Skate Away

     I've had a long love/hate relationship with skating. Started many years ago when the local Gansevoort gang of underaged hoodlums would clear off some farm pond to hang out, start a bonfire and enjoy an illicit beer that someone had filched from their parents frig. Problem was, most of us were so poor that we just had a rag tag collection of hand-me-down skates. My old pair fit so tight that it was an excruciating ordeal to wear them. Cold, sore feet pretty much sapped all the fun out of the day to the point where I eventually just slid around the ice in my barn boots during our free-for-all hockey games (worn out brooms for sticks and a frozen cow pie for a puck).  

 

Screen shot from Small Axe Farm Reel

     That's why seeing a recent Facebook Reel from Small Axe Farm felt like an epiphany. It follows a skater on clear, black Lake George ice as he makes his way past shoreline and islands in the south basin and on up into the narrows. This is the skating I've always dreamed of. None of the violence of hockey, the convoluted intricacy of figure or the go go of speed skating. Just seemingly effortless gliding for mile after mile. Indeed, watching the video it would seem that Lake George end to end would be a matter of a few hours.

Luke Dow's amazing shot of a recent Lake George sunset

     Viewing the various reels on their page it seems that they have been skating since late October, starting with small, high elevation ponds. This is called Nordic Skating and uses a long bladed skate, some of which seem to attach to cross-country type boots. Some other equipment to consider would be ice picks, probes and poles, helmet and padding and a pack. Even completely outfitted it is a relatively cheap sport compared to downhill skiing and not even close to snowmobiling. More on equipment and technique here. 

     Of course, the big consideration is getting the right conditions. This year seems golden. Some recent years the big lakes haven't even frozen over and other times they will be covered with snow making them more suitable for X-C skiing. The other point is to find experienced people to go with. Obviously, falling thru the ice is deadly serious, so never go alone and learn from those who know more than you. 

Early morning start to a nordic skate

(from small axe farm facebook page)

     I don't know if this link to the Small Axe Farm's Facebook page works but I hope you can find it to enjoy the exhilarating videos. Till then here's a link to Dire Straits Skateaway. It's not nordic skating but Roller Girl is fun to watch and the guitar isn't bad either.

A Rock and Two Trees

     A rock and two trees play a prominent role in this post. They are landmarks of Israel Putnam's adventures in our area. But we'll also need to visit a cave and a waterfall. Ready for local history that plays like a Hollywood movie?

     First, let's meet the star of the show. Israel Putnam is probably best known for commanding the Americans at the Battle of Bunker Hill where the quote "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes" is attributed to him. With the beginning of the Revolution he became one of General George Washington's most trusted officers. But before that he had spent many years in the upper Hudson/Lake George area fighting in the French and Indian Wars. It was these years that produced a thrilling litany of close escapes and derring-do. 

Israel Putnam statue

     Putnam was born January 7, 1718 in Salem Village (now Danvers) outside Boston. In 1740 he moved to northeast Connecticut with his new wife Hannah and began farming. They raised sheep but like their neighbors had problems with wolf predation. After concerted effort the farmers had reduced the wolf pack to one wily old female holed up in her lair. Dogs, smoke and reluctant slaves proved ineffective in flushing the beast out so it fell upon Putnam to crawl into the cave and resolve the situation. The passage extended 40 feet back into the hillside. Putnam crawled in with a flaming torch only to have the cornered animal lunge at him snapping and snarling. 

The wolf den in Connecticut's Mashamoquet Brook State Park

Anyone care to crawl in and take a look?

     The other men quickly pulled him out by a rope tied to his leg, thoughtfully providing a loaded pistol for a second attempt. This time when the wolf came at him he got off a shot and was once again yanked out of the cave backwards. Finally, there was no avoiding a third trip in to see if his shot had found it's mark. Fortunately, it had and when Putnam emerged from the cave for the last time he had become a folk hero.

Putnam's farmhouse in Brooklyn, Conn.

