LOCALadk Magazine

Hertha and her son moved to Saranac Lake the next year. When old enough, Dave enrolled in North Coun- try School, a progressive boarding and day school catering to students in fourth through ninth grades. Its 220 -acre campus outside Lake Placid includes a working farm, a maple-sugar operation, vegetable and flower gardens, horse-riding tracks, a ski hill, and a rock-climbing crag. The school emphasizes hands-on learning as well as academics. As a bonus, the stu- dents have ample opportunities to enjoy the Adiron- dack wilderness, whether hiking, climbing, or skiing. Founded in 1938, the school must have been a good fit for a kid like Dave, with his love of the outdoors and his practical bent. After leaving North Country, he attended Saranac Lake High School, graduating in 1950. The quote next to his yearbook picture reads: "In every rank, both great and small, 'tis science that supports us all." In the 1940s and early 1950s, Bernays and his buddy Stanley Smith were among the few locals drawn to rock climbing. Jim Goodwin, himself a pioneering climber, said the young Bernays repeated most of the challenging rock routes in the Adirondacks, including a rare winter ascent of the Case Route on Wallface. Even more impressive, in the winter of 1952, Bernays and a partner climbed frozen Rainbow Falls, a 150 - foot waterfall in the Adirondack Mountain Reserve, by chopping steps in the ice. For its time, this was a re- markable achievement. (Climbing is no longer allowed in the reserve.) When still a teenager, Bernays published two articles about his outdoor exploits in Adirondac, the magazine of the Adirondack Mountain Club. One documented his ascents of Rickety Pinnacle and Lost Arrow. To climb the latter, he and Smith tossed a rope over the summit and hoisted themselves up hand over hand. "This was probably a first ascent," Bernays wrote. "There were no traces indicating otherwise; in fact, nobody seemed to know that this little group of needles even existed." Nowadays, Lost Arrow is climbed in a freestyle, without pulling on a rope. The other Adirondac article described his ex- plorations of the cave system on Pitchoff Cliff in Cas- cade Pass. In 1950, Bernays and various partners made six trips to Pitchoff and ventured deep into its hidden recesses. On the last trip, Bernays used a rope ladder to lower himself to a chamber partly filled with water, followed ledges to the end of the chamber, and then crawled through a small hole to the bottom of a crev- ice. His account of what happened next gives readers a taste of caving without any of the unpleasantness: "I chimneyed horizontally between the walls for about ninety feet until I came to a small, sandy beach. A little brook came out of a crack in the rock about ten feet further on; here the room ended in a vertical wall. I went up it. About twenty feet above the beach, I found a hole blocked by a large, loose boulder. Beyond it, the entire system continued into another room, but the boulder stopped all progress, and I turned back. The dim light a hundred feet away seemed as remote as the outside world. We had all been underground for over four hours, and the wet and cold had begun to tell on us. Everyone was glad to call it a day and withdraw." His winter climbs in the Adirondacks helped prepare Bernays for adventures in bigger ranges.

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