Speaking as an admittedly-biased Manhattan-dweller, to me the name “New York” conjures imagery of dense urban jungles and glamorous skylines. But in fact, upstate New York is home to the Adirondacks, a vast expanse of wilderness surrounding the eponymous mountain range. Wikipedia informs me that Adirondack Park is actually the largest park in the contiguous United States—larger than the entirety of my home state of New Jersey! The area is famed for many things, but the two that stand out are: (1) the fall foliage and (2) the forty-six High Peaks. So, on one October weekend, Josh and I went on a backpacking trip to the High Peaks Wilderness to enjoy the fall foliage while summiting Mount Marcy, the tallest mountain in New York at 5,343 feet.
In the week leading up to the trip, I did more of my favorite activity of late: buying gear at the Soho REI! It turns out that shopping is actually quite fun when you’re buying things that you like. I’ve gone so often now that one of the REI staff members in the backpack section recognized me from last time I bought a backpack for my trip to the Dolomites a couple of months ago.
As bear canisters1 are required for food storage in the Adirondacks, I bought two canisters at REI, one for me and one for Josh. I bought the only model that they had on the floor, the Bear Vault. It’s quite a nice canister: lightweight and easy to open with one’s bare hands, once you know the technique. (The technique is a little hard to figure out at first, at least without consulting the instruction manual. I gave the canister to some of my friends to try for fun, and about half of them were able to figure it out. I was embarrassingly in the half that did not…)
However, I ended up having to return the Bear Vault and buying a different model, because I soon discovered an incredible fact: a bear named Yellow-Yellow in the Marcy Dam area of the Eastern High Peaks Wilderness—precisely the spot we were planning on going—figured out how to open the Bear Vault a few years back! That’s one wildly smart bear…smarter than I am,2 and at least half my friends! Nature never ceases to amaze…
Anyway, I also snagged some nice carbon trekking poles from the used gear section of the store (my previous experience in the Dolomites convinced me that trekking poles are actually a necessity), and I also bought some extra water repellent to apply to my raincoat, which is fairly old at this point.
I also had fun testing my stove—an MSR Whisperlite Universal that was a gift from my uncle a couple of years back that I had never used before—out on the shared balcony of my apartment building. It felt a little incongruous trying out this wilderness equipment amongst the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, but the stove did indeed work fine; it cooked me a serviceable Pad Thai for dinner.
Finally, with all of these preparations done, it was time to go on the trip. After work on Thursday, I went over to Josh’s house in Queens, where I spend the night. We then both took Friday off of work, setting off in the morning to drive upstate to the Adirondacks. The drive itself wasn’t that eventful; about the most interesting thing that happened was stopping at McDonald’s on the way there for lunch.
Due to our rather late start to the day (Josh and I both like to sleep in), we arrived at the parking at the Adirondack Loj around 3pm, which is fairly late. On the bright side, it was so late that some parking spots had opened up, so we didn’t have to park further up along the road. Right away, we were treated to vibrant fall colors in the parking lot, with brilliant scarlet trees illuminated by the afternoon sun. Before starting the hike, we stopped by the nearby Heart Lake to admire the view of the dimmer but still pleasant fall colors on the lake shore.
But of course, we couldn’t stay to admire the view for too long. We were here to hike after all, and it was already late enough that we’d be hard-pressed to make it to our intended campsite at Lake Colden before nightfall. The trail started off with a lovely woodland hike through nice, if not spectacular, fall foliage. We reached Marcy Dam pretty quickly and enjoyed the view from there while briefly chatting with some other backpackers who were unsure whether they should camp there for the night or continue on to Lake Colden. After hearing that we were doing the latter, they decided to as well.
There were lots of fun bridges and other obstacles along the way, especially once we hit Avalanche Lake, a narrow pond nestled between sheer rock walls. Unfortunately, here was also where the sun began to set, so we donned our headlamps and continued to hike in the dark. We didn’t have too much difficulty with this part of the hike—in fact, it was so unseasonably warm that I was perfectly fine in my t-shirt and shorts. We did encounter and travel with a mother and her son who were also hiking late at night; they seemed to be much less happy with hiking in the dark.
We finally arrived at Lake Colden quite late, only to find that most of the campsites in the area were already taken. I suppose this is what happens when you go to one of the most popular spots in the Adirondacks on the weekend of peak fall foliage. It seemed like we would have to go find a spot in the wilderness, but we fortunately ended up not having to hunt for a spot in the dark, since we found a nearby lean-to that was miraculously not full yet. (The Adirondacks have a few open-faced wooden shelters around for hikers to use. They’re pretty basic—just three walls and a roof—but they’re a lifesaver in storms.) We joined two guys from Rochester who had arrived at the lean-to earlier in the day.
