As a native Upstater, hiking and exploring the state comes naturally. But, in my opinion, you haven’t truly explored New York until you’ve done some Adirondack Mountains hiking. The Adirondacks are home to 46 high peaks and tons of trails that crisscross the landscape. The best part of hiking in the Adirondacks is the views. Even if you don’t go to the tippy top of the mountains, you can see amazing scenery from almost anywhere. Plus, the mountains offer pristine places to; hike, snowshoe, snowmobile, mountain bike or whatever else you do. If you want to do it, you can! So, I did, and I will again!
In the Fall, a friend and I decided to take on Mount Marcy, the tallest mountain in the Adirondacks at 5344 feet with an ascent of 3166 feet. There are four different trails (http://www.lakeplacid.com/do/hiking/mount-marcy) that gain the peak, ranging from 14 to 23 miles to the top. We chose to hike the primary trailhead that takes off from the Adirondack Loj campground a few miles outside of downtown Lake Placid. This is a popular trail and is marked perfectly for hikers unfamiliar with the area. Plus, we camped out for the weekend at the campground, so this was our best choice.
We woke up pretty early to get a head start up the mountain since this was our first experience on a mountain and knew it was going to be a long day. It looked like our game plan was everyone else’s plan too since about the whole campground started at the same time. The congestion could have been an issue, but this was a positive for us. We didn’t know the trail nor did we want to be alone on such a long hike and because everyone was so nice, the company was great.
For the majority of the hike, we were walking through a dried up creek bed. Yet, with the cold temperatures and the rain showers throughout the day, we were skipping rock to slippery rock, which didn’t help the already uncomfortable trail. I’d say this was the point of the trail that slowed us down the most. But we continued on and eventually hit dry steep land that continued on to Indian Falls about four miles from the top. Once we hit the falls, we checked out our map and location and knew that we wouldn’t make it to the top before sunset and weren’t ready to hike back down the mountain in the dark.
We made the obvious decision to turn around and start back down the trail to the campgrounds. This was upsetting, but not a huge surprise since we’ve never done a hike that long before and weren’t sure what we were up against. Alongside daylight, blisters, aches and pains started to set in and by the time we were back to the campground we were exhausted. Mount Marcy won this round, but I’ll be headed back early July to have another go at her!
Editor’s Note: Brooke recently returned from her second trip to the Adirondack Mountains and Mount Marcy and we’re looking forward to hearing about her successful summit!
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