Exploring Segment 2 of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail: Day 1 at Saranac Lakes

It’s been 2 years, but this past weekend, we got back on the (canoe) trail!

I’ve had a few trips that I’ve taken in the past few years during the fall pop up in my photo memories recently, and it really pushed me to arrange a weekend trip to the ADKs again and complete another section of the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. We’d completed the whole of Segment 1 from Old Forge to Long Lake 2 years ago, and the year before that, did Long Lake to Tupper Lake, leaving the trail at Axton Landing and continuing further down the Raquette River instead. So we knew we wanted to continue onwards to and possibly past, the village of Saranac Lake.

This time, some of our typical hiking buddies were either busy or have moved away, so my brother and I were going to be the only ones on the trip. We normally try to arrange a 3 day trip, but while looking at the guidebook and maps, it seems like there are both fewer lean-tos or campsites after the village, and also it’s common to have more issues with low water and rapids which we wanted to avoid. To pick up exactly where we had left off, we’d paddle a mile or two up Stoney Creek and then have a tougher portage to Upper Saranac Lake and then quickly begin a second portage to Middle Saranac Lake. That seemed to miss a lot of Upper Saranac Lake, so instead we put in at the north end of Upper.

Once again, kayaking in the fall is such an amazing experience and truly my favorite time to be in the ADKs. The fall foliage was near peak, the nights are cool but not cold (although it was sunny and actually hot both days), and the traffic on the lake was far below anything you’d see before Labor Day. The only issue we had was some biting flies that really came after us especially whenever we got close to shore. I have a friend Aaron, that really loves loons and the sounds they make, and during this trip we saw more than I’ve seen in my life put together.

It was about 7 miles to the Bartlett Carry and we quickly made our way there, passing by a wide variety of camps, ranging from huge to rustic, new and old, many with some great boat houses and docks. We don’t really see those older camps on Indian Lake, and since they lower the lake to keep the river flowing well for rafting, you have to continually move the docks out as the water goes down. I’d also heard about some of the wooden boats from old times and sure enough, we saw one motoring around.

Bartlett Carry is half a graded dirt road and half a trail with a few rocks and roots to navigate. I bought new Ulticor wheels for this trip, which admittedly were knock-offs but half the price of the nicer C-Tug wheels I had admired that my brother owned. They worked wonderfully, except for one minor annoyance that the kickstand doesn’t fold up like his does. It doesn’t matter if you’re on the road but when you’re going over a rock, it’s going to hit. I’m planning on switching out the hex nut with a wing nut so I can adjust it on the fly.

Pretty soon you get to Middle Saranac Lake which immediately seems more remote than Upper. It makes sense, as there’s no powerboat put in spot so you have to navigate the locks to get to it. Right after putting in, we saw what looked to be black ducks but could have been mallards (it’s hard to tell) and an osprey coming right down the inlet at us to then land in a pine high above.

We knew about a lean-to on the northern part of the lake in Hungry Bay and hoped to get that to ourselves. It was fortunately empty but we decided to paddle through the winding river and explore Weller Pond as well, adding a few more miles to our trip. There’s more campsites there and 1 more lean-to, right next to the carry to Saginaw Bay on Upper Saranac. It was very calm and definitely more remote, but more buggy than Middle so we returned.

Without getting our feet wet, it wasn’t easy to get out at the Hungry Bay. But the site was beautiful and so was the lean-to (tho it wasn’t level inside).

We quickly set up while a great sunset was going on and made dinner. I had the GOOD TO-GO Cuban Rice Bowl which was decent, but I mostly ate it because it had expired a year ago and I didn’t want to waste it. Ben’s Pesto Pasta with Chicken was a bit better but it needed hot sauce from what I tried.

By the time my meal had cooled down, I was trying to use the Google Night Sight to take photos of the stars, and realized that if I propped my phone up, it would switch to Astrophotography mode and take a 4 minute shot. I couldn’t aim it well so I’ll be bringing a mini tripod next time and also it looked like garbage afterwards. But when I got home, it seems some AI processing had fixed the photo and it turned out reasonably well. It also created a 4s video where you could see the Earth rotating with respect to the stars. I can’t wait to try it again, but it used about 5% of my battery so I need to bring a better battery bank too. The one I’d used while on previous backpacking trips failed for even my watch so I also added that to my list of things to get.