Some might find it difficult to believe, but I don't ALWAYS want to go on climbing road-trips. I actually do spend some time outdoors doing other activities. (OK, maybe not lots of time, but anyways)... So it was a nice summer weekend and Jim R. and myself found ourselves planning a weekend trip to the Adirondaks to do some peak bagging with Jim's brother John.
John is making a serious concerted effort to get his "46" done in a short amount of time. What this means is to hike up the 46 mountains in the Adirondak State Park which are all over 4000 feet high. Well, most of them are more than 4000 ft., it's kind of complicated, and besides it's not the point. ANYWAY, John had made plans to spend 5 days in the area which surrounds Dix Mountain. Dix is the highest peak in the region, but is also the only one with a well established, marked trail up it. There are 4 other peaks in the immediate area that are all part of the "46". These were our target.
Jim makes some
arrangements with John and a plan comes together: Jim and I are going to leave quasi-early on Friday afternoon and drive up the Adirondaks. John has to work all day Friday, so he's not leaving until some time after 6 pm. Jim and I will hike in to the "base camp" and John and his crew are going to spend the night at the parking lot and hike in the next morning. Then we are planning on doing Macomb on Saturday, then South Dix, East Dix and Hough (pronounced huff, we think) on Sunday. Jim and I will hike out Monday morning and drive home. I'm taking Monday off.
Everything unfolds nicely and the weather is pretty hot and sticky at home, so Jim and I both pack
light. We both decide to try something different and leave the sleeping bags at home to save weight and bulk in the packs. Lately, it's been getting all the way down to like 70 degrees at night, so what the heck. Jim packs a light-weight army blanket he inherited from John, and I pack my burly fleece blanket that usually lives on my bed.
We throw everything in the Saturn and hit the road at about 4 p.m.
We make good time and have an uneventful drive up to the Dix Mountain trailhead, arriving around 9:30 p.m. The parking lot is pretty full already, and some Canadians arrive just after we did. Jim and I shoulder the packs, don the head-lamps and prepare to cruise the 2 miles up to the camping sites near the lean-to. The Canadians are acting kind of strange, and look incredulous that we are going to hike even though it's getting dark. Do these guys really belong in the woods?
Jim and I have a good laugh and start cruising. Our packs feel astonishingly light considering the lack of technical rock climbing gear, and we have a pleasant hike over relatively flat terrain. We arrive at the designated camping area near the base of Macomb and find tons of people already there and look for some free space to pitch the tent.
We get the tent up, and decide to brew up some tea and maybe some food before going to bed. Jim brought his stove, and we unpack it and "try" to fire it up. The jet appears to be clogged however, and neither of us have brought cleaning tools. What this means is that the stove, basically, doesn't work. I look over at Jim.. "No problem" I say, "I have a few spare jets in the my kit, let me dig one out". We pop one in, no good either... it's also clogged. DOH. We frantically search our packs looking for something the size and sharpness of a pin, to no avail. I figure I'll try to clean it out using my knife, and proceed to make the jet hole a little TOO big. Of course, we don't know this yet, so we pop it in and fire up the stove, and are greeting by flames
shooting out of the stove about 20" high. WOAH. We try to cook, but the giant flames are just not throwing off enough heat, they are however making a complete mess of my pot. We decide to scrap the idea of cooking and finally crash out wrapped in out blankets.
Jim gets pretty cold that night with just the army blanket, and I toss and turn quite a bit trying to keep my feet covered... maybe the blankets weren't such a good idea after all. Well, it's a little too late at this point to change our minds, but we both decide that sleeping bags are definitely the plan, no matter what the weather at home feels like. Oh well.
John had told us to expect him and his crew at 8:00 am ready to go, so I had set the alarm for 6:30. Jim gets up and chuckles at the late arrival that had set their tent up next to ours...it's a Moss Stardome, identical to my tent that Jim and I are in. We both have a laugh at the coincidence. We find another guy up already and Jim asks him if he has a cleaning tool for the MSR stove that has now turned into a portable flame-thrower. He does, so we pop in a new clean jet and are back in business. We immediately brew up some hot water for coffee, tea, and some hot oats.
We eat, and patiently wait for John to come cruising up the trail.. 8:00 am.....8:30 am, and still no John
. Hmmm...... By 9:00 we are getting impatient, and we finally see some rustling from our new neighbors in the Stardome. A guy pops out of the door and I look at him... It's Mark Cusac!! Mark is a climber that was living in the Buffalo area for several years and climbed quite a bit with both Jim and I as well as volunteered at the same rock gym as Jim and I. He had moved back to Boston for a new job about 18 months ago, and nobody has seen or heard from him, and here he is camping next to us in the middle of the Adirondak park... to wild.
