How do you loose a mountain! Seriously!

Currant Altitude: 4,960 Feet
Current Location: 44°06′20″N 73°54′2″W

A lovely late August day. The day started early, around 7:30AM to be exact. Today's objective is the peak of Haystack Mountain, located in the Adirondack Park of Upstate New York. With me today is my dear friend, Mike. So, I grabbed my backpack, threw on my boots, then drove out to Schodack to pick up Mike.

When I got to Mike's house, he promptly got ready and we moved out. With everything taken care of in advance, we were able to head up north and start the long climb to the summit.

All was well until we got up to Lake Placid. Apparently, the directions to the trailhead were wrong, so we were about an hour or so behind. After looking and looking, we decided to stop and ask some of the locals for directions. Seeing as Haystack is a rather large mountain, perhaps the locals would know where the trailhead would be. Lake Placid is a great town, full of hikers and other outdoor enthusiasts, so it should have been a done deal in regards to directions. Well, after stopping in one of the local gas stations, we were given directions, which were wrong. We drove around for a little while longer and stopped in a few more shops in hopes that someone would know where we could hook up with the trailhead. After many unsuccessful attempts at attempting to get directions, I came back to the car shaking my head. Mike turns to me and in his loud "I cant believe this shit" voice, he spurts out "How the hell do you not know where a mountain is, when it's practically right in your back yard?!" I laughed rather hard, out of complete frustration for the whole (seemingly) hopeless situation.

We managed to get directions from a fine gentleman at (yet another) gas station that knew exactly where we should go to look for the trailhead. Finally, we found it! It's now rather late in the afternoon, and we need to get moving if we want to make it to the summit and back before dark. We started making our way up the trail after getting all geared up and ready to roll.

It's now about 12:30 PM and we are about 1/3 of the way up the trail. The trail that we took splits in two directions. If we stay on the blue trail, we go to Haystack. If we take the red trail to the right, we make our way to McKenzie. We were unsure if we would see good visible trail markers on our way up, which would lead to another disaster had the wrong trail been taken. We got to the trail split and saw that there was indeed a sign. Thank God! For whatever reason, I neglected to bring a map, and all I had was my GPS, so it was nice to see that there was a sign to point us in the right direction.

Now that we established that we were going in the right direction, we stopped for a quick smoke break. On that quick smoke break, we decided to take a few more pictures before we put ourselves into two-heel-drive and kept moving. When we started moving again, the fatigue kicked in and the complaining started. By this point, I felt like I was part of an out-of-control stress test. I remember saying "Nurse, turn the stair-master off!" as I was huffing and puffing my way up the mountain.

We stopped for another break before the final leap to the summit. We came across an old foundation for an unknown structure and decided it would be a great place to take a seat and drink some water. We took a brief moment to speculate what the foundation might have been before it's obvious overtake by the mountain moss. We seemed to think that it was part of an old pump station for water, based on it's proximity to the river that ran parallel to the trail we were hiking up, but I'm sure the structures true nature can be found somewhere in old records.

After our unscheduled pit-stop, we began the final jaunt to the summit. I must say, it was quite steep. I remember at that moment really feeling like I was on the stair-master from hell. We were doing hand over hand to climb the final .10km. We might as well have been rock climbing. This whole time, I was thinking just how sweet reaching the summit would be. With that said, the summit was now in reach. As seen in the picture to the left, Mike was feeling on top of the world as he sped his way up. He was a good few paces ahead of me for the duration of the voyage, and it was quite tricky to catch up to him. He was basically unstoppable, and moving at savage speed! I remember thinking to myself "Man, I need to get in better shape!"






We finally reached the summit! We were surprised to find two elderly looking ladies sitting there at the peak. Mike looked at me with complete astonishment, and I returned the look. The ladies greeted us with a "How was your hike?" t which we collectively responded "It was quite an adventure!" They managed to get up there in just around 2 hours. It took us almost 3 hours to get the summit, which means that these old ladies were hauling some serious ass up the mountain! After a brief conversational exchange, they bid us a hearty farewell and made their way down the trail. Mike and myself grabbed a seat on the rock which the old ladies were sitting on previously and plowed some granola bars. Shortly thereafter, we took some pictures at the summit.

Mike was quite happy to have reached the peak

I was quite happy to have made it up top too. It was a bear of a hike!

We took a few more pictures and decided that we needed to hit the trail and get back to the car before it got too dark. After this hike, I was kind of glad we got off to a late start because the sun was not at it's hottest, and we had some shade the whole way up. When we had arrived to the summit, there was this beautiful breeze that carried with it the delightful smell of mountain air and tasty smelling pines, so if I were to ever hike this mountain again, I would start it a bit later in the day, as we did completely by accident. 

On our way back down the mountain, my knees started giving me trouble from the sheer steepness of the descent. It felt great to reach some flatter ground as we reached the half way point. We sped up the pace a little bit when we were a quick stride from the car. It felt awesome to sit back in the car and have a victory smoke. We settled down for a quick moment before we got back on the road back to Schodack. I learned a lot from this hike, and the lessons learned (like.... bringing a trail map and getting good directions) will be with me on future hikes. It was great to hike with Mike, he's a real trooper! For someone that does not hike very often, he sets the pace like a fearless leader.