'Turning off' on Mount Marcy's slopes

The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers / Little we see in Nature that is ours." - Wordsworth

For the first few thousand years of humanity’s existence, life was really all about living long enough to live some more.

It wasn’t about "finding one’s calling," or searching the self-help aisle in the local brick-and-mortar bookstore in search of some book that will finally, finally be able to tell us what’s "missing."

No. It was simpler. Gather food. Build a fire. Make a shelter. Have a family, and hope they live long enough to help you gather more food. They’re modest goals by today’s standards — so modest, in fact, that many of us feel we’re now entitled to them just because we’re alive.

It wasn’t always so, hard as that may be to believe in this world of blazing rapid-fire advertisements and pinging push notifications that bombard the iPhones, tablets, and televisions that haunt us every waking moment.

But it’s remarkable how fast that all melts away the second you strap a pack to your back and step out onto a trailhead. Within hours, you’re back to the basics — build a fire, find some water, set up a shelter — and most of your thoughts revolve around your next step.

You don’t quite sleep through the night when you’re out there, either. It’s as if your subconscious opens that long-shut eye, the one we all closed years ago after barricading ourselves behind high gates and sheetrock walls, and you become aware of every rustling leaf in the darkness. The water you filter from the stream tastes different, also — not quite so "pure." Or maybe it’s more pure, because it doesn’t have all of the chlorine we load into it, and its flavor is that of the rocks it glides over, the moss it flows through, and the fish that swim in it. You taste the earth, instead of the chemicals we’ve created from the elements we’ve found.

You realize that fire is actually pretty important. We don’t pay much attention to that, even though figuring out the cheapest, easiest way to boil water has been civilization’s primary goal since the Industrial Revolution. Nah. We ignore the groan of the baseboard or the hushed whisper of the stove’s burners until they stop working, at which point we panic.

But when it’s actually cold out, and you’re missing that aforementioned sheetrock shell, doing something as simple as pulling wood out of the ground and dragging it somewhere to burn becomes a matter of utmost consequence.

And then there’s the hike up the mountain itself, the one whose summit sits, quite literally, a mile higher than home. Taken as one gigantic mass, it’s intimidating as hell, but if you never look past the next headlamp-lit step, it becomes beatable… although you won’t ever concentrate harder on each and every footfall as you will when you’re on a slanted rock face in the alpine zone of New York’s highest precipice.

You might think this is all just some hippie-ish Romantic treatise about turning away from the modern world to "get in touch with the earth." Maybe it is. But I cannot help but feel that totally disconnecting from this information-overloaded system is necessary every so often, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t find strange comfort in seeing "Searching for Service" pasted across my cell phone screen for three straight days. (The Adirondacks, it appears, are one of the few remaining white spots on Verizon’s red invasion map.)

And that’s fine with me. Especially because after gazing out at the expansive views offered by the craggy 5,343-foot dome of Mount Marcy, coming back down to sea level to sit in a house and look at Facebook is more than a little bit of a letdown.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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Adirondacks, Backpacking, Camping, Hiking, Mount Marcy, New York State

From the summit of Mount Marcy

Technorati Tags: Mount Marcy, New York, Adirondacks, Nature, Hiking, Camping

Farewell and adieu to winter...for now

There was something primeval about it from the second we stepped out on the trail.

The snowpack was thick — 12 inches or more in some spots — and without snowshoes it was an exhausting task just to hike the mile into the forest where we intended to camp.

Just as we reached our spot it started snowing again, and it continued as we clipped together our tents and gathered the wet, green wood that would barely suffice for a fire. All night it fell, stacking up on the shoulders of the four figures who sipped whiskey and spoke gently about the struggling flames as the Catskills rose around us. The cloud-covered sky obscured the stars and blurred the horizon, reducing our entire world to a football field’s worth of white, barren moonscape that lay around us. By morning, another two inches had fallen.

People always look at me like I’m slightly crazy when I say I’m going backpacking in January. Maybe they’re right.

"You know it’s winter, right?" they ask.

Oh yes. Well aware.

But I love it. And now, in late March, I’m probably one of the very few in North Jersey who isn’t all that excited for spring. Sounds crazy, I know, especially considering that there was once a time in my life when I could hardly wait for that first warm breath of 60 degree air to flow up from the south.

There were even years that I’d convinced myself that I got some kind of seasonal depression from the long, silent nights, and that my future was destined to be in a more southerly latitude as a result.

That’s all changed as I’ve aged, of course. I still enjoy the spring, and certain things like the blooming of the forsythia or that first night game of the baseball season can’t be replicated. But there’s a lot about winter that I love now, perhaps nothing more than the peace of mind it gives me.

This world is a loud one (maybe too loud for me), and to walk in the middle of a humid August night is to walk amongst the cacophony of nature’s whispers. Birds and bugs sound their mating calls, and the woods are constantly moving with a kind of nervous energy that can be found when animals know they only have so much time. Nothing is quiet, nothing is still.

