Tag Archives: hiking

Prospect Mountain Hike

Time for another Adirondack hike! Saturday was a good day for hiking, not so great for biking because it was pretty windy.  We chose the Prospect Mountain hike, which is one of the most popular trails. It starts pretty much in the village of Lake George, so easy to get to. 

It starts with a staircase to the bridge that crosses the Northway. Lots of steps!

Then the bridge over the highway:

I must admit here that my heart was pumping faster crossing this than going up all those steps. You can see right through the bottom!

On the other side, the trail started going up right away. It was pretty rocky, too.

The trail isn’t too long. It is an out and back route. The length of the hike as the crow flies is 3 miles, but it ended up about 5 miles. You never quite go straight up, but because of the rocks you go back and forth, which adds a lot of steps.  The elevation rise is around 1500 feet, which is a lot of climbing.

The trail crosses one more road, which was a nice resting spot.

Thumbs up – going well so far!  After crossing this road, then we hit the really steep part.

See John looking up to where we will be climbing? LOL.  It was challenging.  There were a fair number of people on the hike in the morning as well. It was in the upper 40s, which was kind of nice considering how hot and sweaty we were getting while climbing. I can’t imagine doing this on a hot and humid day.

There was leapfrogging of people because of the stopping and resting during the climb.  People coming down would say “You’re almost there”. I’m thinking their idea of almost there was not my idea of almost there.

Finally we made it and the views were worth it!

We started down there at the water level. Now that was a hike! The interesting thing is that you can actually drive to the summit here, which is why it is a popular destination. There used to be a cable tram that would bring people up to the hotel that once stood here. This is the last remnant of the tram line:

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There is a really nice picnic area with tables and outdoor grills. I would love to come back and picnic here.

More views:

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After a rest and snack, it was time to head down. It was almost as hard coming down. The flat rocks with pine needles were actually a little slippery. Good thing it wasn’t wet!

We passed some kind of memorial. Not sure what it is for as there was no signage.

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Rocky from top to bottom!

Then back across that scary bridge. Wave to the nice people!

Seriously – that bridge was really scary to me.

When I checked my health app after we were done, it said we climbed 99 flights! That’s a lot of stairs 😀  Our legs are feeling pretty sore today after all that climbing. It was definitely a challenging hike.

Meadowbrook Preserve

Sunday I did a little solo hike. The afternoon was really nice and I decided I wanted some foot work instead of bike work.  Since I was going alone, it’s all about safety and I went to our local nature preserve, which you can’t get lost in and is really close to home.

It was a sea of Joe Pye weed and goldenrod:

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There are several loop trails through this totaling 2-2.5 miles all together. I went around most of them with a little doubling back. I brought the Rebel along for pictures today. The preserve is as flat as can be, so carrying camera gear is not a problem.

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Enjoying the day!

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I heard lots of Jays, saw some Red winged blackbirds, but no turkeys. We do see turkeys around when riding sometimes.

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Sea o’ ferns:

I don’t know what made this hole, but I didn’t want to stick my camera in there!

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Back out in the goldenrod meadow. It was full of bees.

My nose was running a little bit during this hike.

All in all a beautiful day. Between my other walking and intervals, I ended up with about 7 miles on the day!  It’s good to be active.

Berry Pond Hike

We had a very mild weather weekend here. In fact, it was 48 degrees Saturday morning when we got up!  There was hiking planned for the day and the trail was Berry Pond. There was supposed to be a beaver colony on the pond and I wanted to see that. We had nixed our original hike route as we thought it was going to be a bit much for the day, but we underestimated this hike LOL!

It took about 20 minutes or so to drive to the trail head. There is a large complex of trails at the Lake George Recreational Center to choose from.  We were thinking based on the mileage given by the map it should have been about 4.5 miles, 2.7 for the blue trail and 1.7 for the orange trail.

It was very quiet on the trail. We were the only ones on it for almost the whole day.

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This lean-to overlooked West Brook, which was probably my favorite part of the whole hike. The stream was covered in moss and looked so pretty.

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I could have just parked myself by this with a picnic lunch and spent the day here. But, we had plans!

