In the last Transitions, it was noted that a number of hunters were in the Cold River interior when the land hurricane of 1950 hit the area and hit it hard. One of those hunters, blocked by fallen timbers in that “Big Blow,” was the mayor of Cold River City, population one (Town of Newcomb, Essex County), the honorable Noah John Rondeau.
Noah had pretty much retired from being a hermit at this time of his life. In fact, he had spent part of that summer of 1950 at the Corey-Saranac Lake road intersection, where he had an exhibit. Later in August, he worked as a substitute Santa Claus at the North Pole in Wilmington.
That November, however, he returned to his old camp to do some hunting. His journal, left with his nephew, Chester Rondeau, as part of his estate, tells us that on the 14th, he shot a 200-pound, 12-point buck (he had seen the sun glint from the buck’s antlers as it sneaked through the forest cover across the marsh):
Nov. 14, 1950
At Cold River – mild and cloudy, 9 a.m. I shoot from Town Hall
door and kill a 12 point Adirondack buck. I knew nine of his beds –
today two bullets took him almost instantly.
Eleven days later, Noah had an almost ominous feeling about the winds. Could it have been because he had lived so close to nature most of his life that he had a special sense, much like the creatures around his camp? At any rate, Noah decided to get out of the woods and headed for the Avery Rockefeller in-holding on Ampersand Pond.
The Rockefeller family knew Noah. The caretakers, Frank Blanchard and this community’s Lucien Martin were his friends. Lucien once told me that they had helped Noah many times over the years – giving him a ride on occasion, shuttling supplies where Noah could pack them into his camp, providing him quite often with food, allowing him to stay overnight in a guide’s cottage to break up his 17-mile walk to Coreys, and, in general, keeping an eye out for him, particularly as he got older. Noah’s journal entry tells us about that day:
Nov.25, 1950
Cold River – cloudy and fierce wind. Snow all gone. I re-canvas
Town Hall. I find 1 gallon glass jug full of sugar hid since 1934.
I walk eight miles to Donkey Lodge 4-7 p.m. Stop with Marcellus Hunters 7 p.m. to Ampersand Pond with Frank Blanchard . . . hunting season close –
A few notes in this entry might be of interest. Before the blow down, Noah could use a shortcut through a pass between Seymour and Seward mountains. An old haul road located there, built by the Santa Clara Company, was at that time still in good shape. It was known as Ouluska Pass (an Indian name for “a place of shadows”). Today, that pass is still complicated by the blow down and is seldom used.
Donkey Lodge, which Noah mentions in his journal entry, was the tent camp located on Ward Brook near the Ampersand Pond private gate. It was a traditional location used for years by a Syracuse group (Marcellus) that used mules to bring in supplies and to get their deer out.
Noah stayed over at Ampersand that night of the storm and the next day and, with the Ampersand caretakers and the Syracuse group, spent the next three days cutting a way out to Coreys.
As noted previously, the woods, following the 1950 storm, would become closed to the public. Lumbering and salvage would take place near Noah’s old camp until March of 1956, when the state ended all contracts. As Maitland DeSormeau tells us in his book, Adirondack Hermit, “That edict (which closed the woods) plus the realization that he was then, at 67, too old to ever seriously consider the resumption of the uncertain ways of the wilderness, ended forever that phase of Rondeau’s life.” Note: Noah would never return to his old hermitage. In March of 1957, Louis Simmons, in company with Dave LaVoie and this writer, visited his abandoned camp high on the bluff below Cold River Flow.
We didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but the three of us would be almost the last people to see Noah’s hermitage as it had been when he lived there. The very next week, just days before the spring breakup, when the log roads softened and became a morass of axle-high mud, lumberman Paul Crofut used his bulldozer to load Noah’s main camp (“The Town Hall of Records,” as Noah called it) for transportation on a log truck via Huntington Forest on the Newcomb-Long Lake Road to the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, where it is currently on display in the Woods and Waters building.
It is just as well that Noah did not return to Cold River. Two years after the blow down, a tall pine near Noah’s old site, which somehow survived the wind’s onslaught and remained the highest thing around, served as a lightning rod that attracted a bolt from the sky.
Forest Ranger Earl Blanchard was standing on the porch of the ranger station at Shattuck Clearing, six miles below Noah’s old place. He saw the lightning strike. First came wisps of smoke and then, suddenly, a monstrous cloud of more intense smoke that billowed into the sky, followed by a roaring inferno of fire. At a point four miles up the Cold River from Shattuck’s, a fire started in the blow down. Earl immediately got on the phone and called George Youngs, the district ranger at Saranac Lake. Pieter Fosburgh summed up that disaster best when, in his book, The Natural Thing, he wrote: “And so at last it had happened. The nightmare that had been troubling our sleep for more than two years was now a reality; there was now a real fire in the blow down and where and when it would stop was anybody’s guess. We’ve been expecting it. Now, let’s give it the works.”
Next Transitions: The state’s master plan design to “give it the works.”