THE OULUSKA LOGS: WILDERNESS DIARIES SPEAK, DECADES OF DIVERSE ADVENTURE
LOG BOOKS FOUND IN AN ADIRONDACK MOUNTAIN WILDERNESS LEAN-TO IN UPSTATE NEW YORK DOCUMENT DECADES' OF EXPLORATION BY DIVERSE ADVENTURERS
Ouluska Lean-To Register Transcripts I-III, 1986 to 2008, photographed in situ at the Oukuska lean-to, Cold River Valley, New York, 2024. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Oct. 27, 2024
Men, women, moms, dads, mountain-hopping backwoods hobos, hippies, school children, troubled children, Boy Scouts, college kids, a retired Marine master gunnery sergeant, a pair of squatters from New York City's Lower East Side and even a path-breaking "solo gay leatherman" from 1988 all recorded their stories in handwritten wilderness log books documenting 22 years of wild adventures in a remote and dangerous part of upstate New York's Adirondack mountains.
Some came to duel primeval nature to the death. Others came to commune in solitude with the wilderness in the way believers in religion offer prayers to their gods. Still more came to make a pilgrimage to the camp where the outlaw hermit Noah John Rondeau squatted for decades. The largest group challenged themselves on the 133-mile long Northville-Placid Trail.
Whatever brought them, many visitors left deeply affected, a few even transformed—judging by the words they left behind, and return visitors.
All that makes the log books a remarkable first-person testimonial to the timeless and universal human instinct to explore—and to place our bodies in mortal danger to make ourselves better and stronger. At the same time, the logs are an extraordinarily rare historical document because the stories they tell were recorded by the people who actually lived them. Covering 22 years from 1986 until 2008, the logs also reflect America’s changing social mores as the 20th Century ended and the 21st began.
The author about to cross a massive make-shift cable-strung suspension bridge over the Cold River in the Adirondack High Peak Wilderness, Oct. 24, 2024. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
The Free Lance found the logs during a recent fishing expedition into the Cold River Valley—one of the most isolated and rugged areas of New York State's vast 3 million acre Forest Preserve. The preserve is one giant public wilderness park. It's a Victorian Age miracle. New York State's Constitution has legally shielded it from development since 1894, requiring officials keep it "forever wild."
Among all the wild places protected by the Forest Preserve, the Cold River Valley is one of the wildest. It's not only one of the wildest places in the Empire State, it's also one of the least visited places in all of the United States east of the Mississippi River.
Its forests are an almost-impenetrable tangle of pine, small and large, fallen and standing. The dense thicket is sprinkled with giant boulders and a patchwork of swamps, ponds, lakes, streams and rivers. It usually rains a lot. The closest road is a dirt road about 13 miles away. The valley is surrounded by a rogue's gallery of towering, officially trail-less Adirondack mountains with elevations near or over 4,000 feet: Panther, Couchsachraga, Santanoni, MacNaughton, Seymour, Seward, Donaldson and Emmons.
The logs themselves were found in roughly the physical and spiritual center of the Valley: the Ouluska lean-to.
Lean-tos are primitive, three-sided log shelters used throughout the Forest Preserve instead of four-sided, fully-enclosed cabins because those are banned by the state Constitution’s “forever wild” command. The Ouluska lean-to is on the Northville-Place trail where Ouluska Pass Brook joins the Cold River—less than a 1/4-mile south of where Rondeau's outlaw camp was located.
Given its remoteness, getting help in case of an emergency in the Cold River Valley is extraordinarily difficult. In time-limited emergencies, rescue is not possible. You will die. For most people, that makes it a frightening place to avoid, not visit. Not so the brave souls who tell their tales in these log books.
Let's call them The Ouluska Diaries.
A mangled aluminum canoe in the Cold River near the Ouluska lean-to demonstrates the deadly dangers visitors to the primeval and remote Cold River Valley face. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
“The hike for Individual Independence packs on," Brian Gudmunninson, of 29 Palms, California, declared his credo on May 17, 1993. "It is through the rigors of the trail that the individual has cause to once again realize his/her own self worth."
