I’ve been fortunate enough to go backpacking in a lot of “bucket-list” destinations over the past year and a half—the Dolomites, Patagonia, the Sierra Nevada. I’ve really enjoyed those hikes, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to explore some of the most beautiful places on the planet. But of course, one doesn’t always have to go far from home for an adventure; after coming home from some far-flung destination, it’s always good to spend some time appreciating one’s own backyard. In the case of my (adopted) home state of New York, that backyard is impressive indeed, especially around this time of year: countless visitors—some from other countries!—flock to upstate New York to enjoy the foliage every fall.
Wanting to escape the city at least one more time this year, I recently spent a long weekend hiking in the Adirondack High Peaks with Josh, Karena, and Marissa. We ended up following a loop up Mount Marcy similar to the one I did with Josh last year, although a trail closure at Avalanche Pass necessitated a slightly different route.1 I’ve written up a brief trip report below, although honestly I am a bit tired after writing up the overly-long previous one, so this one might be shorter.
One of the nice things about hiking closer to home is that the logistics are generally much simpler, especially since you can carry a lot more stuff if you don’t have to take a plane at any point. I went down to my parents’ place in New Jersey on Thursday night after work, taking my backpacking gear with me on the train. Then, having taken Friday off, I drove up to Jersey City to pick up Josh and Marissa, and then we drove up to Albany to pick up Karena, who had traveled there by bus from Boston. Finally, we drove up to the Adirondack Loj (sadly passing by the welcome center with a playground) to begin the hike. See, wasn’t that easy?
After arriving, we had a quick lunch at a restaurant at the trailhead with surprisingly high reviews on Google Maps, and we packed our bear canisters and distributed the heavier shared items. We then set off, starting the hike proper at around 4:30 pm. It was a bit later than I had originally hoped for, but I suppose it is a rather arduous journey up from New Jersey.
We started off the hike with a summit of Mount Jo, a rather short mountain that’s right next to the parking lot. When it comes to foliage, shorter is often actually better—you’re closer to the leaves, and you typically have a higher ratio of deciduous trees to pine trees, which is always helpful for seeing leaves changing color. The view from the top was indeed quite lovely: a sea of fall colors, alongside the still waters of Heart Lake below. Unfortunately, the colors seemed a bit muted this year,2 but I still very much enjoyed the sight.
After coming down from Jo, we stopped by Heart Lake for a bit to admire the view and found a very friendly tree with excellent branches to sit in. The lake was quite pretty with the foliage, but alas, we couldn’t stay forever in the tree, as we actually did have to go and hike the rest of the way to Marcy Dam to set up camp that night.
We almost went on the wrong trail going to Marcy Dam, but fortunately we encountered the Loj staff again, who directed us to the correct trailhead. Apparently, AllTrails and Gaia like to direct you to an abandoned trail; the correct way to go is to take the Van Hoevenberg Trail. So it goes for people who trust apps over paper maps!
As we had set out rather late, we arrived at Marcy Dam after dark, which made crossing the stream feel quite treacherous and adventurous. (The stream crossing is quite easy in the daytime.) We made dinner near the riverbank and found space in a nearby lean-to, where we joined two friendly Canadian fellows for the night.3 Staying in a lean-to is always good fun, and it’s nice not to have to worry about setting up and tearing down your tent.
Of course, knowing us, we had a somewhat late start to the second day as well. After cooking a late breakfast at Marcy Dam, we set off shortly before noon, continuing along the Van Hoevenberg Trail. Along the way, we stopped by the beautiful overlook at Indian Falls, which Josh and I had actually missed last time we hiked Marcy. I’m very glad that we didn’t miss it this time, because it was quite a spectacular lookout point, with great views of the MacIntyre Range to the west. It would have made an excellent lunch spot, but it was only about an hour and a half since we started, so we decided to press on and eat at the summit instead.
The trail up Marcy is not particularly technical, but it is decently long, and the terrain is fairly rocky, so it’s a bit of a slog. It took us a few hours of hiking to clear the treeline and enter the alpine zone, and a bit more hiking after that to attain the summit. Marcy is a fairly popular hike—mostly as a gargantuan day hike—so we shared the trail with quite a few other parties. Hiking in the front, Karena and I started up a game of greeting passing hikers in French; we stopped this game out of embarrassment when we tried this on some actual Québécois and they responded to us in English.
Besides being a good place to look at the surrounding High Peaks, the summit of Marcy is also a surprisingly good place to people watch; all sorts of people, from large groups of day hikers to weary backpackers to astrophotographers like to climb the mountain. The group that amused me the most was the group of Chinese-speaking hikers who brought fish tofu (!!!) to the top of the mountain. I love fish tofu normally, so you can imagine how envious I was watching them eat it after a long hike to the summit. In comparison, our tortillas with sunflower seed butter looked a little bit sad.
After this very late lunch and plenty of pictures, it was time to hike down the mountain and set up camp for the night. Our original plan was to camp at Lake Colden the second night and then head back to the Loj on the third day over Algonquin Peak, but it was already a bit too late to make it all the way to Colden, and we weren’t really feeling another High Peak after Marcy. So, we instead decided to camp at the junction with the Lake Arnold Trail for the night, and then head back to the Loj via that trail the next day, which would be a much more approachable itinerary.
We did not make it to our campsite by nightfall, but on the bright side, we were treated to a really pretty sunset on the trail. Unfortunately, there was no good lookout spot from which to take a picture, so I guess you had to be there to experience it. We did have a bit of a slight navigational mishap here: after making it to the trail junction and filtering some water by the stream, we tried to find a nearby lean-to that was marked on the map, but we couldn’t seem to find it. So, we continued on along one trail, eventually making it to a lean-to after half a mile of walking.4 The next morning, we discovered that if we had gone the other way at the junction, we would have pretty much immediately stumbled upon that lean-to. Oh well.
