Death Brook Falls / Goodman Mountain
Oswego to Tupper Lake, NY | Death Brook Falls | Buttermilk Falls | Goodman Mountain | March 2023
One of the things that we have to deal with in my new job is that, just like in the Navy, sometimes we stay longer at places than we initially planned – like in Illinois where we ended up staying almost an entire extra week. This makes planning trips trickier as we can’t ever be too sure that we can even make the trip until a day or two before. But the Navy prepared us well for this and we’ve learned to be flexible if anything.
We knew that we would have almost a month between this project and the next, and had spent the previous week in our hotel brainstorming and researching places we’d like to go. One thing was for certain, we knew we wanted to stay in the Northeast. On Friday, we knew that we would almost certainly be leaving Oswego on Monday, so after ruling out camping because of possibly inclement weather, we did some quick searches and found a cheap AirBnb in Tupper Lake, NY. What a way to start, returning to our old stomping grounds.
On Monday we completed the long process of packing up our hotel room and returning the rental car, and then hit the road heading east. We ended up taking county roads instead of highways in order to cross over to NY-28 before driving into Old Forge. We stopped here at an outfitter to grab some micro-spikes for our boots. And boy would we need them — while Oswego was definitely entering into Spring, we found significant snow cover as we drove deeper into the park (You’re telling me that the mountains DON’T have the same climate as a coastal town? Preposterous.) Good thing we didn’t plan on camping.
As we drove by the Chain Lakes we passed by several of the firetower hikes we had completed when we lived here before: Bald Mtn, Blue Mtn, and Owl’s Head. And while it would have been fun to re-hike some of them, we just missed the end of the official ‘Winter Season’ and so they wouldn’t have counted towards our efforts at getting the winter rocker to our ADK Firetower Challenge patches.
Instead we killed time by stopping for some very short hikes to waterfalls. Death Brook Falls was located right off of NY-30 and was less than a mile round trip. If the weather was colder, the falls might have been completely frozen – but then it would have been colder. Instead we had almost an anti-frozen waterfall: everything BUT the waterfall was frozen and covered with snow. Further down the road and down the river we stopped at a roadside park for Buttermilk Falls on the Raquette River. The falls were definitely full today and definitely living up to their name.
Both of these were quick stops and we still had time to kill, so as we neared Tupper Lake, we stopped at the trailhead for Goodman Mountain. The Adirondacks have a host of hiking challenges that have come up, even since we left in 2017, and one challenge is the Tupper Lake Triad. Three peaks is definitely doable in a week, so we decided to go for it.
We decided that, at 3 miles long, it was worth wearing our new microspikes. I wouldn’t say it was necessary on this hike, but it was fun. There was probably a foot and a half of snow, but the trail itself was fairly compacted without being icy. The trail itself follows an old roadbed for the first 3/4 mile before winding and ascending up to the peak. As we approached the peak, we started to get glimpses of the still-frozen Tupper Lake to the North through the bare trees. Unfortunately the summit itself didn’t offer the same views and we were left wanting a view to the North. Fortunately, we had great views to the South and East where we could just see the High Peaks. We probably won’t get out to see Marcy this trip….but we dream. To the North we could see some low lying clouds moving in so it was time to move on.
Our timing was great for the rest of the afternoon. As we started going down, another pair of hikers arrived at the peak, and as we drove into Tupper Lake it started to snow – not for long mind you, but we felt like we had put in our time exploring and enjoying the mountains and it was now time to relax.
