April 2021 Monthly Running Challenge

Hike Report: Adirondacks High Peaks attempt --- and fail.

This was a weekend with a lot of ups and downs both literally elevation wise and emotionally. I'll keep it somewhat brief (not my strong point) and say that hiking with a group of 7 friends can sometimes be a little challenging and we tested some limits on this one.

The spoiler of the whole thing is that I did not get to summit a high peak, but I did summit a beautiful mountain on gorgeous day. It was not one of the 46 of my goal, but with a view like this, it was still very worth while
Slightly longer story is that we arrived to our AirBnB Friday evening and we unloaded the car. There were stone stairs outside the house going down from the driveway to the front entrance and as I carried stuff I stepped on one of the stones and it gave way and I fell down pretty hard onto my butt. This was not good on my already tender back. I alternated icing and heating it that night and took ibuprofen and muscle relaxants in hopes that it would be okay for the hike the next day - but this was not a great start.

We debated several different hikes because the conditions were not good. It had gotten really warm the last few week and had rained, so the trails in the mountains still had a lot of snow but it was soft and mushy and many water crossing were raging rivers because of snow melt. The recommendations we were seeing were not to hike this weekend because trails were bad. But of course we had come all this way so we wanted to give it a shot. We had a long discussion about how that might mean we had to give up and turn around if conditions were not good.

It was a beautiful day Saturday when we started. It was in the 20s to start but the sun was out and skies were blue. It started out well, I felt ok, the trail was ok, all was good. But then it started to get worse as we ascended because the snow conditions were very challenging. On the trail where everyone hikes it becomes very packed and hard in the center, but the edges get very soft and melt away, so it becomes what they call a "monorail" where you have to stay on that high hard center or you sink in the rotten snow. And even the centers were getting soft. So we were sinking in with almost every other step, and lots of falling when that happens unexpectedly. We did have snowshoes and that helped some but it was still hard to stay on top of the snow and it made it a very challenging trudge at best.

Along the way, part of our group decided that we should detour from our planned high peak to hit a peak called Indian Head, which is less than 4000 feet so doesn't count as a high peak. That's the view in the pic above from the summit. It's gorgeous and still made an excellent hike but because some of us didn't know we had decided on this detour, we had a bit of a dramatic group argument when it was discovered that we were off our planned trail. Things settled a little as we left that summit and headed back toward the trail to our intended peak, but conditions were getting worse and worse so several us started contemplating taking the upcoming fork to go back down instead of continuing on to the summit. As much as I wanted to get a high peak that day, I didn't feel the greatest and it was so hard under those conditions, that I decided to go with the group heading back down. We had another group argument at that junction and we ended up 5 of us going down, and 2 continuing on to the summit. It was still a long challenging hike to get down and I was glad that I made that choice because this particular day I didn't have it in me to battle those conditions. The mountain will be there next time and it's a gorgeous hike for a better day.

So we eventually got back to our car, picked up beer and pie, and headed back to our house to relax and enjoy the hot tub, drinks and food for the rest of the weekend. Our 2 friends eventually arrived back and things were a bit uneasy among the group but in the end we're all friends and we put it aside and had fun.

I'm a little disappointed that I'm still at 25/46 peaks after the last two trips over the winter didn't end up the way we planned. But it's okay, that means more trips and I'm ok with it. It's now officially mud season in the high peaks so they really don't allow hiking until it dries up because its hard on the trails, so I probably won't be back up there until May or June. That gives us all time to do some other things and get over our little drama.