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| Lost Pond |
It's always nice to revisit the Hurricane Mountain Wilderness. After all, Hurricane Mountain proper was one of our first hikes in the Adirondacks. But since the summit gets so much traffic, I much prefer some of the other trails in the area, especially the trail to Lost Pond. We first visited Lost Pond back in 2019. As we remembered it, the hike to Lost Pond was a pleasant, not too difficult uphill hike to a secluded pond with a large rocky beach on which we took a long, comfortable lunch break, skipped stones, and admired the pleasant scenery on the opposite shore. With that memory in mind, we decided to use one of our last days on a recent ADK trip to visit Lost Pond once again.
The most difficult thing about the Lost Pond hike is the parking. To get to the trailhead, you have to wind your way up a very narrow road with blind curves and washout gullies on either side which leave just enough room for one vehicle. Meeting an oncoming car, therefore, is an absolute disaster. But if you make it there, the reward is a very pleasant trail. The first mile, fully on the level, leads to a hillside lean-to and the turn off for one of the trails to Hurricane Mountain summit. It seems that most people on this trail are heading to Hurricane, so after the junction it becomes pretty quiet and lightly-trafficked. The second mile is a long, steady climb via switchbacks through a pleasant forest with the sounds of a nearby brook pretty much the whole way.
Upon reaching the pond, we turned to one another with matching looks of confusion. We both had remembered a wide open, rocky beach but no such topographical feature even remotely existed. There was no shoreline at all, the water of the pond actually pushing its way well into the woods. Thinking that our fondly-remembered destination must be farther along the trail, we continued along the path around the western shore of the pond. By the time we reached the Biesemeyer Memorial lean-to, we still had not found what we were looking for and decided to backtrack to that first point where the trail meets the pond. Returning to that spot, we scrutinized the landscape more closely and realized what had happened. There were noticeable signs of heavy beaver activity on the eastern edge of the pond at the outlet point. Indeed, beavers had decided to build a dam there, seemingly enlarging the pond and completely flooding the rocky beach that had served as our special lunch spot several years prior.
Laughing off our mistake, we found a fallen log and used that as seating for a long, much-needed lunch break and then took a bunch of photos of the pond and the beaver constructions. On the return hike, K's phone started acting funny by suddenly showing the wrong date and time. We didn't pay it too much mind until later when we realized that all of the photos that she took of the pond were completely gone, as if she never took them and/or we were never even there.
Further, when we checked our 2019 photos from the first trip to Lost Pond, they didn't show a rocky beach at all.
Worm Hole? Close Encounter? Brain Fart? Whatever. There's something strange about Lost Pond.
Destination: Lost Pond
Elevation: 2,840 feet (Gain: 650 feet)
Distance: 4.2 miles roundtrip
Route: Out and Back, Hurricane Mountain Trail to Lost Pond/Weston Mountain Trail
Conditions: Partly Sunny, 40 degrees F
