Backwoods Brotherhood
I began to wonder what kind of camping trip this was shaping up to be when the guys I’d met just hours earlier tapped me to play the dog in a fox hunt.
On that muggy June night on the Sacandaga River, the announcement that we middle-aged gents would leave the campfire ring to play games in the nighttime woods landed while I was still trying to gauge my own interest in joining a group of backpackers who called themselves the Adirondack Commandos. At the time, I worked in Manhattan. I had driven from my downstate home to meet my brother Todd and this Rochester-area group he had recently joined. Those attending the trip were an old Scouting friend of ours, Brad, and three of the Commandos’ founders—the self-proclaimed Elder Statesmen.
We met at Whitehouse, where the Northville-Placid Trail crosses the river on a picturesque suspension bridge, for a long-weekend off-trail hike to a spot upriver in the West Branch Gorge. My brother and I had been working toward our 46er patches for a couple of years at that point, with a fair number of backpacking trips under our belts. The invitation to join this separate crew, who’d been exploring the more obscure corners of the Adirondacks for decades while avoiding the crowded peaks, sounded intriguing.
Todd and Brad had warned that Commando “missions,” as they dubbed their outings, featured a steady patter of faux military regimentation and some intense forms of play. Now I was
