ADIRONDACKS AND MORE 1970
October 4 - 10, 1970
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3: Leave for Adirondacks; dine at Four Columns Inn; sleep at Four Seasons; Monopoly with Art.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4: Breakfast in Jamaica; lunch at Lake George; To Blue Mountain Lake Lodge.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 5: Climb Mt. Ampersand. Lovely!
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6: Canoe Blue Mountain Lake, Eagle Lake, and Utawana Lake. Exhausted! Slides.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7: To Elk Lake, walk to Marcy Landing; night canoeing with flashlight.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8: To Avalanche Lake and Marcy Dam; John swims; finish "The Aristos."
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9: To Raquette Lake, up to sun on Cedar River Flow; buy "Magister Ludi."
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10: Leave Hemlock Hall; to Moriah, Bristol, across Lincoln Gap, room in Randolph at 3PM. Up to Sugarbush for dinner, bed at 9PM.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11: Down route 100, cloudy; gas at Readsboro; down route 8 past dams and home at 6:30.
NOTE: SALAMANDERS AT ELK LAKE
I look down at what I first take to be an elongated tadpole, but then there are four legs stuck out at right angles, and the creature WALKS along the bottom rather than swims, and I call out to John, "Hey, there are salamanders here," alternately calling them newts and efts and water lizards.
Then one of them actually swims, tucks in his four feet, lashes his tail back and forth like some Silurian behemoth, and finnily swims his way exactly like a fish. At various times they seem to be avoiding each other, but there are two occasions on which they look like they might be 69ing each other, head to hind-leg jointure on the bottom, unmoving, for minutes at a time.
Another takes alarm at something and hides under a leaf, but only his head, while his un-eyed rear body sticks conspicuously out into the water.
It seems a most idyllic way to live, seeming never to require air to breathe, yet having all the crawling and running apparatus of a land creature, yet capable of folding up like an eel and knifing through the water with only a side-winding snake-like wriggle. They can launch themselves toward a rock face and suspend there, putting out only a skillful toe to moor themselves, or float at any level in the water, or walk about the undersea terrain much as on land, or alternate either of the modes with perfect ease.
They were capable of quick motion, since at one point I was watching five of them, and two eluded me so that I couldn't see where they'd gone, though I hadn't been looking at the others for much more than a moment.
Never did I see them on land, and I saw one about the same size in another lake coming back from Marcy Dam, so I couldn't tell if they migrated or had to grow, and what their stages of life were. But their greenish color fit in perfectly with the greenish water and the algae-covered bottoms over which they swam, and usually only a CHANGE of motion betrayed their existence, and I had to point a number of times to even allow John to SEE them at all.