For one Boy Scout leader, that meant leading his troop up Ouluska Pass Brook in an attempt to bushwhack to the top of the enormous tri-pointed, 4,000-plus foot tall, 10-mile long ridge that holds the summits of Seward, Emmons and Donaldson.
The route took them through Ouluska Pass itself—the valley between the ridge and Seymour, which rises in parallel alone on the north side of the pass. A popular online guidebook warns hikers "DO NOT attempt" to traverse Ouluska Pass. It is "complicated and dangerous due to cliffs and major blowdown."
"We spent hours pushing through scrub balsam branches woven together as closely as a chain link fence, and the bugs brought a couple of us close to tears," the scout leader wrote in an entry dated June 27, 1990. "When we finally hit the (pretty good) herd path on the summit ridge (west side of the ridge), all we had time to do was sign in at Emmons, eat (not much of a view) and start down."
Immediately there was a problem: "Couldn't find the herd path down where the guidebook said it used to be, so we made it by map + compass." They re-traced their steps back to the brook and descended, "rock-hopping once the stream widened." They arrived back at the lean-to "just at dusk." It was "a tiring day, particular as the oldest scout is just 14 years old."
Perhaps realizing readers might question the wisdom of his decision to lead children possibly as young as 11 in an attack on a mountain so challenging U.S. Army infantry soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division train on it, the older Scout felt the need to explain “this kind of hell experience."
Because "learning to rely on one's self (and one's compass!) in an area where rescue is difficult or improbable builds inner-strength + character. outer strength, too."
Another reason: to simply "prove that we can do this, dogonnit!"
As challenging as the terrain is, most visitors make it out of the Cold River Valley alive. Most. Not all.
When Daniel Cleveland from Erin, New York visited in 2003, he felt like sharing "a story about why I've come here."
It was because one of his high school teachers, Carlton West, "always told stories about his backpacking adventures + some of the stories were about the Cold River in the Adirondacks + he also told of visiting an ole hermit named Noah John Rondeau on the Cold River."
He didn't realize until the "late 1970s" that Rondeau was "quite a piece of history."
"I wish my teacher was still alive so I could tell him” that he visited “but I'm sure he knows," Cleveland explained. He "hiked in here in 1976 + died in his tent with a camera on his chest of a heart attack."
The Ouluska lean-to when the author visited in 2015. The Cold River can be seen in the background, right. Originally built in 1959, it was re-built in 2018. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Instead of Man vs. Nature, Leah Sarat focused on the power of the wilderness to unlock the spiritual and psychological renewal so eloquently recognized by John Burroughs in his 1920 essay "Accepting the Universe": "Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance."
"I am more alive here than I have been for a while," the precocious 14-year-old Sarat wrote when she visited Ouluska with family and friends in 1994, "spending the day tramping through the Tolkienesque forests and watching the flow of the stream until I'm hypnotized."
"This is living!," Sarat concluded.
She's a college professor today. She studies migration and mass-incarceration.
Groups of two or more women traveling by themselves in the wilderness make repeated appearances in the Ouluska Diaries. Some of them risk their lives bushwhacking up the Seward Range, just like the boys do.
The first two appear July 23, 1986. Linda Tarantino and Tami Robertson wrote they were "almost finished with the N P Trail—Benson to Placid a very nice trail! Nice lean to too!"
"Mary Lou and Joan" appeared a month later, Aug. 31, 1986.
"This is day 9 of 10 of our Northville to Placid trek," Joan Robertson, the "46er" from Cleverdale, New York, wrote. "We're really going to make it."
"Each stretch of trail seems different—the wildflowers have changed as we progressed north," Robertson reported. "These days will be a treasure in my mind's eye for the rest of my life."
18 years later, "4 bad-ass but not hardcore chicas" Michelle, Lisa, Megan and Shira visited with guides Cal and Lindsay on a "Cornell Wilderness Orientation trip" July 6, 2004.
An anonymous hiker landed at the lean-to the next day.
"July 7. Just my luck," they wrote. "A lean-to full of chicks, and I'm a day late."
Ouluska Lean-To Register Transcripts III, 1999-2008. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Gary W. Koch compiled the Ouluska logs.