Walk in the winter, however, and the earth is more restrained. The trees are voiceless except for the wind threading through their branches, and that thick blanket of night sky is never as clear as it is when the temperature drops to 15 degrees. The clatter of deer hooves on concrete carries for a mile, every smell — from the rustic scent of burning wood to the harsh bite of cigarette smoke — is amplified, and the starlight from the constellations is never so sharp.

In other words, if summer is your friend who never shuts up, winter is the one that only speaks when it needs to. It hardens us, shows us every six months that nothing is eternal and warmth never lasts. They’re good, if not sobering, lessons to learn.

Right now, even though errant snowstorms keep finding their way into the foothills of the Appalachians, it’s clear that my season is ending. The nights are cold but the wind is warm, the ice on the lakes has melted, and it’s time to again bid my frigid friend a fond farewell.

It’ll be back, though. Sooner or later.

I’ll be ready.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

http://www.northjersey.com/news/200368571_Farewell_and_adieu_to_winter___for_now_for_now.html?page=all

Former Pequannock police captain devotes time, work to maintaining trails

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2012

BY  STEVE JANOSKI

STAFF WRITER

SUBURBAN TRENDS

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Take a look at West Virginia's Dolly Sods wilderness on a Google Earth map and you'll see one, maybe two stray roads cutting through what is otherwise a vast expanse of hundreds upon hundreds of acres of untouched forest.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ED LEONARD

Leonard works to split a tree that's fallen across a trail in the sprawling Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia.Leonard (left) with the other members who made up his group of Wilderness Volunteers during his 2012 trip to Dolly Sods.

While spending seven days performing manual labor in that wilderness, miles from even a hint of cell service, might not sound like the ideal vacation for some, for former PequannockPolice Capt. Ed Leonard it's not only a getaway, but also a chance to give back to the natural world that he has devoted so much of his life to.

Leonard, 64, has always been a self-described outdoorsman who could "sit in the woods and watch the trees grow all day," but on his most recent trips, he's been actively helping the park services maintain its thousands of miles of trails through the programs run by an organization named "Wilderness Volunteers."

According to its website, the group was created in 1997 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to work with public agencies like the National Park Service (NPS) to organize volunteer trips into "America's wild lands" to assist in performing upkeep work that might otherwise never be done.

Leonard, who lives on Manor Avenue, is a trail supervisor for Pequannock's Mountainside Park and is long accustomed to performing those tasks. Introduced to the Wilderness Volunteers by his nephew, Mike Leonard, he seized what he thought to be a "great opportunity" and took his first trip in 2011.

On that expedition, he and a handful of other volunteers hiked 7 miles into the 47,815 acre Cranberry Wilderness in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, set up a base camp, and for the next week, reconditioned about a mile-and-a-half of trail.

West Virginia storms can be brutal on the narrow paths. Washouts, fallen trees and limbs, and the total disappearance of the marked routes can be a regular occurrence. The volunteers' job, he said, was to go in and clear them out by removing rocks and fallen trees, rebuilding trails, and reinforcing them with stone where necessary.

"It's pretty strenuous," he said. "You have to be in a little bit of condition to do it."

Leonard, who admits that it takes a "certain breed of person" to go into the woods entirely dependent on what they're carrying in their pack, was hooked, and he returned this past October to a different part of the park — Dolly Sods — with another group of volunteers to once again rely on their axes and the strength in their spines to give something back.

By the time the sun sets, workers are eager for dinner. The food, said Leonard, is provided by the National Park Service and is surprisingly good. Afterward, they use their leisure time to talk, take pictures, fish, and unwind however they so choose.

The program is not without danger — in the interest of "keeping it wilderness," he said, the trails are sparsely marked, and no power tools or mechanized vehicles of any kind are allowed. If someone gets hurt, they're a long way from any kind of help.

"We stress that when we're out — be careful with the equipment. If you fall down and break a leg, it could be six or 10 hours before you get help," he said.

On his 2012 trip, he said, the NPS gave the group a small pocket device with a satellite connection that could send out an SOS if necessary, but that doesn't shorten the trek in.

Despite that danger, Leonard said that the sense of purpose that clearing a trail gives is immensely rewarding.

"It's such a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the week. You feel like you made a difference for the trails, and for the people that you'll probably never meet but you made the trail better for them," he said. "It's a good feeling."

Leonard and his group have already been invited back to Dolly Sods, he said, and he suspects that he will wind up there again in 2013. Of course, he is also considering visiting a more adventurous site somewhere in Colorado or Arizona.

One thing is certain, however: when he goes, he's going on his own. His wife, he said with a laugh, does not come with him.

"She understands my love for the outdoors and she's very supportive with it…(but) she's not a hiking/camping-out person," he said.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com