Its been a dream of mine to be an Adirondack 46er. I haven't made a ton of progress, since I was more interested in hiking local trails when I was in New York than I was making epic trips into the 'dacks. Definitely my regret now that I have to drive a couple hours for decent topography, let alone Adirondack vistas.
But while I was conducting fieldwork in August, Jesse and I had the opportunity to take a couple days and enjoy a whirlwind hiking trip in the Adirondacks. As we had a couple stops for fossil collection in the morning, we didn't get into the Adirondack region until around 2. And to top it off, I had brilliantly packed my central Adirondacks NatGeo map and not my high peaks map.
This could have been a disaster, since we hadn't chosen which peaks we'd hike since we weren't even sure we'd make it up to the 'dacks. Luckily, we had a New York State gazetteer in the car with us that we used to map out localities. We turned it to the high peaks pages and BOOM, trailheads and trails denoted.
We hiked Ampersand Mountain as we drove into the Adirondack region. The weather was looking increasingly ominous and we only had that day and the following day to hike before we had to drive back to Michigan. Its not a high peak like we wanted, but there was no way we were going to be able to make it into the high peaks region AND hike that day. Better to hike a 3500' mountain than no mountain at all, right?
Here's the trail up Ampersand. This was Jesse's first time with East Coast trails....he was surprised at the lack of switchbacks!
Here I am at the top of Ampersand. It was very windy and about to open up and downpour on us! We took a quick couple celebratory pics and got the hell off that mountain.
The next day we tackled Cascade and Porter Mtns, 2 of the 46 Adirondack High Peaks. They share an approach trail, so it was an easy way to cross two peaks off the list. We met a trio of ladies on Porter, two of which were hiking their very first mountain. We chatted, took each others' pictures, and bid them adieu. Here's the pic they took for us, you can see Cascade in the background.
The weather didn't really improve much for us, but it was a great couple days of hiking. I have on my bucket list to become an ADK46er, since I spent so much time in New York. I did a lot of hiking out there, but without that goal in mind, so now I'm working on it from afar. I made Jesse kiss me on top of each mountain, and we've got that photographed, too, but I thought I'd save you all those images!
While our big goal right now is the Appalachian Trail, I don't want to forget the other journeys we've tackled in preparation, nor the great hiking locales we've hit so we can remember to go back.
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