On the beaten path

My favorite road is Route 73, with its narrow throat connecting Keene and North Elba.

The road rims two stretches of deep water between Pitchoff and Cascade mountains.

Nothing can stop the pass from being wild, not even the plow trucks, though they try.

DOT had to close it a few years ago to blast back a gargantuan boulder that seemed ready to roll onto the road.

It might have kept rolling down the ramp of 73 like a 20-ton pinball. I think it would have headed east to Keene.

Almost every evening drive home from the mountains in Lake Placid to the Pleasant Valley is breathtaking in one way or another.

Sometimes I hold my breath when the wind-swept snow blasts over the guide rails like a horizontal storm.

But I love it most when the moon lifts from the bottom of the long crevasse of 73 as night falls.

As you drop into the pass, it appears all at once, hung huge and bright yellow between the grey cliffs.

It stays with you the whole way, ducking only once or twice behind the sheer Cascade wall.

When winter moons are full in a clear sky, birch-covered slopes beside the lakes are marked with erratic dark shadows on snow in cold light.

I’ve had to stop a few times to get out and look at them.

I can only imagine the 12 hours it used to take to get from Elizabethtown to Lake Placid by stagecoach.

Horses’ hoofbeats must’ve sounded pretty cool bouncing off the ledges.

The 25-some-odd mile morning trip is never the same.

I watch distant mountains a lot as I go. They work like a compass if you know the peaks.

Coming over Spruce Hill toward the T at 73 is stunning.

It’s not just the wall of mountain layers that explode into view as you crest the hill.

To the east, if you catch it right, the Sentinel _ with his nose, chin and mouth facing skyward _ guards the very pinnacle of Whiteface.

Whiteface gets tricky at the end of 73.

I’m not sure if it’s an optical illusion, but the mountain actually seems to MOVE.

Just past the Lake Placid ski jumps coming into town, Whiteface looms fierce and tall to your right — or apparently east — over the horse show grounds.

As you approach the village limit in an apparent straight line, it disappears.

And then when 73 ends and you turn left onto Main Street, Whiteface emerges again — only this time to your left, or apparently west — off the north end of Mirror Lake.

If you look at a map, it still doesn’t really make sense, unless you put it in motion.

You’ve actually encircled distant Whiteface by about 180 degrees.

The whole 73 pass actually cuts a sharp south-to-north curve dividing the High Peaks from the Sentinels.

It’s wild.

But you have to slow down to see it.