LOCALadk Magazine

Fall 2014 27 LOCALadk or a faint footpath leading to them. All told, those cliffs host 3,100+ routes and a total of more than 4,000 pitches. (That's over 66 miles of climbing, in case you are wondering.) The first edition of ADK Rock (2008) tallied more than 1900 climbs. In the intervening six years many rock walls previously unknown to climbers have appeared and more than 1200 new routes and variations have been added to the park total." It is an incredible time commitment to compile such vast amounts of information and present it in written and illustrated form in two guidebook editions in a way that comes as close as possible to meeting every user's needs. Knowing this can leave you wide eyed at how Lawyer and Haas have also managed to author a combined 374 first ascents. While many of the 374 new routes Lawyer and Haas established were intentional, a few of their routes weren't. In attempt to properly document a route with an unclear route description, Jeremy and Jim would climb it to ascertain the correct path up the cliff and in the process got lost and created a new route. On a few occasions, I helped Lawyer and Haas with the guidebook. My favorite part of helping them always involved anything that had to do with actual rock climbing. Since the best way to document a route is to climb it, we ended up doing a fair bit of climbing together. One of the more memorable routes we tried to document together was in Avalanche Pass. Avalanche Pass is perhaps one of the most iconic areas in the Northeast. If you have never been there imagine this; a beautiful alpine lake with 300' cliffs on either side of it. During my and my wife's first summer in the Adirondacks, we went there every Sunday to explore, swim, and of course, climb. It was our version of going to church-- peaceful, quiet, pine scented, just plain awe inspiring. During that summer, we would often gaze across the lake to the precipitous cliffs on Mount Colden, particularly the ones that dove dramatically into Avalanche Lake. We would often wonder out loud what it would be like to try to climb them. These particular cliffs, we later learned, had been climbed just once in the summer of 1985, by local rock stars Bill Dodd and Don Mellor who, in order to access this wall, packed in a bright yellow inflatable raft (on loan from The Mountaineer) to ferry across Avalanche Lake. Once across the lake, they anchored their inflatable raft to the rock and then climbed a 300-foot plumb line up the center of the imposing face. As they neared the top of their route, the wind picked up, and whitecaps formed on the lake below. To their dismay they saw their little yellow raft get destroyed when it hit the rocks. They were able to figure out a descent back to solid ground that involved a lot of heinous Adirondack bushwhacking. Dodd swam across the frigid lake to get the remains of their boat. They named their route "The Poseidon Adventure." In 2006, 21 years later, on a perfect Adirondack fall day, Lawyer and I set out to document The Poseidon Adventure for the first edition of Adirondack Rock. We were accompanied by Tom Yandon, Joe Szot, and Drew Haas. Drew, author of The Adirondack Slide Guide, was asked by Jim and his older brother to photograph the area's cliffs for the new guidebook. Yandon and Szot just wanted to climb. The four mile hike to the cliffs went quickly, with Szot and Yandon holding court, as usual, by just being themselves- -super friendly, bubbling with enthusiasm, and brutally honest, who banter about anything as old friends do. Since borrowing a boat from The Mountaineer was no longer an option, our tentative, "well thought out" plan involved putting our 40+ pounds of climbing gear in dry bags and swimming across the lake. I think that half the reason Szot and Yandon came along was just to see us try to do this. Once we reached Avalanche Lake, we quickly figured out that swimming was not a viable option. A "No go," as we say in the Adirondacks. The air and water temperatures were just too cold. We decided to try to traverse in from the left to the start of their climb. Lawyer took the first pitch--a sparsely protected, 100 foot long traverse, not more than few feet off of the water--that took us to the start of the Poseidon Adventure. I then led the next poorly protected 100' pitch. It took me over an hour to do so; I had a hard time figuring out where to go with so much loose rock and dirt and so little gear. I was an astronaut with no mission control to tell me which way to go. I was lost, so I made an anchor, clipped in, and belayed Laywer up to figure out what to do next. Lawyer figured out a bold, unprotected passage that helped us get to the final pitch of the Poseidon Adventure. The final pitch was the crux of the climb--a hand/finger crack heavily marinated in a fine blend of very wet moss, slimy mud, and loose rock. In order to safely climb the pitch, I had to use a tool to dig out the mud, then stuff my hands, feet, and rock gear into the slimy, dirty space. Naturally, I audibly complained about this, to which I then heard Szot prod me on, yelling from across the lake: "Awww boy, she'll go, that's right!" punctuated by his distinctive hearty laugh that reverberated off the canyon walls. That was all I needed to get me to the top of the climb.

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