The Adirondack Mountain Club and the state Department of Environmental Conservation collaborated to establish an “adapt-a-lean-to” program in 1985. Koch adopted the Ouluska lean-to from 1986 to 2008. He not only made sure the wooden structure itself was clean and in good repair, he placed a school-style notebook inside it along with pens and pencils for visitors to write in. By 2008, he had transcribed two decades' worth of hikers' hand-written scribble into a 3-volume, type-written collection.
Koch left the collection inside the lean-to. It's sat there for the last 16 years, where it's been read, by new and old hikers, and even added to.
The year Koch adopted Ouluska and first placed a log book in it, Tarantino and Robertson recognized its novelty in their 1986 entry: “This is the first register I’ve seen in a lean-to in the adirondacks.”
“It is generally assumed Gary was the first to provide a logbook in a lean-to so that the temporary tenants could record their visit,” Christine Bourjade reported in the Adirondack Almanac in 2015. “But he recalls seeing one in a lean-to along the Ward Brook Trail in the fall of 1986.”
While lean-to log books are now commonplace, none of the 100s this reporter has seen included earlier logs. In fact, they're usually half-eaten by mice and missing pages because campers ripped them out to start fires with. The fact that the Ouluska logs lasted nearly intact as long as they have is remarkable.
Koch did edit some entries when he transcribed them, but his touch appears light.
He included in his transcribed collection a 1988 entry that—by the conservative standards of the ultra-masculine outdoor culture dominant at the time—was scandalous: "solo gay leatherman passing through to spend a few days at Seward lean-to could use some company!"
"Would love to get in touch with other gay men who hike this region,” Solo added, “I'm into safe backwoods fun!"
Koch only deleted the phone number Solo wrote down and what he called "numerous unpleasant comments" that came after it.
Solo eventually revealed himself over years’ of entries in the Ouluska Diaries to be Harry Freeman-Jones, a gay marriage trail-blazer. He responded to the backlash his first entry triggered a year later.
"I'm sorry my entry last year 'brought out' the homophobes," he wrote in a 1989 log entry. "I'd say the woods are big enough for all of us."
"Incidentally, I never received any harassing calls but did get one from a gay ADK member who'd become a good friend and hiking buddy."
He concluded with a challenge: "We're everywhere... and love the woods too!"
Ouluska Lean-To Register Transcripts 1, 1986-1991. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Besides hot-button cultural conflicts, real shooting wars also blasted their way into the logs.
"The 'ole sarge' still 'picking 'em up and laying 'em down," retired Marine Corp Master Gunnery Sergeant K. Ferris from Schenectady, New York wrote in 1989.
Master Gunny Ferris was back again in Sept. 1990. The Gulf War was brewing. The "ole sarge" now called himself “ole salt”: "the U.S. is only looking out for the super-rich as usual and it's not worth defending anymore even if it wasn't."
"The U.S. Gov't," Ferris added, "is an illegitimate conspiracy against poor and working-class people the world over. Semper Fi!"
11 years later, Brandon, Matt, Bill and Dave visited three days after 9/11.
"The post-terrorist attack world seems quiet," they wrote Sept. 14, 2001. "We have only seen 1 or 2 planes in the sky."
"It is good to be away from all the bad news," they added. "Hope all is well in the world when we get out."
Rounding out the range of characters appearing in the Ouluska Diaries are two squatters from New York City.
Arthur Fonseca and Zelka Grammer stopped at the lean-to on their way to Long Lake Aug. 8, 1986.
"Started raining," they wrote, "so decided to read these words & enjoy the good vibrations."
Approps for squatters, who frequently have to fix places up to live in them, they observed many of the bridges they crossed on the way "need repairs." They asked, "Who should we write to to get funding for these trails? There's a lot more garbage up at Rondeau's Camp—would you help us pack it out? Peace, Love."
The pair identified themselves as "The CUANDO Free Press." They listed their address as "9 2nd Ave. NYC, NY 10009."
