Thanksgiving Weekend Adventires

As I pulled out of my temporary lodging here at Ft. Drum Wednesday, the day before Turkey day, there was at least 6 inches of snow covering everything and at least that much slush on the road.  I headed east once again for the Adirondacks for a weekend of hunting and what not.  Well the scenery changed every mile I drove as I approached closer and closer to Lake Placid and then onto Wilmington as that crazy white stuff they call snow got deeper.  I would say Wilmington and Whiteface Mountain received around 15+ inches of snow the night before.  Just like always as soon as I arrived to Wilmington I headed over to Steinhoff's Pub for a brew and something to eat.  Well I got so wasted that night that I fear there are still stories floating around about that night that I cant seem to remember.  But what I do remember was that damn porch in front of Scott's cabin covered in ice, slip, bam, ouch!  The next morning Scott and I hit the mountain thrashing through knee deep snow tracking deer up and down the mountain but had no luck.  We scouted the deer quite a few more times with no luck as well as we did a day of duck and goose hunting with a little pheasant hunting during the middle of the day.

 These were the tracks of a huge buck.

 A froze over beaver pond.

 Now for the unbelievable part, me, yes I, got in that water.  A few weeks ago I went out to the Ausable Marsh, a marsh alongside of Lake Champlain and scouted the area for some waterfowl hunting, and saw plenty of birds and great hunting locations.  So we rig up our decoys and head out to the marsh Saturday morning to find the whole damn thing frozen over.  At least 5/8 to 3/4s of an inch of ice.  So now what, um I guess we could break up a small hole to drop the decoys, uh, that could work right?  So in I went, kicking, elbow slamming and grabbing sheets of ice, sliding some large sheets under the rest of the surface.  Wow that was cold!

 That afternoon after an unsuccessful morning icy marsh hunt we move about a half of a mile over to the lake side of the park road directly on Lake Champlain where the surface was only frozen over near the banks and in between the reeds in only shallow spots.

The picture below is one of our decoy spread looking out from our blind towards the center of Lake Champlain and if you look close enough you can see the mountains of Vermont across the water.

This was an Impressive sight, the Ausable Chasm, with canyon walls behind the camera shot of hundreds  of feet straight up.