On our first full day in the Adirondacks, we drove over to Lake Placid to visit Charlie Wilson and Joe Moore at Placid Boatworks. For those of you unfamiliar with canoes, Charlie and Joe build high-end top-quality canoes from David Yost designs. David Yost, known as DY in the paddling world, is probably the most prolific designer of human-powered water craft alive today. Owning a DY canoe is akin to owning a Harley Davidson bike, without the pollution. His interest in canoe design began in the sixties when he built his own solo marathon racers. He designed canoes for Sawyer in the seventies and has designed tandem and solo canoes for Curtis, Bell, Loon Work and Swift, and touring kayaks and sit-on-tops for Perception. I have owned several DY designed canoes over the years, each one perfect for its intended use. The man knows his boats!
Charlie and I each own a Placid Boatworks Spitfire: his is a black recycled model and mine is a garnet gem that slips through the water like a knife through soft butter. It is reminiscent of the Sawyer Summersong I owned in the mid eighties, only it’s half the weight of that Goldenglass boat. We were interested in seeing what Joe and Charlie are up to these days in their quest for building the perfect canoe. They now offer a light-tech version of their models, using carbon instead of wooden trim…trimming several pounds from the finished version.
Now, I know my Charlie, and I could see the flecks of foam forming, drool build-up, as Charlie Wilson talked and demonstrated their manufacturing techniques. I checked my watch. By the time he turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of their lot, only seconds passed till he began planning the sale of his Spitfire to make room in the wallet and on the wall of the garage for a new Rapidfire XLT.
We are a match made in heaven. When I buy something new, he gets bitten by the spending bug too. And when he buys something new…well, you know how that goes. But I just bought my Spitfire in May, so I’ll keep it for several years before upgrading to a Spitfire XLT! By that time, Charlie and Joe will have made more advances in their product line and I’ll be able to get one up on my Charlie!
With visions of pretty new boats dancing in our heads, we sought out the trailhead for the Bloomingdale Bog Trail. This straight and level trail is a former D & H railroad grade, four miles long. A birder’s paradise, we saw Boreal and Black-capped Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, White-throated Sparrow, Blue-headed Vireo, American Redstart, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Cedar Waxwing and others along this trail. That is, while we actually birded. I was so busy stuffing my mouth with the wild blueberries that I’m sure I missed many birds.
Mushrooms. Everywhere. August is mushroom month, and the Adirondacks area is no exception. Of course, true to form, I left my mushroom field guide (Orson K. Miller’s Mushrooms of North America) at home. I took tons of photos, but without being able to actually collect and study each specimen, making spore prints, it’s difficult to ID mushrooms by pictures alone. But that’s where my other hobby kicks in and makes it all worthwhile—photography. Now I need to find a contest to enter all these great photos! Maybe someday I’ll win enough money to pay for all the equipment I bought over the years.
Some of the wildflowers in bloom along the Bloomingdale Bog Trail included bottle gentian, pearly everlasting, bunchberry, dalibarda, St. Johnswort, Joe-pye weed, various goldenrods and asters. There were a few mushrooms I can ID without the guide: Amanita muscaria and puffballs! Mosses, lichens, clubmosses, shrubs with berries (dogwoods, choke berries and choke cherries), all added to the mystical charm of the trail. I am eager to revisit the Adirondacks in May, when the spring wildflowers are in bloom instead of just in berry and seed.
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