After a two-year hiatus due to lousy conditions (not enough snow or too warm), the NCMC resumed its annual winter camping expedition with a trip to St. Regis Pond in the Adirondacks on the weekend of March 24-25, 2018. The eight-member party included ACACIA SEMLER, who had been bound and determined to get her name in CAPS, a distinction awarded to those members who participate in a sanctioned overnight camping trip. Not only did she achieve her goal, but she did it with the toughest trip there is; a winter trip on skis while hauling a pack filled with warm clothes and the other bulky and heavy kit required for the cold Adirondack nights.
St. Regis Pond has become the default winter destination for the NCMC, primarily because of its proximity to the luxurious, four-season NCMC Clubhouse on Kimpton Road. To accommodate the growing NCMC membership, the clubhouse was expanded a few years ago to add another bedroom and bath, and an outdoor shower. The kitchen was also expanded and updated. The clubhouse is really a “lodge” now, and can be rented from the NCMC by those who wish to enjoy the Adirondacks without “roughing it.”
The clubhouse is a great basecamp at which to prepare for the winter trip to St. Regis Pond, as the trailhead to the pond is accessed via a short walk from the house.
The team assembled at the clubhouse on the Friday night before the trip, with Tom arriving first from Connecticut. His trip to the clubhouse takes him through the Keene Valley, Lake Placid, and Saranac Lake, so he can stop frequently to buy clothing and gear for the trip that he does not need.
Tom started a fire in the wood stove and was napping on the couch under a fleece blanket when Mary, Jack, and Matuki arrived from Buffalo at around 10:30 p.m. He learned from them that Bill and Caz were not coming until the next morning, so he promptly selected the Kimpton Room, a nice bedroom with a comfortable sitting area, and went to sleep. Dylan, ACACIA, Nacho (who Bill likes to call Taco) and Mayday arrived from Rochester (“Don’t take my Kodachrome away”), New York around midnight.
After a good night’s sleep, they all awoke Saturday morning and began to pack for the trip, selecting clothes, gear, and food to haul into the leanto. Mary provided a hearty breakfast of coffee, French toast with real maple syrup, hash browns, and the “Ring of Death” sugar-laden coffee cake. Mary and Mayday were going to remain at the clubhouse and monitor the trip from basecamp.
Jack was going to use his waxable Madshus skis for the trip and put in a call to the Cascade Cross Country ski area, where he had purchased the skis, to ask for advice on waxing in the uncertain conditions the NCMC would be facing. It should be noted that the vernal equinox had occurred a few days earlier, and the longer days and warmer temperatures of late winter/early spring and the effects of those factors on the snowpack can wreak havoc on one’s strategy for kick wax. Jack wanted at all costs to avoided using messy klister on his skis, and was relieved when his waxing consultant at Cascade instructed him to just use red (Or did he advise Jack to apply special red, or extra blue, or one of the greens, or perhaps polar, or some new fluorocarbon mixture, or some combination of all of the above, with a lot of corking between applications?). There was apparently no discussion during the phone consultation on what glide wax to employ on the tips and tails of the Madshus boards.
The only urgency to pack for the trip was due to the fact that Bill and Caz were planning to get underway from Buffalo at 5 a.m. and the rest of the team didn’t want Bill to arrive and be standing in the driveway ready to go with his pack on his back while they were looking for socks or Jack was in the basement performing ski wax alchemy.
Bill and Caz did arrive mid-morning, but the team was in full packing mode, including sorting through the extensive food supplies available for the trip, and was able to head from the clubhouse to the trailhead by 12:30 p.m., which is considered an early start for the NCMC.
