dyken Pond is actually getting even more over-developed every year. But all that can be skipped, as the hike did in the interest of keeping civilization—so often so uncivil– to a minimum, when it cut over to the Newcomb Pond parcel which the Friends of Dyken Pond purchased in 2014. The Newcomb trail has a neat trail marker system where one can buy a marker online at Dykenpond.org for $50 and have it personalized with their own message (“as long as it’s printable”, added Conrad in case anyone had already begun composing some blue verse.) Many were “In memory of…”, which was kind of sad in a way, but some were hopeful like “Micha and Tanja” who had either bought two markers proclaiming their union, or someone printed it twice. There appears to be no course of action to remove a marker, so Micha and Tanja had better stay together forever, or one of them is going to have to climb some trees and rip “Micha and Tanja” down before they can safely walk that trail again with a replacement. One marker declared “There is pleasure in the pathless woods,” which might seem odd marking a path through the woods, but to those who had already spent the last day and half largely walking pathless across their County, it seemed just about right.
Day 2 lunch was at Dunham Reservoir in Grafton. Conrad’s wife, Liz, had brought cookies and a water resupply and the hikers sat around a dead campfire pit eating and watching kayakers glide under the bridge at Johnson Road. With the reddening Fall trees, it was an idyllic scene only sullied by “fishermen” who had tried, but failed, to set fire to a pile of nylon fishing line, rubber worms, bait containers and other detritus of their day spent communing with nature, failing at that as well. Much of the fishermen’s mess was cleaned up, but at different spots along the way–usually the most picturesque– were similar mounds of moron waste which would probably fill a small pickup truck.
The hike, here, began to change in subtle ways. It seemed no longer just “a hike” and had become something else, a kind of Canterbury Tales, a sort of pilgrimage to the beauty of the County. Perhaps it was the great weather after the previous day’s drizzle, and maybe it was sharing a meal with people who were also sharing an empathetic challenge, an experience, a short moment of good life. Up along the paths at Grafton Lakes State Park, the conversations and story-telling started to come out as a way of filling in the miles. Like Canterbury Tales, the stories were of different times, and different lives but all seemed momentarily cohesive. Dan told of his trip overland from India to Kabul, Afghanistan in the mid-70s, the last “safe” years of that land before it was invaded by the Russians. Lisa told about her travels to Russia during the waning years of the Cold War in 1984. “The food was terrible in Moscow,” she remembered. “But the Champagne in the hotel there was delicious. We drank a lot of it. You couldn’t drink the water, you know.” From Moscow she’d gone on to Tashkent. “The food there was much better.” Katya shared a recipe for Plov, which might have been Lisa’s “better food.” Katya had eaten it morning, noon, and night while camping in a yurt in Uzbekistan. Rachel told about letting her dog, Star-bright, temporarily lick-clean camp dishes on an overnight hike before she could find enough water to do the job right. She realized her father had been quietly watching Star-bright getting the dishes almost sparkling clean, and then his daughter re-packing the dishes. Would he ever again really believe that she didn’t do this at home? Would this be going through his head at Thanksgiving?
As the group passed Shaver Pond in Grafton, Dr. Hunt recounted snorkeling through the murk there one day and suddenly finding a swarm of fresh-water jellyfish around him. Dr. Hunt pointed out that Shaver Pond was one of the few naturally created lakes in the County that have no development on them. It might have been there since the glaciers left. This story spurred a discussion on the use of the word “develop.” Looking around at the nature surrounding the “un-developed” Shaver Pond, it seemed to be the height of perfection. How could it be developed further? It could be destructed, it could be destroyed, but it could never be “developed” to a higher level than it already was naturally. So is “developer” the right word for those people who were bulldozing the north end of Dyken Pond to add even more plastic houses, more sewage, more noise to an already sensitive area? The word seemed misappropriated at the least.
From Shaver Pond, the Hicks Trail was taken toward the new Gundrum forest land, 927 acres acquired by the RPA in late 2016, situated just north-west of Grafton Lakes State Park. The trail is named after Small Town author Granville Hicks who lived much of his life in Grafton. Hicks was a Marxist-Communist for a while before he realized (much earlier than most Marxist-Communists) that the true goal of communism was “brutal revolutionary totalitarianism.” The Soviets later proved him correct, tasty champagne notwithstanding. Hicks’ house was passed. There looks like what one might have used as a giant antenna to talk to the Russians in the front yard. It’s probably something else, but Dr. Hunt-Google didn’t know what it was either so one had to make things up. “I always meant to ask what that thing was” said Dr. Hunt, who had done some work on the property for a later owner, “but I never got around to it.”
A lookout spot called Rynard’s Roost on the Gundrum property (now known as the Grafton Forest), overlooking the Tomhannock Reservoir, was the hike’s pinnacle, if not exactly literally than maybe metaphorically. The view is incredible, and its description will be left at that; you simply have to see it yourself. The rest of Day 2 was all downhill—literally, not metaphorically—as the group descended the Plateau’s northern escarpment into Pittstown State Forest. Some limped. Most—with the exception of Star-bright and Dr. Hunt’s young son–seemed tired, and much of the rocky hillside was likely overlooked as the group made their way to the parked red County vans waiting to take us back to Poestenkill.
And for a moment or so, as the vans drove South on Tamarac Road, one could look out the window and see the escarpment, Rynard’s Roost, the Plateau, see it all anew one more time, before it once again began to disappear.