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.

Phelps Mt. (23)

On our first hike of the 2015 season, we hit the half-way point of our 46-peak adventure, catching Phelps Mt., which we didn't manage to fit in when we hiked Tabletop last year.

Edging closer to actual camping, we reserved a lean-to in the campsite next to the Adirondack Loj. We managed to get to it about an hour before nightfall on Saturday. Made our first "freezer bag cooking" meals-- rice with chicken & vegetables for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast.

The first part of the hike was familiar from our hike to Tabletop and is a nice, mostly level and well-worn (since it also leads to Mt. Marcy) trail, about 3 miles long.

Ian barely noticeable in front of Marcy Dam.

When you take the spur to go up Phelps, the real climbing begins. It's only one mile, but it's mostly steep climbing.

We hung out at the peak for a while, resting and eating some lunch, along with a few other people. One of them was an older man who seemed to have done a lot of hiking; he could name all the mountains in view and talked about how eroded the trails had become.

We made it back to the car by early afternoon, about a six-hour round trip. Then a nice lunch at the ADK Café and the long drive home.