Cone Mountain Pond
Dan Newton
We’re driving down Route 49 on our way to a trail that is not on a map. It’s a unique route that begins on private lands, and then moves into the National Forest, eventually leading to a beautiful special pond: Cone Mountain Pond. The trail is off one of the several backcountry roads in the Sugar Run housing development: unmarked, no parking lot, obscured by evergreens growing thickly at the roadside’s edge. It’s been a while since I’ve been here, so I’m not sure exactly where it is… so I’m beginning to feel the silent angst of the lost guide [a tragic and sometimes weekly condition, caused by an overabundance of enthusiasm, adventure mongering, and the seductions of the many sylvan voices known to be wandering these parts of the world]. Generally, people seem to forgive me for this. Looking into the rearview mirror at the group: Lisa, Suzie, Dorothy; Mark and Roy, I see they’re geared up and talking excitedly in anticipation of the afternoon’s sojourn. I stop the bus.
Five faces look at me as if to ask, “What are you doing?”
“I must have past it,” I tell them, “because it’s not this far…”
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Turning the bus around on the backcountry road proves to be more of a challenge than I care to endeavor; however, I manage, without incident; and, driving back over the same road we’d ascended, at once familiar, and at the same time, different, I immediately recognize the indistinct beginning of the trail and park the bus off the side of the road as best I can.
The trail, a favorite among local dog walkers, is usually fully packed-down from foot traffic, so snowshoes aren’t even necessary, but I recommend we begin with stabilizers, and carry the snowshoes for walking on the pond, because walking on a pond is one of the things to do when snowshoeing, simply because you can’t do it when you’re just hiking. This thought gives these wintertime tramping days significance in our wanderlust, a sense of pioneering and exploration, newness and beauty; and on a pond, you can look at the same trees and the same hillsides or mountains that you’ve seen many many times before, and seen them anew, from a different perspective, from the loon’s perspective, as it were. I follow the group, who have already begun to ascend, into the woods, having doddled and tinkered with my many accoutrements of the trade, pawing through my bucket-pack, and then throwing it onto my shoulders and heading off. I am out of breath catching up to them. The trail rises quickly from the road. Although it is well trodden, the snow is soft, and so Lisa and I soon stop and take the stabilizers off and put the snowshoes on. It is clear and cold and the woods are in the wind. I tell them the little ravine of the pond outlet stream has a 300 year old spruce tree in it, “They’re a thinner tree than pine, for instance, so an old one can look not-so-old, especially if it’s growing out of the bottom of a little ravine.” As we approach the pond, we can find no such tree; and so, we’re wondering about my facts. At the pond, we can see the tips of Dickey and Welch for a moment, at the spot where the trail first comes up to the edge of the pond, but then they’re gone, eclipsed by the green-needled treetops, as the trail leads down to a rock, a popular site for eating lunch and swimming. No one has been on the pond; and so, it is a pure whiteness, a smooth surface of whiteness and cold; and, as the elected official, it is I who ventures out first, soon to tell them that it is completely frozen; and then, turning out into the great white expanse before me, it is as if I’m walking into oblivion on some lunar landscape, desolate, beautiful, lonely… I step forward, each step throwing a spray of snow, light and granular, like sand, the snow sound crunching; and the others follow, one by one, walking down the rock and onto the pond. Each on his or her own route tramps across the waters, feels the smallness of walking here, with the sky all around, and the trees far away, humbled and human. We convene in a place, just some place on the water, not a little nook, or a turn in the trail, a rock or a tree, but just… another spot, another step, in this white wilderness. The sky is big and bright blue and the trees are green-dark and shadowed on the distant shores. We wander around, roving, enjoying the juxtaposition of having been in the woods for an hour, and then popping out onto the surface of the pond, instantly distant from the trees and rocks on shore, standing now in another world, a detached observer, looking back at where we’ve been, at where we’re used to seeing ourselves be. The perspective is delightful and we find it hard to stop smiling. We take pictures of each other. We look at the green trees and the tracks we’ve made, and all the whiteness of the blue-topped day.
Returning to the rock, by way of the pond, we walk past it, choosing another exit off the water, where the balsam branches form a tight canopy, like an arched doorway, and there’s a little tread-way in the contours of the pillowed shoreline. We duck under the branches and step back into the woods, leaving the wide-open sunshine and snow-bright of the smooth white pond behind, returning to our trodden ways alongside a not quite frozen stream in a little brook-bed ravine, past an old growth tree somewhere in the woods, and, mixed in with the tramping clomps of our snowshoes, I hear the sound of loons.