(web image)

     Both Putnam's farm and family grew over the next ten years but by 1754 France and England were rattling the sabres and in late August of 1755 the 37 year old father of six answered the call to go to war. He immediately headed north but arrived too late to be a part of the September 8th Battle of Lake George in which a French raiding party ambushed British forces a few miles south of the present day village. The Warren County bike path traverses the site of the battle with the Williams Monument and Bloody Pond being prominent local landmarks.

      

Williams Monument, bike path with historical panels and Bloody Pond sign.

Battle site south of Lake George Village.

     Soon after arriving at Lake George Putnam met Robert Rogers (of Rangers fame) and the two men took an instant liking to each other. By the end of October they had already gone on several scouts together north towards Ticonderoga. Putnam quickly became acquainted with the area after paddling down the lake and then bushwhacking thru the woods for seven or eight miles to the summit of what is now known as Cook Mountain to observe French activity. In another instance Rogers was trying to kidnap a Frenchman who fought back with a knife and was only subdued (and killed) when Putnam struck him a blow to the head. A few days later Putnam and another soldier named Durkee were spying on the French when they were discovered and chased thru the dark woods. The lead was flying and when Putnam stopped for a swig from his canteen he found it empty courtesy of several bullet holes. Later he counted fourteen holes shot thru his bedroll! Finally, upon reaching Roger's camp a brisk firefight erupted and the French were driven off just long enough for Rogers, Putnam and company to make a quick retreat back up Lake George. 

Present day view from Cook Mountain.

Called Bare Mountain in Putnam's time.

Would have been completely wooded with no development visible in 1755.

(web image)

     Putnam spent the winter of 1755-56 at Fort Edward with only a few scouts and skirmishes for action. Later in the summer of 1756 there was a French raid on a British supply train at Halfway Brook between Fort Edward and Fort William Henry. It was quickly decided to try and intercept the French as they made their way back north towards Fort Carillon. To that end Rogers, Putnam and a hundred men rowed hurriedly down Lake George before stashing their boats and scrambling up and over the mountains to set up an ambush on Wood Creek at Pulpit Point (now considered a part of Lake Champlain).

     Soon enough the French rowed by and were caught totally by surprise as Rogers, Putnam and company rained fire upon them. But several French boats managed to escape to Ticonderoga and the British knew this would soon bring enemy reinforcements from the fort. This lead to a headlong retreat back over the mountain to their boats on Lake George and a small naval battle when the anticipated French retaliatory party arrived. The British were able to fight them off with only one man killed and two wounded before escaping back to Fort William Henry. Obviously, boating and hiking around Lake George wasn't the relaxing pastime then that it is today.

The rugged country between Lake George and lower Lake Champlain

Putnam and Rogers world 

     After several fall scouting missions to Ticonderoga Putnam was able to return home to Conn. over the winter of 1756-57. Spring of 1757 found him back in Fort Edward and in late June he lead a scouting party to the Whitehall/South Bay area. On the evening of June 30th Putnam and 40 rangers had set up an ambush in anticipation of a large party of French and Indians heading south in canoes from Crown Point. The rangers initial volley caught the enemy by surprise but with over 200 Indians the numbers were against Putnam and his men. After a long night of fighting a retreat was ordered but even this proved dangerous when the rangers came under mistaken 'friendly fire' from a Provincial scouting party. It wasn't until late in the day when Putnam and his men made it back to the safety of Fort Edward having lost several soldiers in the battle.    

 

Put's Rock where art thou?

While frequently mentioned as being along Wood Creek near South Bay

I've never found the exact location. The two photos were taken on a paddling 

trip north from Whitehall. Put's Rock? Maybe, maybe not.

     Following several skirmishes near Fort Edward Putnam was sent on a scout down Lake George in late July of 1757. He was the first to see and warn of Montcalm's approach towards Fort William Henry. Unfortunately, not enough was done to reinforce the fort and its commander, Lt. Col. Monro, was forced to surrender with an infamous massacre following. These events were subsequently immortalized in The Last of the Mohicans book and movies. 

