A Winter Adventure at “Big” Trout Pond

By Bill Ingersoll

I have been writing about Adirondack trails for 20 years. If you are familiar with my prior articles, you may have noticed that I tend to eschew places that are already well known in favor of the places that don’t get as much love. The Adirondack Park is huge, and rather than telling people about the places they can already see a dozen times a day on Instagram, I’d rather encourage them to take a chance on the less beaten trails.

This month’s outing is no different. It will take you on a winter journey into a corner of New York’s Forest Preserve that tends to get overshadowed by other, more well-known features in its immediate vicinity. Parking is a question in the winter, and you may be elbow to elbow with snowmobilers at first. The trail is accessed from a paved state highway, but this may be the worst state highway you’ll ever drive. But the destination is highly intriguing, and it’s one I wish I could say I knew better myself.

Trout Pond lurks in the hilly forests south of the Bog River, in the western gerrymandered arm of the Round Lake Wilderness. People sometimes refer to it as “Big” Trout Pond to better distinguish it from the neighboring Little Trout Pond. It is nearly two miles long, and its southern end is flanked by enormous rock bluffs.

A marked trail leads to the pond’s north end, but the trailhead coincides with the overwhelmingly popular parking area for the Bog River Flow canoe route (i.e., Hitchins Pond and Lows Lake), where in the summer there can be more cars than there is room to turn around. In the winter you have to put up with other obstacles: a potential lack of parking, a poorly maintained road, and the snowmobile traffic at Horseshoe Lake.

But as you’ll see, these are obstacles worth overcoming. 

Getting There

If you are familiar with Horseshoe Lake and Lows Lake, then you can gloss over this section; the trail to Trout Pond is that obscure route you might’ve noticed while launching a canoe at Lows Lower Dam but never got around to exploring.

For the rest of you, this adventure begins at the far end of NY Route 421, the dead-end state highway that begins on NY Route 30 between Tupper Lake and Long Lake. The road crosses the Bog River at 0.7-mile, and at 1.6 miles it turns sharp left to climb steeply uphill.

The upper portion of Route 421 can become exceedingly rough with frost heave, which only gets worse as you near Horseshoe Lake at 4.6 miles. Winter maintenance ends at 5.5 miles, although the clearing here may be reserved as a snowplow turnaround.

Because of the road conditions, this might best be a snowshoe hike saved for a fair-weather day.

The Trail

Because you cannot drive to the summer parking area at Lows Lower Dam, this winter trek necessarily begins where the plowing ends on Route 421 immediately south of Horseshoe Lake. The unplowed extension of the road is a well-used snowmobile route, but you only need to follow it for 0.3-mile to the point where the driveway to Lows Lower Dam bears left.

This narrow road leads in 0.7-mile to the summer parking area at Lows Lower Dam, where paddlers throng in the summer. There has been a proposal on the books for years to enlarge this parking area, which is far too small to handle the volume of traffic. In the winter, however, there is no traffic.

Continue through the parking area to the pedestrian walkway across the concrete dam. It seems silly to recommend the view from such a non-wilderness monstrosity, but on my visit, this was one of the most impressive highlights of the day. Upstream, Hitchins Pond is serene and locked in ice; downstream, the Bog River bursts from captivity into a free-flowing stream. The scene can be quite photogenic under the right conditions.

You have already hiked one-mile to reach this spot, but the trail is only just beginning. Continue across the walkway and find the old woods road that burrows into the woods. There are blue DEC trail markers, but these are superfluous since the route is so obvious. It leads generally south, climbing at a gentle, steady grade. On paper this would be an outstanding cross-country ski route, but I suspect the old road is just so wet that it doesn’t freeze adequately to make skiing fully enjoyable. Snowshoes, though, work just fine.

After cresting the height-of-land, the trail swings southwest and drops steeply toward the pond. It ends 1.3 miles from the dam (2.3 miles from the snowplow turnaround) at a slightly boggy corner of Trout Pond.

The view from this spot is tantalizing, but one of the joys of winter hiking is the ability to continue forth across a firmly frozen water body to see what else there is to be seen. By itself “Big” Trout is a highly scenic destination, but one of the aspects that makes this area worth going out of your way to visit is its proximity to two other ponds: Little Tout Pond and High Pond. Informal paths — possibly difficult to detect in winter — do connect all three, but otherwise the only other way to explore this chain would be to haul in a canoe during the warmer months.

Bill Ingersoll is a cofounder and the vice-chair of Adirondack Wilderness Advocates. For more info on this area, visit adirondackwilderness.org/round-lake-wilderness.