MacIntyre Range (37, 38, 39)

Our July goal was to hike the 3 northern peaks of the MacIntyre range. (Mt. Marshall is also part of the range, but there's no trail connecting the first 3 to it.) There's a loop hike possible, but it would have added a couple of hours, so we decided to climb over Algonquin, on to Iroquois, backtrack over Algonquin, then take the side trip up Wright, before heading back to the Adirondack Loj.

On the last hike, I'd learned about TMax -n- Topo's, a hostel right near the turn-off to the Loj. Much closer than other places we've stayed at and the bunk rooms are only $28/person. It was nice to hang out in the common room and watch TV.

Our trail led past the turn-off to Wright, which we decided to climb on the way back. The incline was pretty gradual until we got close to Algonquin. Algonquin is the second-highest mountain in New York; there's a pretty extensive alpine zone, with lots of cairns to keep you off of the protected plants.

There was a good handful of people hanging out on top of Algonquin, including a mountain steward. After a break, we went down the col towards Iroquois, which was not too long of a trip.

Then we had to turn around and climb Algonquin a second time! When we got there, there was quite a crowd.

From there, we continued back, but took the side trail to Wright, which had an even bigger crowd, including-- and largely due to-- some folks who were finishing their 46 peaks.

Near the peak is a plaque and a few remains from a 1962 plane crash.

Mt. Seymour (36)

Last year, we'd attempted to climb Seymour on day 2 of an overnight outing, after doing the 3 peaks of the Seward range on day 1, but day 2 was pouring rain, so we cancelled. Now we were back, but because we knew there was a lean-to conveniently located near the base of Seymour, we made this an overnight outing too. But first we checked out the Wild Center, in nearby Tupper Lake.

We got to the trailhead in mid-afternoon and spent two hours hiking in the mostly level 6-mile trail to the Ward Brook lean-to.

The weather was nice and we were in no rush at that point, so we relaxed, made dinner and, of course, went to bed early.

We did have to be home before dinnertime the next day, so we got up before 5:00 to have some breakfast and hit the trail. A nice thing about having the lean-to to come back to on the way out is that  I could leave most of my stuff there and just take a day pack up the mountain.

Mt. Colden (35)

For something different, we decided to hike Mt. Colden as part of a group hike organized by the St. Lawrence chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK). Ian’s high school friend Pat Carroll came along too.

The hike had been described as having a pace that would be “on the slow side of moderate.” I figured it would be hard for Ian to go that slow, but for myself, I welcomed the excuse to go a little slower. When we met at the Adirondack Loj, we were a group of seven, including the leader, an older guy who was involved with his local chapter and was interested in seeing the trail improvements that had been done a while earlier.

Also, it was Memorial Day weekend, so when we got to the register to sign in, there was a crowd there. But there are a lot of trails leading out from the Loj, and there didn’t seem to be too many people heading to Colden.

When we got to Marcy Dam, we had a clear view of Mt. Colden.

Around halfway up, our hike leader made an announcement: He was tired and not feeling well, so he was going to turn back! We were free to carry on without him, which we did. Suddenly, Ian was one of the people in the lead and the pace picked up considerably! Before long, a young woman who’d been counting on the “slow side of moderate” was finding herself way behind us; when she caught up, she had decided to head back too. So now it was just Ian, Pat, me, and two others.

We stopped for a nice lunch at Lake Arnold, at about 3,800 feet, one of the highest bodies of water in the Adirondacks.

There’s a shoulder leading up to Colden, which has a great view of the peak. It seemed really far off still, but was only 10 minutes away.

Nippletop & Dial (33 & 34)

After having done a very wintry hike in May, two years back, I didn't expect we'd start off a new season with an April hike, but it had been such a snowless winter that I thought we could do it (without snowshoes.)

Last fall, we hiked nearby Colvin and Blake, camping out on the trail afterwards, with plans to hike Nippletop and Dial the next day. But two days of mountain hiking with a full pack was more than I could handle, so these two were postponed. This was our chance to get caught up. Nick decided to join us.

This hike is usually done as a loop, but people seem to be split about which direction is best. After reading lots of hike reports, I decided to do it counter-clockwise, making a long, gradual hike to the base of Nippletop, then a very steep climb to the top, then a long, relatively easy hike along a ridge to (the lower) Dial and on towards the starting point.

