Hey, remember me? I’m BAAAAAACK!!! To be more precise, I came back to Newcomb, NY (pop. 436) last week to complete a missing 17-mile segment of my bike route. You may recall from my early blog posts that a bridge near Newcomb, which is situated near the headwaters of the Hudson River in the Adirondack Mountains, had been destroyed shortly before my arrival during severe flooding in the area. At the time, there was no way to complete that portion of my Adventure Cycling Northern Tier bike map route. The only way to get to the next town, Long Lake, NY (pop. 791), required an 80-mile detour–which I opted to take by car. I wrote about that experience in my blog post “Adventure in the Adirondacks” dated 7-26-23.

I was always meant to do this stretch on a bike, however, and finally got around to doing that, returning to Cloudsplitter Outfitters in Newcomb, where Dave supplied me with a mountain bike for the trip.

Here is my Chief Navigator Trudi with Dave, shortly after picking up the bike the day before my ride. The black flies in the area are really bad at this time of year, and within minutes we each had a half dozen bites. I think you can see one of these blood-sucking pests hovering over Dave’s head in the photo below.

Here is a photo showing Fishing Brook, where the new bridge needed to be constructed. It’s not a very large stream, but when the bridge over it was washed away, the road was closed for a month until a temporary bridge was built. Dave said the road closure really hurt his and other businesses that summer.

Here I am in the midst of my trip to “bridge the gap.” It rained almost the entire time I was riding, but my bright yellow rain jacket helped keep me visible and dry, and it was an uneventful ride. The rain also seemed to keep the black flies at bay.

This photo shows what the weather and surrounding scenery looked like as I completed my missing stretch. This is a pretty remote area, and there wasn’t much traffic. The weather may not have been perfect, but I was glad to have an excuse to spend a couple hours on the road there.

We stayed in Long Lake after I completed my ride.

While in Long Lake, I checked out this war memorial.

In looking at the long list of names of those from the Long Lake area who served in World War II, I was reminded of the movie Saving Private Ryan, where heroic means were used to find and save a private on the battlefield whose three brothers had been killed in the war. I was struck by how many surnames were repeated in the memorial’s list of those serving in the war, including six named Jennings; four named Helms and Lamos; three named Hosley and Cole; and numerous others with two individuals with the same last name. I suspect that in this small town, most or all of the individuals with these repeated names were related to each other. There were two men named Hamner who were killed in action.

Now that I have completed this missing link on my bike journey, no doubt some of you are wondering what’s next. Could there be another epic journey in my future? Maybe! But before I would consider something like that, we first need to complete one or more items on my long-suffering Chief Navigator Trudi’s bucket list. I’m also planning to write something more about the trip I took and am working on a couple ideas now. I’ll keep you posted!