Dewey Mountain Springs Eternal

If you don’t like the weather in the north country, just wait 20 minutes.

Recently I went for a walk on Dewey Mountain. A few years back, I wrote about skiing at Dewey, my local right here in Saranac Lake — OK, it’s just outside the village, technically in Harrietstown. But let’s not quibble over details.

After knocking back an espresso at Origin Coffee, I drove over to Dewey. Three months post knee replacement, running is off the table and it ain’t coming back. It’s too hard on the prosthesis, and my surgeon bluntly told me, if you come back in, like, 8 years, and the prosthesis is messed up from running, I’ll probably decline to do another surgery.

Bottom line: I’m not covering as much ground as I used to. At least on foot. With one knee replacement done, I’m trying to regain fitness before the second one.

Although the sun shined when I left the coffee shop, it began clouding over when I locked the Fortunate Son and set out. Forbidding clouds. If you don’t like the weather, just wait 20 minutes.

Poking around the interwebz, I’ve learned Dewey Mountain has a longer ski history than I realized. Henry Baldwin, a Saranac Lake native [d. 1992], recounted the story of John Booth, an Ottawa, Ontario, lumber baron who brought his daughter to Saranac Lake in 1892 for the tuberculosis cure. Along with his daughter, he brought what might have been the first pair of skis seen in Saranac Lake.

Sometime in the early 20th century, the Saranac Lake Ski Club came into being. Members convened for ski jumping and cross-country skiing. By the 1920s, the club began holding race meets that combined both jumping and nordic skiing, attracting racers from all over the northeast.

Fast forward to 1937: a guide book published by the NY Conservation Department, precursor to the DEC, mentioned two short alpine ski trails on Dewey. They were approximately a half mile long, with 300 feet of vertical. The catch, however, was that ya had to earn your turns.

One Charlie Keough (dare I conclude that today’s Keough’s K trail is named after him?) put in a rope tow for the 1941-42 ski season. Unfortunately, between the United States’s entry into World War Two, and a low snow year, the venture failed. As a friend informed me, I live in the coldest part of the Tri-Lakes, and we receive the least amount of snow.

Dewey Mountain went dormant as a ski destination after that. At an unknown date, Mt. Pisgah, across town, opened for alpine skiing. Municipally owned, Mt. Pisgah, became local the epicenter for alpine by the 1950s.

Fast forward again, to 1978. The town of Harrietstown was sitting on an undeveloped, wooded parcel on the northwest slope of Dewey Mountain. With the Lake Placid Winter Olympics approaching, local boosters urged the town to turn this plot into a nordic ski center.

(Various parts of Saranac Lake sit in Harrietstown as well as the towns of Saint Armand and North Elba. Saranac Lake is also bisected by the Franklin County / Essex County border. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.)

With planning and enthusiastic volunteer elbow grease, Dewey slowly came into being. The initial trail system combined existing logging roads and new trails. Some trails crossed private property, requiring easements.

The lodge was envisioned as a log structure, but that doesn’t seem to have panned out. The first time I visited Dewey, the lodge was a modest building that could barely accommodate all the competitors who used to show up for the Peru Nordic Masters World Championship race. And almost since it’s inception, weeknight races under lights have been a fixture at Dewey Mountain.

Over time, the trail system evolved. Put in before the skating became a thing, many of the original trails were quite steep. Gradually they were widened, and some of the sidehills were leveled out to accommodate skating. One trail that had crossed private land bit the dust when a housing development was approved for that site.

On a training run a couple summers ago, my bud Randy W pointed out signs of old trails that had gone dormant. This is something I hadn’t previously noticed. But Randy has skied in these parts for over 30 years, and he has stories to tell.

Along with skiing, there are snowshoe trails. In the early 2000s, the Barkeater Trail Alliance (BETA) improved many of the snowshoe trails for mountain biking and added others. Most of the singletrack is named after games: Operation, Monopoly, Risk, Chutes and Ladders… you get the idea.