"Pete Millard!"... "Mark Cusac...holy crap!". Mark had said he thought he recognized our voices but we had been attempting to keep quiet so as to not wake up everyone. We enjoyed catching up with Mark while we continued to wait for John. Finally about 9:30, Jim decides to hike back down the trail to see if John is on his way or not, and arrives back at the site at 10:00. Still no sign of him. Grumble.
Jim and I decide to take off and head up Macomb, figuring John can't be that far behind, and
we'll meet up with him later. The peaks in the Adirondaks that are called "trail-less" do have basic trails that go up them, but typically they are a little more "rough" than the maintained trails. Often called "herd-paths", they can sometimes be hard to follow, are not always well marked and are sometimes just the quickest or easiest way up the side of a mountain. All of the peaks we were looking to "bag" were of this variety, but Macomb is a little different. It has a big rock-slide on it that the "trail" uses for a significant portion of the route to the top. The trail started directly behind our campsite and would it's way up through scenic woods along the side of a stream and eventually merges with it. We were coming up the stream bed, came around a corner, and saw the very large and moderately steep rock-slide staring us right in the face. WOW, what an abrupt change of scenery.. it took both Jim and I by complete surprise.
All morning long, Jim and I had both been keeping an eye on the weather, and now in the open-ness of the slide, we can really feel the temperature drop and the winds really kicking up. They are definitely not great signs, but nothing really terrible, so we continue upwards. The slide is quite steep and filled with loose gravel and compacted mud, so the going is slow and tiring. About halfway up, we both grab our shells from the peaks to help cut the wind and the shed the light mist that had started coming down. We finally reach the top of the slide and quickly find ourselves on the summit of Macomb. A check of the watch shows that it's only 11:50 am. We are making some killer time. Jim and I glance at the map and I convince him that instead of just heading down, we should try and bag South Dix which is less the a mile away across a ridge which joins the two peaks together. My ulterior motive for suggesting this plan was that the idea of hiking / climbing down the slide we just came up in the rain was not something I was really digging. We decide to give South Dix a go. I sign us in the summit register and note that we are heading to South Dix. I figure when John and his crew summit Macomb, they'll see our entry and have an idea of our plans.
We check the map and compass to get a direction and head down the ridge. We drop into a col between the two peaks and start going up, and almost immediately break out above tree-line onto some rock slabs of South Dix. WOW, the weather has definitely kicked up about 100 notches. The wind is blasting away at what has got to be well over 50 mph and it's raining in every direction - down, left, right, even up it seems. Jim and I find hunker down behind a huge boulder to get out of the wind / rain combination to catch our breaths and grab some chow.
The weather is really wild, we admire the sheer power of nature while we munch on some mini-pitas and peanut butter. We want to bag the peak, but the weather is really wild. We decide to ditch the peaks and just make a run for it, we think we can see the summit, but aren't sure. We run like soldiers dodging enemy sniper fire... from boulder to boulder, planning our sprints up the rock slabs. We finally make it to some trees and start hiking through them, but quickly realize that we are going down. Hmm... neither of us saw a summit register, but we are going back down. We are a little confused but assume we just missed it during a sprint. We head back down to the packs and quickly back down to the safety of the col and it's surrounding trees. It's definitely raining pretty hard now, and Jim and I are both on the way to becoming completely water-logged. We find another herd-path that leads us in the right direction and quickly find ourselves on a pretty serious, technical, path.
It really wasn't the constant rain that soaked us to the very core our bones, it was all the rain on the vegetation. You see, paths like this aren't very wide, usually less than a foot, and the huge luscious plants overhang the path almost constantly. Well, these plants manage to hold tremendous amounts of water on their leaves; which, as you walk by, manages to soak into everything you are wearing. It's tiring, we are both soaked, and I'm getting pretty cold. This is prime weather for hypothermia, so we keep moving. Finally we make it back to the main trail the leads us directly to the campsite.
We both pile into the tent (it's still raining) but do notice that there are 2 new tents at the site. One is definitely John's, so we know he's around someplace. Jim and I strip down and get dry clothes on, and brew some food up in the shelter of the tent vestibule. It finally stops raining around 6:00 p.m., and we migrate out of the tent rummage up some firewood. We don't often make campfires in the woods, but this is definitely the time for one, Jim and I could both use a few things dried out around a fire, not to mention to take the nippiness out of the air.