     Shortly thereafter, Putnam was sent on a scout and was the first to reach the still smoldering ruins with butchered bodies lying everywhere. It was a gruesome sight but no French were to be seen as Montcalm and his army had retreated north rather than launch an attach on Fort Edward as had been feared.

     While the fighting tapered off with the approach of winter, danger still lurked. On December 25 a fire broke out in Fort Edward near the powder magazine. Putnam rushed to the scene and manned a bucket brigade pouring water on the blaze and suffering serious burns as a consequence. A week later the Hudson River flooded inundating the rangers camp on Rogers Island. Such was a provincial soldiers life: many dull days, much discomfort and moments of life threatening terror.

     The major event of 1758 was Abercromby's disastrous expedition against Fort Carillon at Ticonderoga. Putnam was scouting the dense woods ahead of the main army with Lord Howe, the field commander. Putnam pleaded for Howe to stay back but the staunch soldier refused and in the first engagement with the French, Howe was shot dead. Things seemed to unravel for the British from that point on with the main battle of July 8th leaving as many as 2000 men dead and wounded. Putnam was in the forefront of it but his and others bravery was not enough and a defeated army soon found itself retreating back up Lake George.

Reenacting the Battle at Fort Carillon

       Shortly after returning from Ticonderoga Putnam and fellow rangers were in canoes scouting the Hudson River near Fort Miller when soldiers on the opposite bank shouted out a warning. A large band of Indians were seen on shore ready to attack the boats. Putnam had to make a quick decision: to land and fight thou hopelessly outnumbered or to run the downstream falls and rapids. To the Indians astonishment he chose the latter, navigating the whitewater amidst a hail of bullets and using the swift current to escape his pursuers. 

Scene of the escape.

A modern dam has somewhat tamed the falls and rapids from Putnam's time.

     Incredibly, after a major battle and a narrow escape, Putnam's 1758 trials were just beginning. On July 27th the French had attacked a British supply train. Putnam, Rogers and fellow soldiers were roused from their sleep that night and ordered to go after the French. The rangers rowed down Lake George in the dark and then took off cross country to South Bay where they just missed the escaping marauders. Several days later they were near Fort Ann when they fell victim to a French ambush.

     There was fierce fighting (the French lost well over 100 men) with Putnam being captured and tied to a tree by an Indian. Bullets from both sides hissed by him, an Indian repeatedly threw his tomahawk at the tree and a Frenchman tried to shoot him but settled for striking his jaw with a pistol butt when the weapon misfired. Eventually the British got the best of the action and the French retreated with several hostages, including Putnam.

While no one knows for sure, some believe this is the scene of Putnam's capture.

The field is off Goodman Road looking north towards Welch Hollow.

This would have been all woods at the time.

 

Historical photo

     The French and Indians with their captives had reached a spot just north of present day Crown Point when they decided to stop and have a barbecue. Putnam was tied to yet another tree with brush piled around which the Indians then set on fire, intent on burning their victim alive. According to some accounts a rainstorm came up putting the fire out while other versions have the Frenchman Marin kicking the brush away, repulsed by the savage's idea of fun. In any case, Putnam once again avoided death by the skin of his teeth. 

This monument is on Lake Road just off Rt. 22 north of Crown Point

The second Putnam tree would have been in the RV park behind The Crab Shack

Today it's a fun place with no captive roasting allowed

         The prisoner of war was marched to Montreal and then on to Quebec. Several months later he was freed in a prisoner exchange arriving back in Fort Edward in November before continuing on home to Connecticut. After a 'busy' 1758 Putnam would live to fight another day. And fight more he did. The colonial wars dragged on for several more years before the British finally took Montreal and the French surrendered. Putnam was in the thick of it but most of the action was beyond the Lake George area. Later he would go to Cuba when Britain was fighting Spain, to present day Ohio to put down Pontiac's Rebellion, to the lower Mississippi scouting out land grants for veterans and then to Bunker Hill and the Revolution, this time fighting against the British.

