Coot Hill’s a breeze

Horse and buggy plunge off cliff! Husband shoots wife and self! Couple tumbles over precipice, stung by passion! Lurid is the lore of Coot Hill, and all these troubling exploits were told to me before I first hiked there a few years ago; the place has a captivating human backstory and is a natural history hot spot too. It’s also an intriguing and easy hike to a knockout of a view.

Coot Hill is a lower summit of Bulwagga Mountain, the long uplifted plateau overlooking Lake Champlain’s bay of the same name just south of Port Henry. The summit lookout perches a thousand feet above the valley, commanding a vista up and down the lake and over to the Green Mountains. An Irish settler named the hill for one he’d known back home, and Bulwagga evidently was the name of a Native American who drowned in the bay. Between the two is Big Hollow, an abrupt ravine several hundred feet deep, whose name most locals use for this neck of the woods. It’s here the nosedives occurred.

The footpath, marked and opened in 2013 by Champlain