| Summary | Petek and Rachel's Adventures in the Adirondacks. |
| Owner | Rachel DeLucas |
| Creation Date | 2009-10-31 22:26:19 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Giant of the Valley and Rocky Peak Ridge, via Zander Scott trail
8.6 mile rt, ~ 4040 ft elevation gain We've found that Rachel and I make a pretty good team when we hike together. Our paces match pretty well, we look out for each other, and we usually agree on the crucial things, like where to eat lunch. Most importantly, one of us will always catch it when we start going down the wrong trail (or trail decoy). Well, almost always. On our Saturday hike in the Adirondacks, we each had our fair share of confusion. When we got to the summit of Giant I tried to keep going and to lead us down off of it, thinking that the trail junction for Rocky Peak must be close by on the other side of the mountain. Rachel quickly intervened: "hold on. we should probably look at a map first." We wound up turning back to a junction we'd passed .2 miles (or was it .6?) miles before the summit. Good call, Rachel. Zander Scott was a beautiful trail, with lots of open ledges and potentially beautiful views along the way. Potentially is emphasized because we had complete whiteout and lots of rain that turned most sections of the trail into a muddy river. Other than the floods nothing too exciting happened, except for when another hiker scared the bejeezus out of Rachel by popping up unexpectedly while we were eating lunch. She thought he was a bear. He turned out not to be a bear, but one of two guys who were camping that night. I felt a little schadenfreudic pleasure at knowing we were going back to a warm, dry house after the hike. On the way back we took it slow with the steep descent and muddy trails, hiking the last couple of hours in the dark. We had a few "...is that the trail? or is THAT the trail?" moments, but luckily never got too off-track. As we descended below the clouds, we had amazing views. There was a carpet of clouds covering the valley that made me feel like we were thousands of feet up. And everything looked so mysterious in the misty darkness - perhaps more because we couldn't see anything past our feet (our headlamps weren't much good in the mist). By the end we were glad to be done and ready to go back. After Rachel sent off the tiny lizard she found hitchhiking on her pack to a new home, we drove off. We passed by a trailhead (Chapel Pond) that we hadn't seen on the way there. Weird. I pointed that out. And Rachel recognized that we were going up a hill that hadn't previously been there. We put two and two together for the 30th time that day and turned around, finally heading in the right direction. You might be thinking, "how are you people still alive?" or "neither of you should ever go hiking alone." But at least together, two half-wits make a clue. -PS |