After a slight delay due to the discovery that our motel wouldn't be starting its free breakfast offering until May, we hit the trail a little after 6am. For the first few hours, the trail was the same we'd taken to do Colvin and Blake. Finally, we veered off that trail, through Elk Pass, to the base of Nippletop. And yes, it was steep. And we knew enough to bring microspikes for digging into the ice that became more and more prominent as we got higher.

There was a lot of walking up slabs of ice— impossible without spikes.

It was still cloudy when we reached the top, so there was no view whatsoever. We actually had a working camera this trip and avoided setting up timed shots because there always happened to be someone on hand to take our peak picture for us.

Note the visibility behind us!

The Nippletop peak was cold and breezy, so I was glad to move on. I was shocked at how easily we got to the peak of Dial. It's a running joke to keep telling each other that the next peak is just ahead and I was just about to do that when it turned out to be true. The sky was starting to clear, so we got a pretty good view from Dial.

On Dial, with the clouds lifting.

That was the last 4,000+ peak of the day, but on the trail back, we still had to climb over the smaller Bear Den Mountain and Noonmark Mountain. The mountaintop at Noonmark had suffered a fire a few years back, so it was pretty barren.

Noonmark— barren, due to fire.

Got back to the car a little after 4— a 13.6-mile hike in 10 hours.

Big Slide (32)

Starting out, in ski masks, in 18° temps.

I've heard about the maniacs who, after becoming a "46er" by climbing all 46 of the High Peaks, then set out to become a "winter 46er." I'm not too interested in risking frostbite, so I said confidently that I'd never do a mountain hike in the winter. But December 2015 was incredibly mild and snowless, so I decided we'd give it a try, with a shorter, one-peak hike. We picked Big Slide.

Of course, the one day that we had available to us was the day the temperature took a dramatic drop, with a forecast of 18° at the start of the hike. I didn't know what that was going to be like, so I said up front that if it got to be too brutal, we'd just turn around and do it another day. At least it was not going to snow.

Big Slide can be done as a loop, with one leg being the gradual slope along the range called The Brothers and the other leg being the nearly level trail between the trail head and Johns Brook Lodge, plus a steep trail on the mountainside. But the Johns Brook trail is boring and muddy, so we decided to go up and back along The Brothers. (Solid line in this map.)

I had tons of clothes on, but I'd underestimated how much heat I generate lugging my flabby body and pack up a mountain. In spite of the weather, I was stripping off layers before long. Then it started to snow, despite the forecast. That was actually nice, because the shallow layer of snow made it really easy to follow other people's tracks. (Hopefully they were going the right way.)

On the way up.

Everyone comments on the great views from The Brothers, but of course it was foggy, so we didn't see much on the way up. I'd forgotten my camera and Ian's batteries died after a couple of shots, so there's not much of a photo record.

I didn't realize what a short hike this was-- we got to the peak in less than 4 hours! In desperation to get something like our traditional peak photo, I pulled out my crappy old phone and got a couple of pictures that were actually OK (with a little Photoshop help.)

By the time we headed back down, the clouds were lifting and we got to see some of those great vistas we'd been hearing about. We also passed quite a few people who were coming up, since they knew it was a short enough hike that they could get a later start.

Confession: Someone else took this photo, but this is what it looked like on our way down.

Turned out to be a really nice hike. I think Big Slide would be my recommendation to anyone who wanted to try a High Peak without committing to a really long day.

Colvin and Blake (30, 31)

Ian, Nick and I headed off on our first hike where we'd be camping out in tents, on the trail. The plan was to climb Colvin and Blake on day 1, then Nippletop and Dial on day 2.

(Click to enlarge)

It was Labor Day weekend, so we figured there'd be a lot of hikers out. When we got to the trailhead, a couple of park rangers were there to tell any campers that a small bear had been visiting the campsites for the last few days. After a couple of hours of moderate climbing, we got to the first of 3 campsites available and set up camp.

We were able to take some of the load off our backs, but couldn't leave any food there, because of the bear. We also weren't sure we could find and purify water when we needed it, so I was carrying a lot of water. I was carrying more weight than usual and, now that we were really climbing up Colvin, I was having a hard time. Like at the Santanoni hike, I was stopping every couple of minutes to rest.

Finally, we got to the peak of Colvin. The hikes down Colvin and up Blake were steep, and we would have to come back the way we'd come, so I left my heavy pack on Colvin; that made the Blake hike a lot more doable.

The day was getting long, so we had to push on to get back to the campsite before dark. When we got there, we heard that the bear had been through the campsite just after we'd left and had shredded someone's tent. It wasn't too interested in the people, though, and the guy we saw said he'd been able to take a lot of pictures of it.

