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.