It was a sunny, calm day with temperatures in the high twenties when they hit the Fish Pond Trail after dutifully logging in at the trail register (Just before they reached the trail register, they crossed the snow-covered railroad tracks and saw two people who were each being pulled on a small sled by a Husky or a Malamute). The skiing for the NCMC team was better than one would have expected, with ample snowpack and a ski track that was neither too crusty nor too mushy. It seemed that in no time at all that the party reached the spur trail that would take them to St. Regis Pond. On the spur trail, they ran into a couple out on a day ski, but saw no one else. Before long they arrived at the eastern end of St. Regis Pond and began to ski out onto the pond to the leanto. It was an easy ski over the pond, and there were none of the slush problems that are sometimes encountered in the spring, when water seeps up above the ice through cracks.
They reached the leanto around 3 p.m. and began to settle in. They heated some water for hot drinks and Bill did his usual yeoman work of finding more water, which on this trip required a long walk to the opposite shoreline of the pond. (finding a place to take water from the frozen pond avoids the tedious chore of melting snow for water). Jack, meanwhile, skied down to the western end of the pond and the pond’s outlet.
Back at the leanto, sleeping pads and sleeping bags were deployed, and various pieces of gear were removed from the backpacks for whatever purpose they might be needed. There was some concern about whether the sleeping bag (an old down EMS bag rated to zero degrees) loaned to ACACIA would be warm enough, but that concern was assuaged when ACACIA donned an insulated body suit that looked like a sleeping bag with arms and legs. The suit combined with a sleeping bag looked like the ticket to a toasty night in the leanto. The insulated suit tied for best garment on the trip with Dylan’s Quebec bomber hat.
We won’t detail here the NCMC’s terrible history and profound dissatisfaction with MSR stoves, but while the NCMCers were going about the business in the late afternoon of heating water for hot chocolate, powdered apple cider, and some freeze-dried snacks, one white gas-burning MSR stove that Jack had brought failed (leaking fuel at the pump). Fortunately, Jack had brought a brand new backup MSR stove, and Dylan had brought a Jetboil, and Tom had brought an old MSR canister burning stove (the Pocket Rocket), and they were able to continue to provide hot drinks and food. Bill had also brought cheese, bread, pepperoni, and summer sausage for the group.
Dinner was Bertolli Italian frozen skillet meals, which the NCMC highly recommends for an easy-to-prepare and hearty winter camping meal. You just dump the contents of the bag into a pot and heat it up for about 10-12 minutes.
In addition to his duties of finding and hauling water, Bill also gathered wood for a fire, but dry firewood is hard to find around any Adirondack leanto, and the fire could not be coaxed into providing a great deal of heat and light.
With dinner over and the fire barely sputtering, Jack and Bill walked out on the pond to check the constellations that were visible. There was a half moon in the sky above and behind the leanto that provided quite a bit of light.
Before 10 p.m. the campers were settled inside their sleeping bags with the dogs arranged among them. The temperature dropped overnight to about 12 degrees, a level of chill that the NCMC scoffs at.
It was cloudy when the NCMCers awoke, but it soon became sunny and warm, giving the team a chance to warm their ski boots in the sun before putting them on. They had coffee, hot chocolate, oatmeal, and Mountain House Breakfast Skillet for breakfast. The Mountain House stuff was pretty good, and you just pour water into the bag the freeze dried concoction comes in.
After breakfast, they skied down to the outlet of the pond, which goes under an old wooden bridge. There is a spur trail there that leads out to the main Fish Pond Trail. A good day ski from the clubhouse would be a loop that traverses the pond past the leanto. After the ski without packs, the campers shouldered their packs and headed back down the pond to where they had entered it the day before. The skiing was good this day as well and they zipped back to the trailhead, and then over the railroad tracks and back to the road. Back at the clubhouse, Mary gave them lunch and soon the whole group was packed and headed home to Buffalo, Rochester, and Connecticut.
In addition to getting her name in CAPS, ACACIA became the second woman to ever go on a winter camping trip. Dylan, who had gone winter camping in 2000, joined the ranks of those who have gone on more than one trip (That group includes Jack, Bill, Tom, Jay, David, and Jan.) Nacho joined Lucky, Samantha, Tuki, and Caz among canines that have winter camped.
View the gallery from the trip.
See the NCMC membership.