A round-trip hike from "The Garden" parking lot would be 19 miles, but we could shorten our day by 3.5 miles, by staying over in the Johns Brook Lodge. We hadn't seriously considered staying over in Adirondack Loj before, at $60 per person, but Johns Brook Lodge is only about $25/person, which seemed reasonable. And staying in the lodge and making our dinner and breakfast– albeit in an institutional kitchen– seemed like a good first step towards a camping hike.
To keep from losing time by getting lost, I printed out extremely detailed maps of the trails. And to keep from getting physically spent, I brought lots of high-protein snacks, water, and Gatorade. I even brought 50 feet of rope, because more than one person had written about having to pull their packs up the Saddleback cliff, because wearing a heavy pack was too risky.
It was fun to stay at the lodge. It was a good thing that I made the reservation when I did, because I got the last two of the 28 beds. We left home in early afternoon, but had our first snafu on the road, when I realized I had left the sausage for our dinner at home. After too much searching, we found a Super Walmart and bought the replacement. It was dusk when we got to The Garden and dark well before we got to the lodge 90 minutes later. The Great Room of the lodge was full of people playing cards and hanging out. We settled in and got going on our jambalaya and rolls.
Got up at 5am and when we left at 6, no one else from the lodge and even gotten up yet. It was pitch dark for the first half hour and dusky for the next half hour. Bushnell Falls was pretty, but we were looking at it before dawn. We did lose the trail at one point, as we laughed about a destroyed footbridge over a stream– until we realized that that was where we need to cross the stream to find the trail.
Our route took us to the farthest mountain first, Haystack, so it was about four hours before we got to its sentinel, "Little Haystack." Since we'd have to backtrack to Little Haystack after actual Haystack, we dropped our packs there and it was a pleasure to climb without them.
I'd read that the views from Haystack were great and had been afraid that we might have too much morning fog, but, although it was overcast, the views were clear and really awesome. As Ian said, you could see 100 miles in every direction. It's the 3rd highest peak in NYS. Marcy is right next door and fills your field of view in that direction.
On the way back, we started to see other hikers for the first time. When we got to the top of Basin, it wasn't even noon yet– we were making great time. We were met by a few French Canadians that we recognized from the lodge. As we got near the top of Saddleback, we caught up with a couple of women, so we all made the final ascent together. In spite of all the horror stories I'd read, the scramble was more fun than scary. It's true that if you were not in good shape, you could have some trouble here. There were some places where you just had to pull yourself up with your arms and swing your leg up high to get a foothold, but I never felt in danger of plunging down the mountain. (OK, I did read that someone had died here a few years ago, but that must have been a freak accident.)
The hike down Saddleback was pretty long. At one point, we came to an enormous mud slide from a few years earlier, that had basically removed all the earth and trees from a huge section of mountain and dumped them below. The remaining rock was so sheer that it was really hard to hike, either up or down, so some lovely people arranged to build a 377-step stairway.
After the trail leveled out, it was still a pretty long slog back to the lodge, but we made it there by 4pm, which was terrific. A quick break to pick up our sleeping bags, which we'd left there to lighten our loads, and we were on the trail again. I'd been aiming to get to the lodge before dark but was really happy to see that we'd made it back to the car before 6– still light out.