CUANDO stood for "Cultural Understanding and Neighborhood Development Organization." It was a grassroots community group from the predominantly Puerto Rican and Black Lower East Side. The group took over 9 Second Avenue in 1975, when it was abandoned by a church, according to Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Members started a community garden. They got covered in Popular Science magazine for installing solar panels in 1979.
The group was evicted about 1989 and faded from history—but they left a written record of themselves and what they stood for in a lean-to log book, in the middle of wilderness 275 miles almost due north of Manhattan.
CUANDO, 9 2d Avenue, New York, New York: Photo credit: screenshot via Popular Mechanics.
Entries related to Rondeau are stitched throughout, and include some of the best—”Carry the Cake!”
“There isn’t a more bona fide hermit in the whole United States—including Sharktooth Shoal—than Noah John Rondeau,” Clayton B. Seagears, naturalist, newspaperman and artist wrote in Conservationist magazine, 1946.
From 1929 to 1950, 21 years, Rondeau lived high up on a bluff overlooking the Cold River with a panoramic view of the northern end of the valley, crowned by a ring of mountains. It was next to an old dam loggers called "Big Dam."
Rondeau built two small cabins with material salvaged from an abandoned lumber camp. He named them Town Hall and the Hall of Records. He hunted, fished, trapped and kept a small garden. Sometimes a friendly pilot with the state Conservation Department flew over Rondeau’s compound and air-dropped fresh bread as well as bundles of newspapers. A pot of "everlasting" stew always boiled slow on his stove.
Rondeau documented his life in journals handwritten in ciphers, denying access to what he called “official busybodies." The best of Rondeau’s code defied decryption until 2009, when it was broken by William J. O’Hern.
Rondeau welcomed visitors. One was Grace Hudowalski, the ninth person and first woman to climb all 46 Adirondack mountains taller than 4,000 feet. For years Hudowalski and her husband visited Rondeau on his birthday and brought him cake and presents.
“I met Noah John Rondeau because the Adirondack Mountain Club asked me to do an article about him,” Hudowalski told Adirondack Life reporter Brian Mann before her 2004 death.
“He could always use a new pipe or shirt and was especially grateful for a rack of bacon. Rondeau loved the Sunday New York Times, especially the advertisements. Noah was fun,” Hudowalski said.
State conservation department officials actually flew him by helicopter and plane from Cold River Valley to New York City for the National Sportsman Show in 1947. The officials must have forgave him because, in 1929, Rondeau was arrested and stood trial for shooting at a game warden while he was still living part-time in the woods.
He didn't have a lawyer; he represented himself in court. He called 22 witnesses. Each testified the defendant was so good with a gun if he had wanted to shoot the game warden “he would have killed him,” according to O’Hern. He was acquitted.
The Big Blowdown in November 1950 knocked down so many trees it made more than 400,000 acres of Adirondack forest almost impassable, including the Cold River Valley. Then 67, Rondeau left Big Dam and lived another 17 years in and around Lake Placid. The famous outlaw hermit sometimes made money by posing as Santa Claus at a North Pole theme park.
New York bought what land it didn't already own in the Cold River Valley and built the Ouluska lean-to in August 1959.
Cold River Valley on Oct. 23, 2024. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
It's not clear when hikers started going to the Cold River Valley to visit Rondeau's old camp but Bill Longwell recalled visiting in 1983. At that time, there were "sections of fence and outbuildings still standing," he wrote on Sept. 28, 2005.
In 1987, Chris Shaw of Saranac Lake and Vermont spent two nights "communing with Noah's ghost.” He wasn’t alone. He reported “many squads of pilgrims who come to his memorial." There were, Shaw said, "college groups, grandfathers + grandsons from Crown Pt., old hippies back after 38 years, 18 year-olds from Colgate being lectured to about an old trapper and French-Canadian outcast in the middle of nowhere."
Rondeau "would have like[d] that," Shaw guessed. The area, he emphasized, "might be the most powerful juncture in the park."
On Aug. 23, Shaw told readers he was "out tomorrow" which was "20 years to the day" Rondeau died—Aug. 24, 1967.
Jeffrey Evans, also of Vermont, visited a year later in 1988.