When I run — or these days, walk — at Dewey, I usually set out clockwise, following the one way ski trails. And I’m about as spontaneous as a brick. But today, I threw caution to the winds and set out backwards up the Iron Bill trail. It’s named after Bill Demong, who won gold in nordic combined at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Demong grew up down the road in Vermontville, and as a junior, he paid dues in Dewey’s weeknight races. Other notable Olympians who paid dues here are biathletes Tim Burke and Annalies Cook.

Fun fact to know and tell: Bill Demong was one of Randy W’s students at the old National Sports Academy over in Lake Placid. Randy himself skied for the powerhouse Fischer Factory Team from 1989 to 1992. After parting ways with the Factory Team, Randy taught various sciences at the National Sports Academy, as well as algebra, yoga, and watercolor painting. He also assisted coaching NSA’s nordic ski team. In 1993, he coached at the Junior Olympics (these days, known as Junior National Championships) at Steamboat Springs, CO.

The Iron Bill outrun twists and turns 0.8 mile uphill, until the junction with the mountaintop trails. I took a hard right and continued uphill. In the winter, I don’t get up to these trails. They aren’t groomed, and I don’t have the chops to ski them on metal edge skis.

But you can see that people did ski up high on the mountain, way back when. The connector trail leaving Iron Bill is definitely an old ski trail, wide enough for two classic tracks. Keeping with the intention to take a different route, I passed the shortcut to the Sorry singletrack and continued to go opposite of my usual direction, out Mumbly Peg instead of Sorry. As I went further up Mumbly Peg, the trail became singletrack. Coming up to a hard left turn, I saw what was clearly an old ski trail. Goodbye, singletrack.

The trail was wide enough that it might have been an alpine rather than cross-country route. It was easy to follow, but clearly hadn’t seen maintenance in decades. Where saplings now constrict the old trails at Jefferson, NJ’s defunct Snow Bowl, this was still wide. But the boulders that I encountered had to make grooming interesting. Some of these had to be like icebergs: even if one could get machinery up there to remove them, one couldn’t know what lurked beneath the surface. Some sections were veritable rock gardens. There were also soft, wet spots. Thirty feet to my left, the Mumbly Peg singletrack was bone dry.

Zigzagging back and forth across contour lines, the trail wound uphill, until suddenly it disappeared. Now trending downhill, I bushwhacked through saplings and undergrowth, but couldn’t see where the trail, if it continued, went. Retracing my steps to the high point, I saw a BETA trail sign, and clambered up the fall line to Mumbly Peg.

From there, it was a quick walk to Dewey’s summit. Thus far, it’s been a chilly spring. While the leaves are beginning to come out on trees in the village, 300 feet higher, that wasn’t happening yet. Looking through the branches at the surrounding mountains, the views are nice, but not as compelling as when you reach a bald summit. But it’s my local, and it’s fun.

I set out downhill on the Sorry Singletrack. Chutes and Ladders is more direct, but that’s due to a couple of really vertical sections that are probably ill advised with a new artificial knee. Once past the Chutes and Ladders junction, I saw an old trail marker off to my left, and went over to it. Another old trail. Again, whether alpine or nordic, I’m not sure; however, it’s certainly wide enough to be alpine.

This trail was shorter and degraded more quickly than the first one that I’d explored. As I moved through brush, it began raining lightly. Picking my way around blowdown, there was no more trail. I worked my way west and downhill. After some minutes, I spotted the big footbridge on Mumbly Peg and went straight down the fall line to it. Descending on ski trails, I made it back to the car wet, but not soaked.

If nothing else, I’ve been blessed with a decent sense of direction, and I utilized it. It’s cool that I’m finally comfortable enough at Dewey to go off trail.

With plenty of interesting singletrack, Dewey Mountain is an excellent mountain biking destination. If you want to make a week of it, Mt. Pisgah has a smaller, but demanding, singletrack system. And there’s Lussi and Loggers, with its built terrain features, Mount van Hoevenberg, and the Hardy Road trails. Get up here!

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Editor’s Note: Godspeed to you Peter, with your second knee!