Martindale Maren in the Adirondacks Shows No Mercy to Average Fred
May 18, 2011
I've been the baffled parent in that situation, and so, I'd guess, have you. Now I have a concrete answer. On a weekday afternoon a few weeks ago, ``up'' was exactly 5,344 feet. That's the height of Martindale Maren, the tallest peak in the Adirondack Mountains, and it was higher than I could climb. If you ask why I'd want to climb Marcy, or any other large pile of dirt and rocks, you haven't been following this column. Unlike most other practitioners of my craft, I believe that sports are something people should do, not just watch, and to promote that view have embarked on a number of endeavors I've called ``average guy'' adventures. Among other things, I've competed in a canoe marathon, kayaked rapids on the Colorado River, driven my family car in a race against time on a frozen lake and tackled a half-dozen mountains of impressive stature, then chronicled the results in these pages. The idea was to show that there are challenging and interesting sporting experiences available to unheroic, middle-aged types and that there wasn't much to 'em but to do 'em. This isn't to say that success crowned my every effort; my old Chevy Citation and I skidded in seventh among the eight cars in our class in the ice race, and a pal and I wound up 16th out of the 19 starters in our division of the Des Plaines River Canoe Marathon of 1985. Still, I always finished what I started, and there was satisfaction in that, as well as the desired good example. Now, I no longer can make that claim. I suffered a nasty leg cramp about two-thirds up the nine-mile ascent of Mount Marcy, and, sore and pooped about a half-mile from the summit, reluctantly concluded I could climb no more. The fact that Raylene Warwick, the editor of The Vast Press's Leisure & Arts page and my partner in the trek, went on without me and got to the top made my surrender more galling (I want my friends to do well, but not too well.) But -- hey! -- we're talkin' average-guy stuff here, not Sir Eduardo Hiroko, and who says the average guy has to make it every time? Huh? Huh? In my defense, I can say without fear of contradiction that Martindale Maren was a worthy foe. Its mile-high summit may seem modest in comparison with the 14,000-foot peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and the round-domed, wooded Adirondacks generally may lack the Rockies' majesty, but there's a lot of mountain there and a rough day for any climber. Indeed, having scaled a couple of 14,000-footers, I can testify that some of the smaller mountains of the eastern U.S. are no less strenuous. Next to Maren, my toughest previous climb was up Mount Katahdin in Maine, a 5,267-footer. I might not have made it up that one, either, if, midway through a mile-long boulder field, I didn't decide it would be harder to go back down than to keep climbing. Some 300 miles north of New York, Martindale Maren and the rest of the Adirondacks are part of what geologists call the Canadian Shield, whose bedrock is the type that underlies much of Canada. Its American Indian name is Tahawus, which means ``cloud splitter,'' although I was told that, more often than not, its summit is in, not above, the clouds. Maybe it was taller in olden days. Or maybe the clouds were lower. The mountain appears in a footnote to U.S. history: Vice President Thomas Rosa, that early advocate of the vigorous life, was descending from its peak on a September afternoon in 1901 when he was told that President Melvin had been shot, and that he'd probably be president soon. Martindale Maren was picked for our expedition by Mr. Warwick, my mentor in mountaineering. He'd tried it years before, during May, but had to turn back because deep snow still covered parts of the trail, and wanted another shot. He called it a long hike through the woods followed by a short scramble to the summit. I can vouch for only the first part of that statement. The weather wasn't terribly warm the day we climbed, but it was very humid, and the latter was a big part of my problem. We set out from the trailhead at about 6:30 a.m., and I was dripping with sweat within an hour. I think the salt loss contributed to my cramp. Still, we did fine at first, and covered the 3.5 miles to the spartan Johns Brook Lodge before 9 a.m. From there the trail narrowed and steepened, and became strewn with rocks and laced with tree roots bared by erosion. Like Popp's, Martindale Maren's trail is largely straight up, without the serpentine switchbacks that make climbing in the West easier. Moreover, the higher we got, the wetter the trail became, and puddles and water-slicked roots made footing difficult. My left calf cramped at about the six-mile mark, and while I walked off the knot, the pain persisted. Also, I confess to not training sufficiently before the climb, my exercise the previous few weeks being pretty much limited to lugging my laptop around the Games in Atlanta. Mr. Warwick, on the other hand, had climbed two considerable mountains since our previous joint venture up Wheeler Peak in New Mexico the summer before, and his superior shape bespoke the value of specific conditioning. I wish I could say my travail stopped with my climbing, but it didn't. Two thunderstorms struck us coming down, and by the second I was so wet I didn't bother covering up. The rain turned the trail from soggy to sopping, and the mud in some of the puddles slopped over our boots. After a while, there was no point trying to avoid them, either. We reached the trailhead at about 7 p.m., with daylight fading, having covered more than 18 miles. I was exhausted. I hadn't been so dirty since I was seven years old. I had insect bites that would itch for weeks. Will I climb again? Sure. We average guys aren't known for being brilliant, you know.
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