The Resting Rock

I wrote this after I took our oldest daughter hiking in the Adirondacks in 2011. I submitted this for consideration for publication, but it wasn’t picked up. This version below appeared in the June 2022 edition of the Niagara Explorer, the newsletter for the Adirondack Mountain Club’s Niagara Frontier Chapter.

Wild thoughts in the Wild

I woke with a start in a moonless July night just after 1 a.m. to the sound of the underbrush crackling around our lean-to.  Several hours earlier, I had fallen asleep in mid-sentence talking to my 11-year-old daughter as we recounted the day’s hike up Mount Colden.       

Something was approaching with slow, deliberate steps. My brain, with help from my ears, mapped out the creature’s route to the backside of the shelter.

I began to panic. My heart thumped with such force, I felt my pulse in every extremity.  Here I was in the middle of nowhere with one of my kids, and something or someone was moving toward our lean-to in the black night. 

Was it a bear? What else could it be?

Earlier that evening, we had taken the strict precaution of stashing our food in a bear-proof canister.  As we laid it upside down in the brush 150 paces from the lean-to, a park ranger on patrol came upon us.  He commended our placement of the canister, which, in the early evening light had given me comfort.

I asked him if he had seen any bears that summer.  “Nope, not at all,” he replied.

Lying in the dark, I tried to rationalize that optimistic bit of information as the detritus on the forest floor around us continued to crackle.  Maybe it was something else.  A chipmunk? A deer? Maybe. A stalker? Not a chance, of course, but at that hour I had vivid recollections of Unsolved Mysteries episodes I used to watch.

Fatigue, I reassured myself, plays games with one’s mind. I was drained from a day that began with a 6:00 a.m. wake-up call in Inlet, followed by a two-hour drive past still ponds, the morning mist rising from the surface, and on toward Lake Placid, ending with a long, hot, black-fly-filled trek to the summit of Colden.

More crackling from the dark. Each moment, it sounded closer. Louder. Heavier. I cursed myself for bringing my daughter into such danger. I told myself I’d never do it again.  

In the next moment, the noise stopped. I lay awake for a long time, listening for the creature to leap out of the darkness. But I heard nothing except complete, beautiful silence.

I tried to relax by recalling the small events during our hike. I thought about the massive boulders along the trail, of the solitude of the lake we passed, the expansive view from the summit, and the serenity of the evening at Marcy Dam.  I fell asleep.

A couple short hours later, I woke to the light of dawn. I had all my limbs. My daughter slept, alive and safe.

Sitting at the edge of the shelter, I watched the wisps of high clouds against the deepening blue of the sky above the mountain ridge.  Branches clicked and squeaked as birds alit their roosts, while the forest floor rustled with small animals poking around our site.

My daughter was still dead to the beauty of the forest life when I walked down to the dam area and took in the vista of the high peaks surrounding us. 

What a view. What an experience.  I promised myself to do this again with the rest of the family. 

As we packed up our gear to hike out and head home later that morning, I told my daughter I had heard an animal walking around our site in the middle of the night.

“Was it a bear?” she asked.

“Hah; I’m sure it wasn’t,” I scoffed. “Something small.  Probably one of those cute chipmunks.”