Buffalo Regional Outdoor Club

And so it begins...

Who says you need to drive 5 hours to the Adirondacks for a good backpacking trip? Whoever said that, they are a freaking idiot and have never set off to explore the North Country Trail.

The official trail extends threw seven states from North Dakota to New York and covers over 4,500 miles. A stretch of 18 miles of the trail passes thru Alleghany state park which is only an hour and fifteen minute drive from Buffalo.

So Wolf and I (Sharkman) assembled our packs and set off to the park at 5:45am Saturday. We arrive at the park roughly at 7am and since we really didn’t do too much research on the trail at all, basically we just visited some loser’s crappy website and he gave a real brief crappy description of how great this trail was. After some more perusing I came to realize that crappy website had just copied the description from another crappy website and so on and so on.

In my opinion, I doubt that the description had even been updated since like 1995 because of the so many inaccuracies in them. However, like I was saying… we pulled into the park and had no idea where to go or where to start. Pulling up behind the Red House Administration building and decided to ask the park police to see if they knew anything about anything or at least steer us in the right direction.

It turns out, that there is a path that leads right from behind the administration building that leads right into the North Country Trail. The actual place where the trail comes into the park is right off the thruway entrance to Red House, near the church. I would recommend parking behind Red House, because you can check your car in with park police and they can look after it for you while you are having a blast hiking! (Above is a rough map of the trek, actually trail maps can be picked up at the Red House Admin Building)

This path is straight uphill for a few miles or so and there is pretty much nothing to see except plain forest. We eventually stumble upon an old worn down lean-to on the trail (see pic).

This was actually a letdown and kind of sunk our moral a little. Anyhow, about 50 feet from this lean-to is the start of The North Country Trail! The North Country Trail continues south towards Quaker Area with two more lean-tos stuck in there.

This is the only place in the whole camp that you can use tents and don’t need a permit. A great area to backpack, visually see the park.. (considering you can check out the bear caves, red house lake, and quaker area). Definitely a great place to train and or get all the kinks out for a bigger trip like the one we will be taking in a few weeks.