Skunked on Wolf Pond Mountain 08-11-2011

[nundagao]

This is a cautionary tale for anyone tempted to try a direct approach from the east. Having obtained permission, I left my car at the Clear Pond parking lot at 9 and headed down a private road to the river, which was high (there'd been an inch of rain the day before) but managable. Some maps show a footbridge. I found none. Once across, scrub coniferous forest made for slow progress. After a while I came onto an overgrown blue trail running more or less north-south, but I needed to go west, so crossed it and continued the bushwhack. But after another 15-20 minutes I was stymied by an extent of flooded swampland and alder thickets, so I angled northeast until I came onto the blue trail again, which began to curve a bit more to the west, raising my hopes (An even more heavily overgrown red trail came in from the north at some point near there.) It was too good to last. Soon the blue trail entered flooded swamp land and I could not pick it up on the other side. There was however, some orange flagging which led up and down, generally westerly, through fairly open hardwoods and eventually into recent lumbering with a network of logging roads and large patches of clear-cut. Presently, continuing westward and upward, I gained enough elevation for back views of Sunrise, Macomb, and Hough, but no forward views of either WPM or Boreas. It was then that I discovered my el cheapo wrist watch was no longer keeping good time. Confounding my uncertainty about the time, the northern border of my map didn't show the Dixes so, although I could get a good bearing on them, I couldn't use it to pinpoint my exact location on the map. I had by then sort of resigned myself to scouting out the tangle of logging roads instead of climbing the mountain, and I shortly came onto an excellent new logging road coming up from the south. Having spent too much time already without much to show for it, I decided to bail. Walking down the new logging road for a while, I reached a place where it came very close to the river which was running high and swift but full of boulders and soon found a place where I could rock hop across. Then it was just a half hour of whacking uphill through another extensive area of recent logging before I hit the Elk Lake road about a mile-and-a-half from the gate. I was back at the car by 12:30. This would have been #81 toward my 100 and was my first fail. No complaints. I have a much better idea on how to approach it next time AND got home in time to mow the lawn.