We made dinner (too much food!) and put all our remaining food in a bear bag; Ian shimmied up a skinny tree and hung the bag on a branch. We were a little disappointed in the morning that we didn't get to see the bear.

After breakfast, we packed up camp and headed off toward Nippletop, but decided to take the trail that led past the Indian Head overlook. Now we were carrying our tents, sleeping bags, extra water, etc. It was a short but steep hike up to Indian Head and before we'd even gotten there, I knew I wasn't going to be able to climb two more mountains that day. As a consolation, we spent a long time at Indian Head and the boys climbed up and down every inch of it.

You can see the "Indian Head" profile on the left.

 

On the way back, we stopped to look at a beaver den and got to watch the beaver.

The Santanoni Range: Panther, Couchsachraga, Santanoni (27,28,29)

Headed out to the western-most of the High Peaks, also known for having some really swampy sections, but luckily for us, there'd been weeks of very little rain, so the terrain was OK.

The trail has a long, mostly flat lead-in, then a steep climb up to a spot known as "Times Square," because it's the intersection of the lead-in trail and the trails to the 3 peaks.

(Click to enlarge.)

These trails in the western part of the High Peaks region are less travelled and less maintained. The first bridge we came to was not kept up too well. The next one was worse.

 

The only person we saw on that first part of the trail was a guy hurrying to catch up to a scout troop then had started out earlier.

Unfortunately, we missed the turn-off to start climbing uphill and walked on for at least a half hour before turning around. From that point the climb was steep and before long, I was having a hard time with it. I was literally stopping every two minutes for a two-minute rest. (Ian was very patient.) When we finally made it to Times Square, we dropped our packs to take the short (15-minute) hike to the peak of Panther.

Times Square was a little bit like the real Times Square, in that we encountered a few groups of people, including a handful of 40-ish guys who were leaders or parents of a scout troop, but without any kids with them. I decided to leave my pack there again for the longer, but steeper, climb down and up to Couchsachraga. The low part of this trail is known as "The Great Swamp," but because of the drought, it wasn't too bad.

 

On the way we ran into the scout troop that had been ahead of us and discovered that one of the boys was in a class that Ian taught! When we got back to TS, we rested along with the scout-leader guys. We decided to hike together to the peak of Santanoni and hike out together. It was fun to have some additional people to hike with and useful, when they used their pump/filter to get fresh water from a stream and pumped some for us too.

13 hours of hiking; 17 miles (plus a few unplanned miles)

Seward, Donaldson & Emmons (24-26)

Our first real overnighter, as we had to hike two hours to get to the lean-to that would be our base camp for, hopefully, two days of hiking. The Seward range is 3 mountains in a row-- Seward, Donaldson and Emmons. Mt. Seymour is nearby, but you can't reasonably get to it from the others. Luckily, a few lean-tos are situated near the trailhead for each hike.

The Seward range includes the furthest west of the 46 high peaks. In fact, there is no taller mountain to the west of Seward until you get to the Rockies. The plan was to leave Queensbury by 7am Sunday for the nearly 3-hour drive to the trailhead, hiking in to base camp, then up Seymour, to get back to camp by late afternoon and do the other three on Monday. We knew there was going to be rainy weather on Monday and just before bedtime on Saturday night it occurred to us that we should switch the order of our hikes, so that the shorter one would be on the rainy day. That meant getting up in time to leave at 4am instead of 7am.

So we managed to hit the trail little after 7am and reached the Blueberry Lean-to two hours later.

Photo taken by one of the guys who spent the previous night in the lean-to.

Dropped off a few things that we didn't need for the day's hike and started up toward Seward. The steepness was moderate for the first 20 minutes or so, but then the rest of the two hours up the mountain was unrelentingly steep. We were pretty well exhausted when we reached the peak.

There was more downhill from Seward than we'd hoped for-- since we knew we would be coming back up it eventually. Neither Donaldson nor Emmons was a trivial hike, though certainly not as tough as the first one. By the time we hiked back over the first two and down the long trail from Seward, it was dinnertime and it felt like it.

We had an elegant dinner of curry chicken with cashews and Ian made a nice campfire, to pass the time.

During the night, the rain started and by morning it was still pouring, with no hint of letting up. We decided it would be no fun hiking Seymour in the pouring rain and we'd already climbed 3 mountains (well, five, counting our return trip), so we hiked out, to leave Seymour for another day.