Big Mountains for Little People
A view from Big Slide Mountain: the imposing peaks of the Great Range, brooding in the gloom of late autumn.
While it's still balmy in D.C., autumn is in its final throes in the mountains of New England. For the long weekend, I took a new friend to hike New York's Adirondack High Peaks region, bagging five of the Adirondack 46ers and making 30 or so miles over extremely challenging terrain.
I was in desperate need of a long outdoor excursion. The return to school has been challenging, as I alluded to in my previous post. I've been so burnt out that my attendance and grades have been slipping, a phenomenon I'm not so unfamiliar with, yet this past month has been the most difficult of my entire college career. Good thing it's almost over!
I find it interesting that nature does not serve to rejuvenate everyone—my roommate, for instance, tends to feel more mentally exhausted after a trip outdoors. On the other hand, the outdoors tends to be where I feel the freest, the happiest, and the most alive. I crave the feeling of self-sufficiency, and I find the most happiness and independence in hiking minimally. For me, this style of backpacking is a way for me to reclaim agency. In my daily life, I find myself saddled with myriad kinds of unwanted baggage, and I require even more contrived tools and mental mechanisms to deal with such baggage. Yet in the wild, where life is in some sense much more difficult and urgent, I need none of those things. Materially, all I require is a backpack, a shelter, insulation, food, and water; physically, all I require is my body; mentally, all I require is willpower and a willingness to discover beauty in the world. Living is reduced to its quintessence.
A small waterfall on the Opalescent River.
This trip had it all. Huge, soaring views from the tops of alpine tundra; long walks along lakeshores and cascading streams; nighttime slogs through flooded marshland (and an unexpected crossing over a beaver dam); sections of ice-covered class 3 terrain; gale-force winds and freezing nighttime temperatures. Though it was some of the most difficult hiking mile-for mile I've ever done, I'd do it all over to feel the divinity of those primordial, weathered mountains again.
Folks are absolutely right when they say that East Coast trail is more difficult than Western trail, broadly speaking. On all 2,000+ miles of hiking I completed this spring and summer in Arizona and California, not a single stretch came even close to the difficulty of some trail in the High Peaks. While summiting Algonquin Peak, the second-highest peak in New York, my friend and I traversed several hundred vertical feet of ice-covered class 2 and class 3 terrain on trail—something absolutely unthinkable on any kind of sane footpath. This was not the only instance of mandatory semi-technical scrambles being part of the route on-trail, though it was definitely the sketchiest. Wright Peak, located near Algonquin, also included several hundred feet of ice-covered scrambling. Mount Marcy, Mount Skylight, and Big Slide Mountain featured scrambling to some extent or another, though their difficulty paled in comparison to Algonquin and Wright. Even so, none of these remaining peaks gave up their summits for free: all three demanded hundreds of feet of extremely steep climbing on rocky, slippery terrain. This was, however, an excellent learning opportunity to me, as I am a neophyte with respect to scrambling.
The view of Mount Marcy from Mount Skylight.
Gear-wise, I packed as light as I could reasonably justify given freezing nighttime temperatures. I recently revived an old Katabatic Palisade quilt I found in the hiker box at Kennedy Meadows South, since I regrettably lost my own quilt in Truckee. Unfortunately, this quilt didn't really make the cut. People often say that Katabatic's temperature ratings are conservative, but in my experience, this hasn't been the case—even with good site selection and a warm sleeping pad, I found myself freezing in the night. My previous Katabatic Alsek also underperformed in freezing conditions, even though in theory it should be even warmer. I will likely sell this quilt soon and purchase something else, as I am not highly impressed with its performance. The online UL crowd, I am convinced, has gotten something wrong about quilts in their relentless pursuit of weight savings. Quilts are not very good in freezing and sub-freezing temps; I would have killed for a 20 degree down sleeping bag on this trip.
I also had the chance to give my tarp and bivy setup a spin, which I've been refining for the past year. I find that a 7'x9' flat tarp with a bug bivy performs excellently under a wide variety of conditions. Over the past year, I've found myself falling in love with flat tarps: they encourage the development of the critical skills of site selection, knot-tying, and creative pitching, and moreover, they're just plain fun. Most tents will never require you to learn any knots at all, which I think is a disservice to any aspiring outdoor enthusiast. I have also found tarps to be far more versatile than tents. They can be pitched in a variety of ways depending on the environment and are perfectly storm-worthy, provided the user choose the appropriate pitch for the conditions (read: a low, closed-end A-frame will save you). They also offer superior ventilation, packability, and weight. I'll probably write a longer post at some point discussing the merits and uses of tarps, as they are a staple of old-school ultralight backpacking that has fallen out of favor. I argue that the introduction of jaw-droppingly expensive trekking pole tents in DCF has been a net negative for UL backpacking in general, as they represent one of the key bellwethers of rapidly-growing consumerism in a subculture putatively concerned with minimalism.
The philosophy of ultralight interests me greatly, as its principles extend beyond backpacking back into the realms of daily living. We could all do with less, and the best way to save metaphorical weight is not to buy more, to burden ourselves more, but to shed that which burdens us. Or something. I'll save the soapboxing for a later date.
A tree reaches out over the shores of Lake Colden.
At any rate, the Adirondacks are a destination well worth the drive. Despite the sadistic trail, short days, and generous helpings of mud, I thoroughly enjoyed the three days and two nights I spent exploring those commanding peaks and serene valleys. Just don't underestimate them—you might find yourself on the wrong end of an SOS call.