The Indian Pass

"Down, deep down trickled a blind rill, mining like a mole through a narrow tunnel of the broken, jagged rocks, and I knew it was the infant Hudson whose birthplace oozed from the gashed heart of the monster...." This is how the author describes his first sight of the springs which form the source of the Hudson in the Indian Pass. Another famous river, the Ausable, springs from its northern end.

There were no permanent shelters and no marked trails when Alfred Street, along with two mountain guides, set out to penetrate the pass and to climb Marcy more than a century ago. The wilderness was total, the forest inhabited by panthers, bears, deer and, more rarely, moose. The nights were spent in bough houses.
Their route ran from Scott's on the Elizabethtown road, ten miles north of the pass, to and through the pass to the "Upper Works, " from there to Lakes Colden and Avalanche, up by Opalescent Falls and to the top of Marcy, down by Panther Gorge, Marcy Brook and the Ausable Lakes, to the "Keene Flats." From there, by wagon, to Scott's, with a side trip to Whiteface.

Here is a narrative, romantic and poetic, as only Street could write it, of a climb in a region now so familiar to Adirondack hikers, but unknown then to all but a few guides. His visit to the Upper Works, with its only inhabitant, Mr. Hunter, was at a time when the Forge was in ruins, a decade after the abandoning of the mine.

He dreams of the "... inexhaustible beds of magnetic iron ore (which) slumber here or wait 'for the good time' coming..." - unaware that it would take three quarters of a century before his dream would come true. The Macintyre mine was reactivated in 1941.
This is a 'nostalgia! book for those who like to tag along with the Adirondack explorers of the mid-19th century.