The Battle of Bunker Hill

(web image)

     Israel Putnam's legacy lives on in our area with several historical markers as well as Putnam Pond and Putt's Creek in southern Essex County and the Town of Putnam in northern Washington County all named in his honor. Presumably, Putt's Rock is still out there somewhere but the two trees he was tied too are long gone. 

Putt's Creek

     * I'm indebted to Michael Shay's book The Whites of Their Eyes for much of the information in this post. It is available thru the local library system. There are other biographies of Putnam and references to his exploits in local histories. Some of the information is conflicting but all portray an extraordinary man.

Cold Open

    

SNL cold open screen shot

     'Cold Open' has come to be synonymous with Saturday Night Live. A bit of the weeks news is satirized by the cast until they blurt out "And live from New York, it's Saturday Night." Then it's on to an hour and a half of commercials, skits and music. Or, so I've been told. I'm usually asleep by then. 

     SNL's been hit or miss fun for fifty years now. But there's another 'cold open' that's been going on for much longer. That's the opening of the new year when the first few weeks of January are usually the coldest of the year. 

     Cold may be no laughing matter but you could almost make a joke that begins "A physicist and a meteorologist walk into a bar for a cold one..." The two scientific disciplines see cold in slightly different ways. Physicist are more interested in heat which they define as a form of energy that exists as kinetic energy, or motion, in particles of matter. This energy tends to transfer from warmer objects to cooler ones. It may be what drives atmospheric circulation but the TV weathergirl who talks about "the kinetic energy of particles of matter" isn't going to last long.

A physicist view of heat (or cold if the thing slows down)

A meteorologist's view of a cold front moving in

     January is cold, July isn't. A pond you're skating on is cold. A pond you're skinny dipping in isn't. Alaska is cold, Hawaii isn't. We all know what cold is. Or do we? I went looking for a simple scientific definition of cold. Silly me. A couple of physics books and some web research sent me down a rabbit hole into a world of thermodynamics, entropy and Bernoulli's Derivation of Boyle's Law. Believe me. You don't want to go there.

     Just a little research into the concept of 'cold' convinced me there was book length material there. With cows to feed and diesel fuel gelled (by the cold), that sent shivers down my spine. Better to just pull together a potpouri of interesting items about cold while waiting for spring.

     * Temperature measures how much energy an object has. There are three scales in common use: Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. Fahrenheit is the odd man out, mostly just used in the United States. A Celsius degree is the same as a degree Kelvin but the latter scale starts at absolute zero making it useful to scientist. Absolute zero is the bottom of the thermodynamic system where fundamental particles have almost no motion and no heat. It's 0º Kelvin, -273.15º Celsius or -460º Fahrenheit.

     * There is a chilling list of 'coldest places'...

     -The Boomerrang Nebula is oft cited as the coldest place in the universe at 1º K, -272º C and -458º F. Watch a short video here. Problem is, scientists in Germany have cooled matter to just a few trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. No word on how the Boomerrang is taking the news

     Surprisingly, our Moon seems to harbor the coldest spot in the solar system with some of its polar craters bottoming out at -233 C. I wonder if this could have anything to do with the difficulty of getting a thermometer to Pluto's moons? Anyone want to volunteer for the job?

Pluto's moon Charon

     * Finally, back on Earth, it's got to be Antarctica. For years the coldest temperature ever recorded was at the Russian Vostok Station with -128.56º F. More recently, several spots on the East Antarctic Plateau have been remotely measured at -138º F. In places where people actually live, Yahutsk in Siberia recorded -80.9º F last winter. Two other Russian cities, Oymyakon and Verkhoyanck have recorded -90º F with the average January temperature being -56º F. Then there's Hell, Norway which freezes over for a third of the year.

