It's the highest mountain in New York, y'all! And it almost kicked our butts. Almost.It was Amy's idea to climb it. Last year, I asked what she wanted for her birthday and she replied, "climb Mt. Marcy." We'd already done 6 of the Adirondack high peaks (actually 5 for me, Amy's one ahead). But they were all day hikes. Mt. Marcy is a 14.7 mile hike using the shortest trail (the Von Hoevenberg), and not something you can do in a day unless you are bionic. So it required more attention and planning than we'd ever done for a hike.
Amy did lots of research and finally decided the easiest/best way would be to backpack in about 3 miles, camp overnight, leave our backpacks in the woods and hike up Marcy and back, then pick up our backpacks and head for home. It seemed easy enough. But I was a little worried. I hadn't camped overnight in over 20 years, and hadn't backpacked since I was in Scouts. On the other hand I would be hiking with someone I'm crazy-in-love-with and that never happened in Scouts!
The biggest deal was water. On a day hike you can carry as much water as you need - for Amy and I, it's usually two 750 ml bottles. But go more than a day, and you need some alternate water source. There's no spigots on the way to Marcy. So I got Amy a Camelback UV Water Purifier for Christmas last year. It's pretty cool - you use a pre filter to get all the solid stuff out. You put the lid on, press the button and the bottle floods with UV light. That kills all the germs and critters and bad stuff. You shake it around for 60 seconds and presto! Ultra-pure water. It charges with a standard USB charger, but people say you can hike around for weeks without charging it. Needless to say, this came in handy.We started out on Saturday afternoon around 3:30, and in the first hour met 3 separate rangers who asked us the same two questions:
- Do you have a bear container?
- What color is it?
Black bears are pretty common in the Adirondacks - the last census was 4000. The law is that you MUST have your food and garbage in a bear container in the high peaks region. Evidently one of these bears was an expert and ripping open bear containers, and she became the test case for every bear container manufactured. The only that passed was a black one manufactured in California, was retails for $80. It requires coins or flathead screwdrivers to open. Fortunately that's the one we had. According to the story the really smart bear was shot last year by hunters, so it's unlikely we needed this much canister. But we had it.
We carried our backpacks 3 miles and set up camp. The trail was pretty flat and uneventful, which was very good when you're carrying a full load. Most people who hike Marcy stay at the dam about 2 miles in, but we hit one of the more remote ones. It turned out to be a good choice, and we had no company the entire time - people or bears. We ate our "trail sammiches" for dinner - procured from Simply Gourmet in Lake Placid. They have 46 sandwiches to choose from - one for each Adirondack High Peak. I chose the Marcy, of course, which is turkey, cranberry sauce, cheddar cheese, apple slices and cracked pepper mayo. Amy did the Algonquin (which we did last year), which is turkey, bacon, avacado, sprouts and Russian Dressing. We agreed it was the best sammich we ever 'et ... and not just because the backpacking made us starve. We also had the legendary Mountain House Freeze Dried Ice Cream which requires no refrigeration. Amy wasn't impressed, and I remember it tasting much better as a kid than it does now. Ehhh.
After a million hands of Uno, we decided to hit the hay. We stored our canister 150 feet from the tent (Putting it up in a tree, by itself, doesn't stop the bears in the Adirondacks. And if your canister is bear proof, you might as well put it on the ground.) and went to bed. It was a bright moon and I had trouble sleeping. I got up once in the middle of the night for a midnight snack from the bear container - fortunately I didn't have to wrestle or bear for it. Or take a flashlight for that matter - it was so bright. Amy and I agreed that even with air mattresses, a soft ground cover, and a decent sleeping bag, that it's harder to camp-sleep when you're grown-up. Both our hips hurt in the morning.
We started the next day with freeze dried granola and blueberries, trail mix and some pineapple juice. I filled the water bottle with UV-purified cool, clear mountain water fed from a mini-waterfall up the trail. Nothin' better to drink in this world, I have to say! We got our little day packs, left our camping stuff behind, and headed for Marcy.
It really wasn't bad for most of the way. Marcy is kind of like a Disneyland destination in the Adirondacks (everyone wants to do the tallest peak), and there were lots of hikers and a very well-worn trail. Most were young. Some weren't in their teens yet, but most were around college age. A few were like Amy and I ... you know, OLD. But there wasn't anything on this trail we hadn't seen hiking Algonquin or Wright or Sawteeth.
Amy soft-pedaled her concerns out loud, "well, if we make it to Little Marcy, it'll be fine." (Little Marcy is a plateau about 500 ft shy of the top). I said, like some stupid motivational speaker, "Oh no, we're going for the top! We've done this before."
And it was, but it WAS really, really long. Yet no one part of it was insurmountable. We scrambled over the rocks for about an hour, sidestepping the plants (this is an alpine zone, and it's illegal to trample on the vegetation.)
And we made it! I waved my traction pole like a madman. We conquered Marcy! We were higher than anyone in New York, including all 8 million people in New York City (three of which I happened to be related to).
But Amy's camera didn't work. She changed in extra batteries, and they didn't work either. So the pictures you see above are generic. But to describe it, the view from Marcy was fuller and more panoramic than any other. You kind of expected that, right? Still, off in the distance, some mountains SEEMED higher than ours - Colden and Whiteface in particular. It's hard to imagine why that is, expect views from a peak are just not like you expect. Still, everything was there ... on Marcy you can see 44 of the 46 high peaks - a few are hidden in back of other peaks.
For my money, the best part of Marcy was the insects. I saw fuzzy, Frank Lloyd Wright-ish bumblebees with larger-than-normal eyes. I saw mini-dragonfly-like critters with neon red stick bodies. These were not things I saw on the trail, even thought there were plenty of insects there. I wish I had brought an entomologist along - god knows there are enough of them at Cornell.
After our traditional peanut butter sammich and apple (which still taste very, very good!) we headed back for home. If the ascent was long and exciting, the descent was long and increasingly miserable. You couldn't have picked a better day, really - sunny, mid-70's. But backtracking through the boulders (hard on the knees) and black flies and swamp land was not very much fun. And when we got to our backpacks, filled up our water bottles, we found the last three miles as probably the longest death march since Sawteeth. The Song of the Volga Boatmen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMYsrZQjlf0) was our theme song. Our calves and feet ached.
But we made it back to the car, smelling bad that we had to open the windows the whole way back to the Pines Hotel in Lake Placid. After a ridiculously long shower, we met our friends Lynn Hidy and Russ Aicher at our favorite Lake Placid restaurant, Liquids and Solids. We chowed down on Charcuterie, Oxtail Ragout, Porchetta and Clams with Sausage. Amy had her traditional after-peak drink, a Cosmopolitain, and I had Grapefruit and Elderflower cocktail. We finished with a Honey Brandy Plum pot pie and Lemon Panna Cotta with Caramel and Berries.
A good time was had by all. Amy was properly birthday'ed. And me, I felt like now that we had the highest peak under our belt, we could do some more remote, distinctive peaks, knowing that we had already seen the highest, and there would be no lingering feeling that there MIGHT be something better out there. The fact is - and you hear this a lot from hikers as they do more Adirondack peaks - they all have their own virtues. You don't play favorites, no more than you do with your children, because you have a soft spot for all of them.
