‘Deer Week’ at Diamond Mountain Meadow
Paul Schaefer included this photo of Diamond Mountain Meadow in Adirondack Cabin Country.
I've not yet made it to Diamond Mountain Meadow, but it's on my list. I know approximately where it is: a mile or so south of Bog Meadow on the western slope of Eleventh Mountain in the Siamese Ponds Wilderness.
When three of us hiked to Bog Meadow last spring, we found no trailhead, no trail markers, no cell service, and no other hikers. We did find a lot of moose scat and mossy blowdown.
A left turn off the Bog Meadow Trail would have brought us to Diamond Mountain Meadow, so long as we kept Eleventh Mountain on our left and Diamond Brook on our right. These were the directions Paul Schaefer always gave visitors when explaining how to find the hunting camp that he and a dozen friends established each November at the meadow.
The 46th week of the year -- generally the week before Thanksgiving -- was when they convened in tents for ten days to hunt deer and share stories, says Doug Miller, who was introduced to the tradition by his father in 1955.
"We would go in at least three weeks in advance to clear trail for the wagon by which we'd bring in our supplies. We would go up each weekend until week 46 and then stay ten days from Friday through the following Sunday. Then we would tear the camp down and come back out."
"We performed this ritual for some 60 years until physically we no longer could."
First Permit
Teamster and club member Earl Allen for years drove the horse-drawn wagon. Doug Miller’s father took this photo the first time they went in for Deer Week in the 1950s.
As Paul Schaefer wrote in Adirondack Cabin Country, the group he called the Cataract Club received its first permit for a camp at Diamond Mountain Meadow from a forest ranger in 1933.
"We came there each year after that until the beavers came back and reclaimed the meadow twenty-seven years later. Then, we moved downstream to a little clearing aside a cataract, high enough to avoid such disturbance again."
They called it the "Cataract Club" because Schaefer thought a peak as magnificent as Eleventh Mountain deserved a more descriptive name and so called it "Cataract Mountain" in recognition of five streams that cascade down it.
To be a club "member" simply meant having the invitation to return annually for as many days as one could spare, whether just a weekend or entire ten-day run of "Deer Week." Everything came in and was taken out on a horse-pulled wagon driven for many years by a local teamster and club member named Earl Allen.
As Schaefer described the experience:
"Days in camp begin with a hearty breakfast of fruit, bacon, eggs, flapjacks, and coffee. Then it's off to the places we envision our quarry is likely to be. Wherever that may be in our country, it means climbing, a hardwood ridge, a cliff, or a mountain. Level ground is rare. Our hunt is seeking the wild places and the signs of animals we have seen. It is reaching, out of breath, a ledge atop cliffs from which we can see a wonderful profusion of country stretching to a far horizon."
Upgrades in 1990
In later years, the club used a wagon with rubber tires to transport their supplies. That made traversing the rocks easier, but accidents still happened.
Dave Conde's first experience of Deer Week was in 1955.
"That was the year we went in to set up and discovered four feet of water on the campsite due to the dam that beavers had built. We never did get a camp set up that year, so we hunted from Paul's cabin and his sister's out on Edwards Hill Road."
"For a time, we put our sleeping bags down on saplings and meadow grass to cushion our sleep," Conde recalls. "The first year we set up at Deer Brook we brought in plywood on top of which we would place straw. Porcupines eventually got the plywood, at which point we put down construction-grade polyethylene. The poly was a lot easier to store than plywood."
In 1990, the group acquired a new army surplus tent that was 16 feet wide by 32 feet long.
"That was the same year we built a new stove to replace one that GE had built," Conde recalls. "It was made by my cousin, who worked in the machine shop at Union College. It was designed to be bolted together in sections and then unbolted so you could lay it all flat. I wished he'd made it lighter than he did, but it worked very well."
Hauling Deer Back to Camp
In his later years, Paul Schaefer’s knees gave out and he no longer could make the hike in. But Cataract Club members would always end Deer Week in the living room of the Beaver House to tell Paul their stories of how it went.
"To bring back the deer we had hunted, we'd use one of those plastic sleds you unroll," Conde continues. "There were holes on the side which you'd loop your ropes through. We put guys on both sides, one in the middle and another five feet in front of him. Being on plastic, it went pretty smoothly through the woods. We would drag the deer back to the camp and hang them from a tree limb."
"Paul brought his son Cubby into camp a couple of times. He was big like Paul. I remember Paul shooting a deer and saying, 'Cubby, can you carry that out?' Cubby hooked the legs together on each side like a pack and threw the deer on his back. He walked three miles out to the road with it on his back and never stopped. I couldn't believe it."
Ken Townsend first experienced Deer Week in 1975, "the year after my brother Bill went in and told me all about it," he says.
"I was 31 or 32 and I couldn't keep up with Paul. He must have been in his 60s and he almost ran through the woods. I remember trying to catch him. He put us young pups to shame."
"Paul would say, 'Stand here and watch that way,' and he'd leave. You'd have no idea where you were or how to get back to the tent. It was scary at first, but you'd get your feet on the ground after hunting there a while."
Until his death in 1996, Schaefer was focused throughout most of this period on the fight for wilderness preservation.
"Sometimes we'd have to wait for him to come in from a meeting down in New York City," Miller recalls. "He'd fly up to the cabin, change quickly into his hunting clothes, and we would boot it into camp. He would tell us about the dams he was opposing, the legislation he was trying to get passed, and the speeches he was writing. He was the most interesting man I'd ever met."
For their contributions to this piece, many thanks to David Gibson, Jim Schaefer, Greg Schaefer, Michael Schaefer, Ben Driscoll, Doug Miller, Ken and Chris Townsend, Bill Ingersoll, Doug Miller, and David Conde.
More Stories of the Cataract Club
“The snow started falling early that year, and in amounts that are difficult to imagine in this current age of cold-but-short winters.”
“I knew that I had passed some test that mattered to Paul, the first of many to come.”
“As I stood next to my son and my father, that small buck loomed larger than the huge buck of my youth.”
