Burning Colours in the High Peaks
Thursday I took off from work for a hike in the Adirondacks. Mike and I have been tossing around a plan to do a traverse of one form or another for a couple of years now. The plan was to take 2 cars down and park one at one end of a trail and then drive around to another trailhead and spend the day hiking across the mountains to the first car. There are plenty of good options to do this in the Daks and we’d played around with a few ideas…. But with just two of us as avid hikers it seemed a shame to drive two cars all the way down to Lake Placid. That meant recruiting volunteers to join us on this trek. Things finally came together this week. Initially we had a plan for 5 of us to do it but in the end only three could make it. Bryan joined us after hearing the many tales of high peak climbing. We decided on a traverse of Giant and Rocky Peak Ridge - ~ 12 miles and 4000 vertical ft.

I drove down alone and parked my truck at a trailhead on the east end of the ridge and the guys met me shortly after 9 to head back to the west trailhead. A few minutes “booting up” and we were off. It was a beautiful day – much more summer like then we expected (probably 25C, hazy and very few clouds). The heat made for slower progress than we anticipated and the steep climb up Giant was serious work but we made it up by noontime.

We had chosen a weekday as we suspected it would be quiet – especially during leaf peeping season - but we couldn’t have been more wrong. Seems this particular Thursday was the Lake Placid high schools “hiking day”. The whole school gets packed into buses and shipped off in groups of 10 with a teacher or parent to climb different trails in the high peaks (why didn’t they have hiking day when I was in school?). We ran into 3 groups in all and 2 of them collided on the summit of Giant at the same time as we did for lunch…. Made for a noisy place. I certainly applaud the school for “hiking day” but perhaps they should give some better instructions to the “guardians”. I had to “rescue” one group whose teacher was lost (on a single trail mind you)… she kept showing me the wrong side of the map and asking where her group was? She might as well have had a map of Spain for all the good it was doing her. In the end she was looking for the top of the mountain and the trail only went up one way so it was actually an easy “save” to point her in the right direction.

Another group we met later in the day spent some time on the summit of Rocky Peak looking closely at the rock formations. They were to study rocks later in the term and their teacher suggested they collect a type of rock to take back with them.... most of the kids whispered that they would prefer to collect a rock in the parking lot at school. Shorter haul distance I suppose.

After we had a quick lunch on Giant we headed off to Rocky Peak Ridge and the long traverse down to my car. It soon became clear we’d underestimated the time to cover the distance and had to opt for short breaks along the ridgeline if we were to get out of the woods before nightfall. I don’t think any of us felt shortchanged though as the ridges open views were stunning so you could enjoy the scenery and still keep walking. This – like the Jay range - was another spectacular ridge walk and, with the fall colours in full bloom, there was lots to see. Little by little we descended the ridge over little sub-summits along the way until finally we dropped back into the forest and made the last walk out to the truck just as the last rays of light were fading from the sky…. Perfect timing. From there we headed to the Pub for a beer and a bite of dinner. In the end it was a longer day than we planned – and I hope we didn’t “scare” Bryan from ever coming to climb the Daks again - but it was a great hike. We’ll have to try some other traverses in the future.
Giant of the Valley 35 of 46

Rocky Peak Ridge 36 of 46

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But that’s not the end of the story….. When you park your car in a lot and head into the woods for the day (anywhere) there is always a little niggling fear in your head that someone will break in to the car or vandalize it while your off soaking up the views. Its only happened to me a couple of times in the many years I’ve been playing in the woods but it hangs in my mind every time I lock up the car and walk into the woods. When we returned to my car after a long day on the trail we found the parking lot covered in water. It had not rained (not even any clouds) all day. We were perplexed…. And then Mike – upon arriving home – spotted an item in an internet hiking forum about a guy whose day went terribly wrong. Seems his car “self ignited” (electrical fire?) when he parked it in the lot. The owner happened to return to his car 10 minutes after he left for his hike. He discovered he’s forgotten something but returned to find his car engulfed in flames(note Kenmores truck in the background). Enter the volunteer fire department to the rescue that luckily was able to arrive to put out the flames before the tinder dry forest erupted into a conflagration(it hasn’t rained much all year and the forests are dry). My truck – escaped unscathed. Don’t tell me the good karma I’ve logged over the summer helping hikers in the woods didn’t pay back for me today. I can’t imagine what we would have done if we stumbled out of the woods at last light to find my car in embers and a State Trooper looking to collect some information from me for the “report”. I can’t imagine… but I probably will try for a while.

The car (smoldering hunk of metal?) had been hauled away by the time we came out of the woods. I'm still debating if my truck had a more exciting day than I did...