Mount Marcy 5,344 feet, Adirondacks, NY
Alex & I decided the highest peak in NY State just had to be summited by us. The fact that we were doing this during winter was of course Alex’s idea. We rented a car and drove up to the Adirondacks on a Friday, arriving at High Peaks Visitors Center about 10pm. We pulled out our tent and set it up on a lovely patch of soft snow and turned in for the night. The next morning we set out on the trail, equipped with our snowshoes and new fancy collapsable hiking poles, bought just for this occasion.
Mount Marcy’s summit can be accessed by 2 different trails, from either the east or west. Both trails are well marked with blazes, however at times the 6 feet of snow cover the blazes completely. This was one of the easy to spot blazes(see photo above), but as we got higher on the mountain they were virtually impossible to locate. For those of you who aren’t familiar with blazes, they are usually well above Alex’s head at 6’1.”
We set out to hike the ~7 mile trail that heads up Marcy from the east. Preferring not to be stuck on the mountain in the dark we were hoping to hike the shorter route. We ended up following a couple that were just ahead of us and to our benefit were doing all the hard work of breaking trail in 6 feet deep snow. The trail had not been hiked in quite sometime. This inadvertently set us on the other trail to the summit which is a bit longer at ~9 miles. The trail was beautiful and the only sign of other humans was the freshly broken trail. As long as we were moving we kept fairly warm in the 25 degree temperatures, armed with our fancy cold weather gear.
We finally caught up with the couple in front of us about a mile from the summit. They had decided to turn around, assuring they wouldn’t get stuck out in the dark. They were locals and weren’t too sad about missing the summit as they had seen it many times already. Alex & I felt differently and kept trudging on, now breaking our own trail. Or I should say Alex was breaking our trail. The last mile was where we lost blazes frequently and had a very difficult time keeping ourselves on trail. We were frequently pulling ourselves out of tree wells that we were falling into up to our waists. The poles were becoming very useful at this point.
We happen to stumble upon the summit by noticing ski tracks at what appeared to be the highest point around. Success was confirmed when we found the plaque marking the top of Mt. Marcy.
After a few mountain photos were taken we started to make our way down the opposite side of the mountain. We learned from some backcountry skiers that we were walking on ~25 feet of snow when coming down from the summit. They said there was an entire forest beneath us! As we were hiking down the clouds finally cleared up and we had a beautiful view. By the time we got back to the visitors center it was 6pm and we had been out on the trail for 11 hours. A wonderful Italian dinner followed at a restaurant in Lake Placid and then we started the drive home. We both had a great time on the hike and it only served to fuel our interest in mountain climbing. We will let you know where our next adventure takes us.