     Unless you're standing next to a volcano (residual heat coming to the surface), solar radiation is what determines how cold/hot it is. Even those nefarious fossil fuels are just solar energy captured and preserved. The biggest factor in temperature is the angle at which the Sun's rays strike the Earth's surface and this is caused by the 23 degree tilt of our axis to the plane of rotation. Obliquity (tilt) is what gives us our seasons and it changes slightly in a 41,000 year cycle. Other Milankovitch cycles of axial wobble and orbit shape contribute to long term changes in average temperature and are probably what leads to periods of glaciation. There is even a Snowball Earth theory that at about 650 million years ago all the water on the planet was frozen solid.

Artist's rendition of Snowball Earth

(web image)

     We experience hot/cold within the thin layer of gases called our atmosphere. I assumed that the higher you went the colder it got. Wrong again. In the lower reaches the temperature does drop at a rate of about 4º F for every 1000' of elevation gain. The coldest I've ever been was on top of Whiteface Mountain after skiing up the toll road. At the tropopause (6 miles up) the temperature might be -70º F but then it starts rising in the stratosphere to as much as 40º F. Another drop follows down to as low as -130º F at 50 miles in height before a dramatic rise into the thousands of degrees F.

(web image)

     People live at the very lowest levels of the atmosphere and the weather and temperature there is what we notice. Some terms you may hear include:

     - polar vortex- A large area of low pressure and cold air at the Earth's poles that weakens in summer and strengthens in winter. It has a counter-clockwise circulation and occasionally surges south over North America, Europe and Asia.

     - Siberian Express - An extremely cold air mass that originates over Siberia and the Arctic Ocean before migrating into the upper US.

     - radiative cooling - The emission of infrared radiation (usually at night) of energy absorbed from visible sunlight during the day.

(web image)

  

     - water density - Water has the unique property of becoming more dense as temperature lowers to 39º F and then less dense as it freezes into a solid at 32º F. This is what causes lake 'turnover', makes for skateable surfaces and sinks large oceanliners when they hit floating icebergs. 

(web image)

     Finally, let's finish up with ways cold can get under our skin:

     - Wind chill - How cold living things (people/animals) feel. As wind speed increases it feels colder as more internal heat is removed from the skin.

     - Frostbite- This is when skin and tissues freeze causing damage. Read Maurice Herzog's account of having his fingers and toes  snipped off after dropping his gloves on Annapurna and you will forever prioritize avoiding frostbite. 

     - Hypothermia - Medical emergency when your body temperature drops below 95º F. From prolonged exposure to low temperatures or relatively short immersion in cold water. Frozen Alive, an archived article from Outside, tells of a hypothetical case of hypothermia in medically accurate detail. Also related is the case of 16 Danish fishermen plucked from the sea after over an hour's dunking. They all walked across deck under their own power and were enjoying a hot drink when each of them keeled over dead. Obviously, it's a good idea to avoid hypothermia.

     In a piece about cold it seems appropriate to let someone named Frost have the last word:

 

        

School's in Session

      I've been doing some end of year house cleaning. Maybe not quite a 'hoarder' but I do tend to keep too many magazines, newsletters and clippings. Did I really need this 2016 piece about a couple of bobcats crossing the road or a 2015 notice of an upcoming rattlesnake lecture? After amassing quite a pile that I was willing to toss, a series of mimeographed sheets stopped me in my tracks. They were '80's and '90's course schedules from something called the White Creek Field School. I re-read all of them and was unable to part with any.

     The reason was a man named Jerry Jenkins who conceived and taught the Field School courses back in the day. His breath of knowledge in tandem with his gentle humor made him a great teacher and a fun guy to spend time with. Since those early days Jenkins has been busy writing books and developing something called The Northern Forest Atlas. Apparently he still leads occasional Field School type courses. Several videos of these are available so I'm providing links as I did for geology in my last post. Hoping my botany friends will enjoy these:

     * Boreal Mosses

     * Woody Plants 

     * Ecology of Quarry Hill

     * Mosses of Cold Cliffs

     * Jenkins on the biodiversity of the Champlain Hills

     These should entertain for a few nights. There is a great deal of additional videos and educational material on The Northern Forest Atlas website and you can see if there will be field courses offered in 2025.

Jenkins in a screen shot from Quarry Hill video