Pedalers and Painters on the Bloomingdale Bog Trail

We'll start with the punchline in this blog entry.  Today, Tuesday, September 7, 2021, we found an exciting bike ride on the Bloomingdale Bog Trail in the Adirondacks, and on our ride we encountered this painter as she worked on a landscape while her husband rode the trail.  We stopped, exchanged pleasantries, asked her permission to photograph her, and rode on our way.  Eventually, we met her husband, who put us in touch with her.  We hope to find out what she was painting when we met her!

But back to the beginning of our story, we found this trail online and drove about an hour west into the heart of the Adirondacks, north of Saranac Lake, to explore its beauties.  Here we are at the trailhead, having not a clue what awaited us:

The trail started out innocently enough as a wide, flat, easy trail.  It is described as a rail-trail on an old railroad bed.  Before 1920, Bloomingdale Bog was known as the Toof Marsh.  In the late 1880s, the Chateaugay Railroad was built along it when the road was extended from Loon Lake to Saranac Lake.  The line was later acquired by the Delaware and Hudson railway.  Passenger service was discontinued in the early 1930s. In 1921, a fire burned some five hundred acres of what was then called the Bloomingdale Marsh.  The state acquired 500 acres of the bog land in 1989.  The bog has been recognized as one of the most important resources of its type in Adirondack Park.

Most of the trail runs through the marsh.  In many places, a stream or dug-out canal runs alongside the trail, where soil and rock were dug to fill in the railroad grade along which we bicycled.

It wasn't long before the trail narrowed, being separated from the bog on each side by not more than 1 or 2 feet of rock and soil:

At regular intervals along the trail, water from the bog on either side has breached the trail, just as it would a weakened dam.  In one place, orange cones marked a very deep watercourse connecting the bog on either side of the trail.  Kathy was lucky not to lose her bike into the abyss in the black water she sidestepped:

The bog on either side of the trail was beautiful and presented us with many picturesque scenes as we rode:

Water channels flowed right up to the trail, and occasionally brought algae along with them:

Having navigated the cross-channels, we thought we were home free, but only then did we encounter perhaps 1.5 miles of large tree roots crossing the trail.  Here, Kathy demonstrates the ultimate solution to the difficulties of pedaling over those huge roots:

Eventually, we reached a bridge over Twobridge Brook, and the soil became sandier.  Below, David stands on the bridge with an active beaver dam on the brook in the background:

Eventually, we pedalled alongside Rickerson Brook, which looked like heaven to a trout fisherman in the Spring:

Not much further, we crossed Bigelow Road, where an upended sign warned of a one-lane bridge to the west of our trail:

After crossing Bigelow Road, we had our own version of a portage across a downed tree:

More bogs graced the sides of the trail, and this one was one of the more scenic:

Eventually, we reached a wooden bridge, south of Merrill Road, which we decided would be our lunch spot and turnaround point:

We munched our sandwiches, looked around, found a trail where it appeared a local moose might have made his rounds, from the look of tracks on the trail.

Having finished lunch, we started the return trip, but almost immediately, David's handlebars froze.  As it turned out, a ring had failed that had held ball-bearings that let the fork turn smoothly over the front wheel.  Half the ball bearings had been lost, and, as David described it, it seemed that he had lost his power steering.  Every little turn of the handlebars required a strong muscling action, which was quickly exhausting.  David had to learn a new way to keep his balance on the bike, and reserved any turns of the handlebar for the avoidance of disaster on either side of the track.  This made riding the bike an all-body workout.

We made our way back down the trail, navigating the massive roots and the puddles and channels across the trail without incident.  We encountered a few hikers and exchanged pleasantries.  It wasn't long before we reached our original trailhead -- about a 15-mile ride in total.  We were hot, tired and sweaty and enjoyed some cool drinks Kathy had packed in the Jeep as we drove the hour home to our campground, marvelling at this most unusual of bicycle outings.