"I visit here every 7 years," Evans wrote. "This place is a very special place."
"Rondeau lived nearby since 1912 and a piece of him must return every so often," Evans explained. "He can only wish that others find his peace."
Evans revealed he had "a child (my first) due in March and I would like to return in 1995. Other's that read this will recognize the need to bring this tradition to those we love."
Evans doesn't appear again but other families do, traditional and not.
In 2002, Sharpie carried a birthday cake "from Seward Assembly Area, around Mountain Pond to here for my 50th birthday with candles," Ed Bunk wrote on Aug. 18. "It is a 26 mi round trip to carry the cake."
"Jim Koback the III, Sharp Swan, + Ed Bunk and Dave Cobb who was interrupted by us, shared all twelve pcs."
Bunk recalled: "Many yrs ago 1960 Grace Hudowalski carried chocolate cake to Big Dam for Noah's birthday, yes Noah's birthday was when Gracie got the cake there."
Cobb, who was hiking the Northville-Placid Trail and had just happened to stop at the Ouluska lean-to that night, wrote.
"Spent night with above trio, Ed (Happy Birthday!), Sharpie & Jim,” Cobb wrote the next morning, Aug. 19. "Lots of fun and they made me feel at home. Last day on the N-P trail maybe today, headed north."
Noah John Rondeau and longtime friend Mary Dittmar and Rondeau’s hermitage in the Cold River Valley. Photo credits: courtesy Adirondack Museum.
Meanwhile, Koback, Bunk and a hiker who identified himself in the logs as "Maj Gen Jeb Stuart" forded the Cold River and bushwhacked up the monstrous mountain named Couchsachraga on the east side of the valley. They affectionately called it "Coucie" in their entry, like Rondeau reportedly did. Then the group bushwhacked back down the mountain to Rondeau's camp.
They reported doing it in a time that would be impossible except for true mountain tramps who had already done it dozens of times, knew the fastest, least-obstructed route down and had the fitness to run half of it.
"Made it here from summit in 2 hr 10 min going through the lumber camp," Stuart wrote. "Now out to Corey's through Ouluska Pass—This is such a beautiful area it no wonder Noah John loved these woods."
In addition to feats of alpine derring-do, the logs capture parents passing on their own love of the wilderness to their children, and even grandchildren.
A group calling itself the "Syzdeck Mtn. Man Club" stayed the night of May 3, 1991.
"Beautiful spot," Andy Smith wrote, "All are doing well."
"Especially 9 year old Jenny who is proving she is, as she claims, a real man."
29 years later, two handwritten notes written next to this entry in blue ink record a visit by "Jenny's children" Chris and Rebecca on June 19-20, 2020.
Ouluska Lean-To Register Transcripts 1, 1986-1991. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Kim G. Glenn of Burlington, Vermont wrote on Sept. 22, 2004 that she was hiking the NPT again, having first hiked it with her father. She hadn't been sure when but, thanks to the logs, she saw it was "15 Sept 1989, a good deal longer ago than I would have guessed."
She tried to hike the trail again in 1998, but only made it about halfway, to Spruce Lake, when the state Department of Environmental Conservation "sent a float plane to fly me out. My mother in law had passed away."
Glenn was back Sept. 12, 2006 with her daughters Kate and Nikki.
"First time was with my father, now gone," she wrote. "I know Dad is smiling to see his two granddaughters on the trail."
When Longwell returned to visit Rondeau’s old camp again in 2005, the traces of fence and outbuildings he'd seen when he visited in 1983 had vanished.
"Time has swallowed up all the remnants of Rondeau's spread," he observed.
Not so Rondeau’s spirit.
The modern world calls the mine run of men to conform in exchange for ease and comfort. It dulls our senses and weakens us. The Ouluska Diaries stand in opposition to all that. They sing of freedom. They urge us to live as wild as we dare. They challenge us to smarten our minds, sharpen our senses and harden our bodies. They call us to master our world, not blindly submit.
They call us to fight, even if we have to make our stand alone.
Remnants of Noah John Rondeau’s squatter camp in the Cold River Valley in 2015. Photo credits: JB Nicholas.