We manage to get a half-way decent fire going, and Mark and his friend roll back into the site after having summited Dix. We all kibitz around the fire waiting for John to roll in. Jim and I figured that we would all eat together. John finally wanders back into camp at around 7:30...it turns out that they had arrived at the site around 10:15 am, just a few minutes after we had left. They hiked up Macomb, and got really lost coming down after taking a slightly different trail. They ended up doing some heinous bushwhacking and were really beat. Not to mention, John also bent a really nice collapsible trekking pole during the whole escapade. Everyone arrived back at camp safely though, so we settled down for some chow and talk around the fire. Jim and I talk about our "blanket" decision, and while we may not be getting the best sleep in, we score some serious "hard-man" points with the crowd. All is not lost I guess. :)
We got up around 7:30 the next morning and got a slow start. Jim and I brewed some coffee, tea, and oats again, while we all discussed today's plan. The weather still looked sketchy, but a lot more promising than Saturday had. John's wife Yvonne is not in the mode to do anything serious, and Phil's son was not feeling well. So we decided that John, Jim, Phil, and myself would try and get up Hough, and maybe South and East Dix, we'd see how things went though. Yvonne and Phil's son were just gonna have a nice leisure day at camp.
We finally take off around 9:30'ish and head back up the same trail that Jim and I had descended the day before. This trail is supposed to branch left to go up to Hough. We have a nice hike but again, the trail demands our full attention. We keep an eye on the compass trying to determine if we are still on target for hitting Hough. Jim and I both are looking for a branch in the trail, and are pretty sure we've made a turn somewhere... That is, until we find ourselves in the exact col that Jim and I were in between Macomb and South Dix. DOH, we've made a wrong turn somewhere. Well, we decide to go up South Dix, and see what happens. We cruise up the same rock slabs that Jim and I had been on on Saturday, but OH what a difference a day can make. There are a few very high clouds, but the sky is bright blue, the sun is shining and we can see for miles in almost every direction.
We cruise up and over the rock slabs, and then down the same trail that Jim and I had turned around on, but quickly realize that there is still more mountain up ahead. Jim and I hadn't summited South Dix after all!! We finally reach the REAL summit, and find the register and sign in. We consult the map, and decide to hike out to East Dix, come back here to South Dix, then up and over Hough and finally back to camp.
We head down off of South Dix heading north-east toward the summit of East Dix and really enjoy the trail, the good views and nature. All of us get along pretty well, and talk most of the entire day about everything from cars to jobs, computers and rock-climbing. We reach the summit of East Dix and the un-believable views that it gives you in all directions. To the east, we can see Lake Chaplain, to the north, the high peaks of Giant, Gothics, and the rest of the Great Range. To the South, we can see South Dix and Macomb, and to the east the massive peak of Dix dominates the view. It's really quite a spectacular summit. We all eat some lunch, and Jim and I share the rest of our pitas and PB amongst the four of us.
We head back to the South Dix, to make the traverse over to Hough, and quickly find ourselves on another large peak. But like the day before, we can't find the summit register. We continue on down and are suddenly going down a STEEP trail. We consult the map and look around. The only other peak that we can see is the huge summit of Dix. We must have been on Hough, it's the only answer that makes any sense.
We continue down the trail, and run into a guy who had come through our campsite early in the morning, and we describe where we just were, and he doesn't think that we nailed the summit. I'm also skeptical since we didn't find a register, but it's really too late to go back and figure things out. Plus, we are already heading down. This trail proves to be even more steep and technical than the other path we had taken up and is quite a challenge to navigate safely and efficiently. Eventually, it hooks up with the other trail, which reveals the error we had made on the way up. Definite mental note for the next time I'm trying to find my way around these so called paths.
We finally make it down to the main trail and quickly cruise back to the campsite. We also talked to some more folks about the Hough question, and came to the realization that we definitely did not summit. Oh well, something to do for the next trip back to this neck of the woods. Many of the folks have already cleared out (as it is late Sunday evening by now), so things are a little quieter. We all get down to some serious cooking and we finally roll into our tents.
The next morning dawns sunny and promising, but Jim and I are heading out, so we start packing up everything while John and Phil start brewing up some pancakes. Jim and I eventually hit the trail back to civilization around 8:45 and make quick time back to the car. We change into some non-smelly clothes, and hit the road hoping to make it back into Old Forge before all the breakfast joints stop serving.
We pull into "The Pancake House" in Old Forge but it's almost lunch time already! No worries, they serve breakfast around the clock. We both order gigantic omelets and enjoy the amazing food. We pile back into the car and head for the interstate and home.
Aside from some extremely wet clothes and some chilly nights in the tent, a really fun trip. Good company, we managed to nail 3 of the 4 peaks we wanted to do, and we're coming home on schedule. An excellent long weekend.
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