Trails, Bites, and Beers

Mount Marcy was the first of four mountains we set out to hike as part of a two-week honeymoon bonanza in the Northeast. We also hiked the highest points in Vermont (Mount Mansfield), New Hampshire (Mount Washington), and Maine (Katadhin aka Baxter Peak). We were just a couple of crazy kids who wanted to hike more mountains and this seemed like a fun way to get into that further. We had a blast.

We stayed at the Spruce Lodge Bed and Breakfast in Lake Placid, just a short drive away from the Adirondack Loj parking area. Simon, one of their cats, was a ragdoll who reminded me of the cat I had during most of my college years. He was pretty friendly.

Concerned we would not get parking, we arrived to the lot at the Loj around 6:30 am after stopping at The Adirondack Corner Store for some breakfast sandwiches as there was nothing else open! The closest lot was not even full, but we knew we had many miles ahead of us so an early start was a good idea regardless.

We registered at the trailhead and took an obligatory selfie (hey, we wanted to try something new… apparently it takes a lot of practice for us), and were off.

Yikes, where do we look when trying to take the photo and make sure we’re both in it with the sign behind us?

It was overcast but a nice enough day to start off. We stopped and took a more reasonable photo of ourselves on the bridge near Marcy Dam area, then moved on to look at the view around the old lake.

Me, still struggling to look at the camera instead of where you press to take the picture.

We continued on, with some drizzly rain here and there, until we made it to Indian Falls, where it turns out the view was pretty poor, but not knowing better, we thought it was pretty neat anyways.

Had I known the pattern of sweat covered my entire front, I might have decline this particular photo to be taken or at least turned sideways.

Soon, we learned about rocks. And rocky trails are pretty standard in the Adirondacks. We’ve since seen better, and much, much worse. Even though we were pretty inexperienced hikers at this point, Marcy didn’t seem overly difficult so much as it was a test of endurance given the ~13 mile round trip hike.

We took turns going first up some of the more scramble-y parts of the trail.

A while before reaching the summit, we met the summit steward who had declined to hang out on the summit that day due to impending rain and winds that were gusting up to 70 miles per hour. Oh, super. Well, we have ponchos. We climbed on, and eventually made it to the summit.

On the summit but not at the highest actual point… that was hidden in fog/clouds/rain and we only realized we could get up there because we heard a few other hikers.

And on the actual top of the mountain…

Lovely view, totally worth it, can’t see anything and can barely hear the person talking next to you over the wind.

We made it!!!! Since we were just stoked we actually made it to the top, we didn’t know about the views we were missing. We were just super excited. And a little chilly at the top from the wind. So we didn’t hang out long, then headed back down. It promptly started to rain enough that we pulled out the ponchos for the rest of the way back, which was otherwise uneventful except the requisite slip on a root in the mud every once in a while.