The trail began to really climb. We had no idea it was going to be such a grade at times.

It was certainly a workout climbing.

We reached a summit outlook. This is the west side (?) of Lake George:

We kept going and going waiting to hit the orange trail. We finally came across where it met the blue trail.

The orange trail went to Berry Pond itself and the beaver colony.

You could see a lot of old and new beaver damage.

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Here is an old dam:

There were lots of lily pads on the pond.

I think that one and this picture are among my favorites of the day.

We finally found the new beaver dam on the other side of the pond. It is really huge!

It was kind of weird being below the level of the pond on this side of the dam.

Very cool. We didn’t see any beavers, though. I was hoping to see the, but I guess they were sleeping 😀

From this point, the trail looped back onto itself back to the start.

We ended up with 7.5 miles! I don’t know how that extra 3 miles happened LOL. I had 19,000 steps on my phone. That’s a lot of walking.  I would do this hike again, but I think we might take a shortcut for part of it.

Spruce Mountain Fire Tower Hike

We did another official trail hike, but first – the pink picture of the day!  My new biking jacket. It is super bright 😀

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The Breast Cancer Site

On to the hike!  On Monday, my sister and BIL had the day off since they are state employees. I was working, but managed to take off in the afternoon so John and I could join them on the hike.  The trail we went on was Spruce Mountain.  This trail was finally finished after getting some easements to make the trail passable all the way to the fire tower. The firetower was in disrepair for many years, but they just finished the restoration so that you can climb up the 5 (!!!) stories to get to the top.  The trail closes by mid October for hunting season, so there are only a couple weeks left to go.

Apparently,we were not the only ones who wanted to squeeze in a holiday hike.  We were pretty surprised at the number of cars at the trail head.

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It actually wasn’t super crowded on the trail and it seemed most people were on their way down when we started up.

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Since there were easements, instructions were to stay on the paths.  Some property owner put this up by a section:

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Okay, then.  The trail was pretty much all wooded on the way up and mostly just forest floor instead of the rocky climbs we have done before.

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Check out how this tree perfectly fell into the V of two other trees.

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Talk about threading the needle. We had to duck a little bit under this tree.

You could almost make 2 canoes out of this split tree:

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Woodpecker damage on an old stump:

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This trail pretty much kept climbing upwards for the whole 1.2 miles to get to the firetower. It definitely got the heart rate up there!  We did have Gryffon with us again on this hike, so we took breaks for him (and us!).

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He’s so special he has his own collapsible, portable water bowl!

More and more climbing and we started to enter a different landscape:

 

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Yippee!!  We finally saw our destination:

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I have to say the thought of climbing this made me a little nervous. I am not a fan of heights, but I didn’t hike 1.2 miles up a mountain not to get to the top!

Gryffon didn’t get to go up in the tower. He was attached to a tree while we climbed:

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There were only a few people there, thank goodness. It would have been hard to get up and down if we had been there earlier with all the people we saw coming down.  Good thing I was busy at work in the morning and delayed the hike 😉

The fire tower was originally built in 1928 (there I go with my favorite time period). Thank goodness they refurbished it… Colleen and Dave climbing:

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The view was getting better with each floor up:

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Colleen says “Lean out of the tower!”. She wanted our picture from above.  Eek!  Not too far. (This was her picture).

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These actually were out of order as John and I climbed first and she took these when we were on our way down, but I wanted to save the view shots for last.

Higher and it was a loooong way down. Look at the tiny people below:

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It was a little scary, I have to admit, but the view was incredible. This is at the very top.  There is a plexiglass enclosure so you don’t fall out, I guess, although the floors on the way up are wide open.

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You can see for 120 miles from up here and are the colors not amazing?!!?!

We made it!! Top of the world!

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Interesting note. Selfie was done on my phone. You can see the difference how the phone does not pick up the fall colors like the Rebel does. 

