The drought is even affecting the lake regions in the Adirondacks. This beaver area has in the past been a large swampy pond. Now the surrounding area is dried out, and just the main path of the brook still has water. There are also signs around the region warning against using campfires because of extreme fire risk.
Priscilla endures the wrath of mosquitoes to pose for a picture. On Snowy and Blue Mountain, there are a lot of wooden "bridges" (not the one she is standing on to get over the brook, see behind her) to let people get over the (normally) muddy areas of the trail. I don't remember these conveniences from ye olden days. I think the Rangers are getting soft on us.
A frog! If you have patience, time, and the ability to ignore mosquitoes, you can sit here for a while and wait for a beaver to decide that the scary, stomping, hairless apes have left. We didn't have any of those things for this trip, but we didn't go home without snapping any fauna. First we saw some tiny, tiny toads, as big as your thumb. Then priscilla spotted this guy. It was very sunny and the pictures weren't coming out that well, so i made up for the lack of quality with quantity. I know it's just a frog, but he was pretty cool.
Priscilla wasn't buying my "come on, we're already more than half-way up the trail, we might was well just go to the top" bit, so we turned around and headed home. That leaves climbing Snowy Mountain and rowing down to the Jessup as my goals for next year. We went for a nice swim (just a wade, in priscilla's case) on the cottage beach, and then it was time for dinner.
Lured by the promise of vegetarian refried beans and organic lettuce, we went to a restaurant in Indian Lake (the town) called Marty's Chili Nights. In ye olden days, Marty's was a seedy small town bar, but they've redecorated. The food was good. I had an enchilada and a chimichonga, both filled with beans and corn, and priscilla had a bowl of vegetarian chili and a kay-sah-DEE-ya with mushrooms and spinach. They also had homemade chips and salsa and a blond haired, blue-eyed waitress who spoke with such a bizarre accent (some combination of british, french, and hollywood starlet, dahling, but certainly not spanish) that i'm certain she was a local girl having fun mocking the tourists. This was the only night we didn't cook dinner in our cottage.
I have no idea what rod's talking about. Her accent wasn't all that bizarre and it wasn't anything like british or french or hollywood starlet. I wouldn't say it was spanish, but it wasn't as strange as rod makes it out to be. She also had light brown hair. The music was loud enough to make it difficult for rod and me to hear each other and since the waitress was standing next to me and not rod, i think he misheard. At any rate, the food was ok, if not great. The chips and salsa were definitely above par. Perhaps they spend more effort on their meat dishes, which are prolly more popular. I just enjoy eating out, so i didn't lose out any. The only thing i didn't get to do was eat dessert, which is a sin, imo. They were only offering fried ice cream and flan. *sigh*
Also, that fly in the eye thing? Not a problem anymore.