This time, we had the lean-to all to ourselves; I suspect most people probably planned ahead and spent the night at Lake Colden. Josh did something quite ill: noticing that he had cell service, he started to play a game on his phone. I am calling it out here to shame him for being an iPad kid.
We had a bit of a deadline on the third day, as Karena had to be back in Albany by 7 pm to catch a bus. So, we set out a little bit earlier this day, to make sure that we’d be able to make it back to the parking lot by about 3:30 pm. The initial part of the day involved a climb up to Lake Arnold; the trail got progressively muddier as we went, culminating in some log crossings over muddy water. I unfortunately trusted the wrong log in this part, leading to my left foot getting completely soaked in the mud.
When we arrived at the lake, we rested for a bit and ate some snacks, before continuing on back toward Indian Falls, where we would rejoin the Van Hoevenberg Trail. This part of the trail was thankfully a lot less muddy than the previous part, but it made up for it by being extremely rocky; it felt more like jumping across a boulder field rather than hiking along a trail. In general, a lot of the trails in the Adirondacks are quite rough in terrain; I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the trail here was nothing more than an old stream bed. At least we passed by some interesting tree roots, much to Marissa’s delight.
Upon making it back to Indian Falls, we decided to skip going back to the viewpoint and instead just hike on to the car, since we did have a deadline to meet. The remainder of the trail—especially the portion between Marcy Dam and the Loj, which we mostly didn’t get to enjoy on the first day because we had hiked it in the dark—was incredibly scenic, with spectacular fall colors on full display. Brilliant red and dark orange and bright yellow and (my favorite) deep gold, all mixed up together like a stained glass mosaic hanging over our heads. Oh, and the delicious smell of fall, and the gentle crunch of leaves underfoot! If there were any doubt that it was indeed fall, these few miles of trail would instantly dispel it.
Since it’s now a bit of a tradition for me to share some sappy poetry in these things, I’ll say that the sunlight filtered through the colorful canopy of leaves, short-lived as the autumn colors are before the coming frost, reminded me of a line from Shelly that was quoted in a novel5 that I recently read:
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.Percy Shelley, Adonais
We ended up arriving at the car at around the projected time, and spent a bit of time packing up our stuff and changing into semi-clean clothes before driving back down toward New York City. The initial part of the drive, through the Adirondacks, was also very scenic, although things got a bit less scenic as we got onto the main highway. We did see two bears while driving, though: we passed by something on the side of the road that I swear looked like black bear roadkill, and Marissa claimed to have seen a live bear in the woods at the side of the road.
We arrived at Albany in time to grab some pizza before Karena had to board her bus; the rest of us finished up dinner in the parking lot under a highway overpass before continuing back on toward the city. After dropping off Josh and Marissa, I continued back down to my parents’ place in Holmdel to return the car and ended up spending the night there, as I was a bit too tired to return to the city that night.6 Instead, I rode the train back into the city before work the following Monday, returning to normal life just like that after a brief weekend escape from the world.
Having done two backpacking trips within a month—the previous one being to Sequoia National Park—it’s only natural that I should think to compare them. Now by any objective standard, there’s no contest, of course. The mountains in Sequoia were more than twice the height of Marcy (itself the tallest peak in New York State); the waters of Franklin Lake were much clearer than the admittedly pitiful Lake Tear of the Clouds; the vistas from California’s high mountain passes are far more beautiful than even the summits in the east. And yes, if you forced me to pick only one place to hike in for the rest of my life, the Sierra Nevada would surely rank above the Adirondacks.
But there is a special charm that these eastern mountains have, one that is observed most clearly in the fall. The West Coast possesses a haughty, severe kind of beauty, cast by its sheer rock walls and imposing peaks rising up out of a parched land. The East Coast has more of a warm, gentle sort of beauty: quiet brooks and green woods that assume a kaleidoscopic burst of color for a fleeting week each fall. The way I see it, while the lofty summits out west have a grandeur that the northeast cannot replicate, it is nevertheless true that little Mount Jo with its many-colored robe of leaves has a loveliness that the forbidding peaks and glaciers of the mountain west could never assume.
I think fall is such a wonderful season precisely because it is so short; that brevity is a good reminder to savor the color in life whenever it appears. A lot of the best things in life are fleeting: the vibrant red color on a maple leaf, a few short years at a university, or just a long weekend spent laughing with friends in the splendor of Creation. These hiking trips are so fun because of all the small moments in between: bulky rectangular objects and jackets of unspecified insulation; bear sightings, both real and imagined; upturned roots and owl-shaped mushrooms; bonjour and merci. Most of all, I’m thankful for the friends who make these trips so magical; some of them I don’t get to see that often these days, but that just makes each meeting all the more special.
I feel like these “gear thoughts” sections are getting shorter each trip, as I dial in my backpacking setup further. But my setup is not totally dialed in yet, so here are a few thoughts on the gear I brought on this trip:
Fittingly, I heard that the pass was closed due to a landslide.↩︎
People online say that it’s because the summer was so dry, although it’s also possible that we slightly missed the peak.↩︎
I must apologize to Lindsay for not really socializing with them, except for giving them a couple of spare band-aids.↩︎
I recall actually voicing the thought: “huh, the lean-to looked a lot closer than that on the map.”↩︎
This was Stoner by John Williams.↩︎
The drive was about six hours each way, roughly the same distance I used to drive between New Jersey and Pittsburgh back in college. I don’t think I’ll have the energy to do these kinds of long drives forever, so I guess I have to take advantage of it while I still can.↩︎
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