We cooked dinner (chicken alfredo!) and stashed our bear canisters away from the lean-to. Just as we were packing away our stoves and returning to the lean-to, it started to rain—perfect timing! There isn’t much to do in the mountains after sunset, so after doing a short devotional reading, I settled into my sleeping bag and went to sleep. It was a little chilly at night, but nothing that I was unprepared for. When I woke up the next morning, I found that we had been joined overnight by a couple who had apparently arrived soaking wet at around midnight, having been caught in the rain. They had evidently not been as fortunate as we.
The next day, Josh and I had a rather late start to the day; again, we both enjoy sleeping in. The nice thing about being in the lean-to was that all of our gear was dry, so we didn’t have to face the misery of packing up a wet tent. As we stopped by a nearby stream to filter some water, we ran into the mother and her son again from last night; we chatted with them for a bit. It turned out that the son used to be a designer at Apple, but he quit to pursue his passion for helping the environment. It was cool hearing his passion for the planet and the ways he wanted to use his design skills to work on environmental education.
The hiking for the day started out pretty fun; we passed by a cool suspension bridge on the trail. It did start to get quite muddy on the trail, presumably because of the rainfall the night before. Eventually, after a fair amount of uphill hiking, we arrived at Lake Tear of the Clouds, the source of the mighty Hudson River. I thought it was particularly funny to stand here because in two days, I would return to my office, situated at the mouth of the Hudson in Manhattan’s Financial District.
From here, it was a rough push to the summit of Mount Marcy up very rocky terrain. It felt more like playing hopscotch on the rocks rather than hiking. The trail was also incredibly muddy, though I suppose I’ve seen worse.3 But at last, our misery was rewarded when we broke above the treeline and stood on the tallest point in the state. The view was quite incredible, although truth be told, I was a bit disappointed by the foliage. At high elevations, the only trees that grow are pine, which obviously don’t change color. So really we were standing in a sea of dark green trees and could only see the fall foliage in the valleys in the distance. Still, it was a spectacular sight: it looked like the hills were on fire with vast swaths of ember punctuated by occasional patches of crimson. It was a bit difficult to get a good picture at such a distance using only a cell phone camera, but I did my best. The mountaintop was also home to one of the very few alpine ecosystems in New York, as the kind ranger stationed there was explaining to me.
It was quite chilly at the summit, leading me to don a thicker layer. After taking enough pictures, we hiked down from the summit and headed back toward Marcy Dam via a different train, the extremely popular Van Hoevenberg Trail. As it was getting late again, we stopped to cook dinner on a large rock by the side of the trail around sunset. I ate two dinners, which was perhaps a bad idea. (It certainly was by sodium intake!)
We again had to hike through the night, eventually reaching a suitable campsite along the Phelps Brook just a mile shy of Marcy Dam. We considered hiking onward to the dam to get a view of the Aurora Borealis that was supposed to be visible that night, but we eventually decided to call it a day and set up camp instead. This turned out to be a wise choice; I looked at some pictures of the Aurora online that some people took that weekend from the nearby Lake Placid, and it really wasn’t that impressive. The sky was mostly just vaguely tinted red.
The night was very cold; I slept in every layer that I had brought: my base layer, two t-shirts, a puffer jacket, thermal tights, two pairs of socks, and my sleeping bag liner, not to mention my sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and tent themselves. Despite all of this, I was still a little too cold for comfort, although not seriously in danger of hypothermia. I learned the next morning that Josh, who runs colder than I do, was also suffering from the cold.
Surprise, surprise: we slept in yet again the next morning, before packing up camp and hiking back to Marcy Dam, where we cooked lunch on the rocks by the stream. After this satisfying experience, we made it back to the parking lot in short time.
Our hike was officially done, but it was still the early afternoon, so we had some time to kill in the Adirondacks before driving back to the city. We initially drove to Whiteface Mountain intending to take the scenic highway up, but it seemed like the entire population of upstate New York had the same idea, and there was a traffic jam leading into the scenic highway. We eventually bailed when we discovered that the entrance fee was forty dollars.
We instead drove down to the Keene Valley region via Lake Placid, stopping at a few places to try to get some nice shots of the foliage with my drone. (My understanding is that it’s not legal to operate a drone from within the wilderness areas, but it’s allowed from the highways themselves.) The shots weren’t quite as spectacular as I had hoped, but I’m still happy with them.
On the way back, we had to stop by Cracker Barrel for dinner, a venerable tradition from my previous trip upstate, when Emma declared it to be the pinnacle of value.
For those not aware, a bear canister is a large plastic container used to store food and placed away from one’s campsite at night, to protect the food from bears.↩︎
There’s the apocryphal story of the park ranger who was once asked why bear lockers are so hard to open. “There’s considerable overlap between the most intelligent bears and the least intelligent humans,” she replied…↩︎
I think the worst mud that I’ve ever encountered was in the Hawaiian rainforest, where I hiked with my cousin last summer. That trail was so muddy that many people were hiking it barefoot!↩︎
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