Jerry said something along the lines of, "It seems to me that wilderness is a place without people." Does that mean that we shouldn't have walked through the woods or was Jerry merely complaining that we saw too many people?

I have been on top of Algonquin with Jerry when 50 other people were there; I have also been on top of Marcy with Jerry when we were the only two people there. I've hiked trails where every 5 minutes you were tipping your hat or saying hi to someone. One fine June weekend several years ago my son and I walked from Paradox Lake to the top of Pharaoh Mountain, spent the night there, and walked out the south side of the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness without seeing another soul.

Usage patterns change with seasons, weather, and newspaper articles. Are we loving the Adirondacks to death, should we restrict access? Not easy questions and I certainly don't have any easy, good or even passable answers. I worry that excessive restrictions on access will create an elite class of those who can go any time and can therefore hike when most others can't thus gaining more access than others. I also worry that restrictions will reduce awareness of the quality and value of wilderness - if no one can experience it, no one will know what it is. I'm getting dangerously close to climbing a soapbox here; let me get back to memory lane.

  We did encounter a few people on our walk, fortunately none were as extreme as some we've encountered in the high peaks (On Mount Colden one early May day we found three French Canadian women who offered us $100 dollars for a bottle of wine - or anything with alcohol. We didn't have any and they walked off with their umbrellas strapped to their packs. But that's a different story.)

We decided that people encountered on the road portions of the trail, at trailheads, or in public campgrounds (like Lake Durant or Wakely Dam) didn't count as people met on the trail. With those ground rules in mind we actually didn't encounter all that many people considering that we walked 133 miles over 11 days. On the first day we saw a couple camped with their tent and their jeep at the end of the Gun club property 1.3 miles in from Upper Benson. On the second day after we'd stopped for the