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We really picked the perfect day to go to see colors.  I just could not get over this view.  Here is the shadow of the firetower while we were up top:

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This was definitely worth the climb up. Going down was pretty much all downhill and fast (relatively for hiking).  I took a few more pictures, but they just can’t compare to the fire tower shots LOL.  It was about 2.5 miles round trip for this hike.  I do recommend this one for sure.  Several days later and I keep thinking about the view from the fire tower. 

Pilot’s Knob Hike

We had company this weekend and one of the requests for things to do was go on a hike.  We looked for easier trails and settled on Pilot’s Knob, although it might have been a bit more challenging that we expected. 🙂

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The trail head is about 10 miles from home, so not very far at all!

It started out somewhat more uphill that we were anticipating, but it was shaded and pretty.

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The trail was quite well marked and well traveled. It wasn’t quite as rocky as Sleeping Beauty, but still a little challenging with tree roots.

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We hit a fork in the trail, both of which led to the gazebo.

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We weren’t sure which to take, but then someone coming down said the trail was a little easier and more interesting to look at, so we went to the right.

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My love:

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Finally up to the clearing and the gazebo 1 mile up.

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We had some protein bars and fruit here and enjoyed the view!

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That’s Lake George.

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I finally got my first butterfly shot of the year up here. This was taken with the 300 zoom.

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After a rest, our friend wanted to continue on, so we headed on the blue trail to the waterfall, which was supposed to be dry at this time of year:

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We haven’t had a ton of rain lately and even the normally muddy areas were dry:

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We didn’t have to walk on that to stay dry.  This is my favorite shot of the guys right here:

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We made it to the waterfall (at a total of 2.5 miles from the start), which was pretty dry – obviously or I wouldn’t be standing in it!:

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Itty bitty trickle of water.

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This is mostly full in the spring. I would like to come back and see that.  We decided to turn around and hike back at this point.  Back to the gazebo and back down the orange path:

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I found a little toad friend.  I actually almost stepped on him!

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It was a bit of a steep descent, so I packed the camera away after that so I wouldn’t drop it or if I slipped it wouldn’t get damaged.  Didn’t care about me, just save the camera!

We did about 5 miles of hiking.  It was a good hike and I would do this one again as well.  Although, there are so many great trails yet to explore.

We had a post hike treat!

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It’s not a cupcake, but still pretty darn good 😀

Sleeping Beauty Hike

We finally did our first official Adirondack hike.  We took the Sleeping Beauty trail in Adirondack National Park. The trail head was about 40 minutes from our house, so not bad – although we were up early 😀

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We knew the hike would be around 6 miles, but it turned out closer to 7 miles since we took a loop around Bump’s pond instead of straight up and down.

Partners in crime for the day:

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This is my new hiking stick I got at the art festival a couple months ago.

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We actually had to walk 1.5 miles just to get to the trail head from this parking lot.  That was the easy part, then it got pretty rocky and hilly.

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It was humid, but we were in the shade of trees for the majority of the climb, which was really nice.  I was sweating like the dickens, though.  That humidity thing.

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The trail was really well marked and a fair number of people on it as well. Lots of people had the same idea of an early hike to beat the heat!

Lots of neat pictures to take. I won’t post too many since I don’t want to flood your reader 😀

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Finally we saw a happy sign!

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And what a view it was:

 

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That’s Lake George down there where we bike to all the time.

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Here is a little movie of the view from the summit:

We ate some lunch at the top and then headed back down taking a loop around Bump’s Pond.

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If we had known it was going to add that extra mile, we wouldn’t have done it because we were pretty darn tired when we got to the bottom.  Although Gryffon was really happy to take a swim.

I think we should have brought more food, but otherwise it was suited pretty well for us since we bike a lot.  It was a little bit long of a hike – and next time we do this one, we will skip the pond.  It would be such a gorgeous view from the summit during fall colors!

 

Hiking in Vermont

Finally – a trip away! It was a short one. My birthday was Friday and I managed to get in my 47 miles of riding. That was a bit tiring, but very good to get it done!

Saturday morning, we left for an overnight trip to Vermont.  We stopped first in Rutland to do shopping. Poor John, I dragged him to all the Vintage shops I could find 😀

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I did manage to score a couple chairs at a sale from an auction house. 

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The one on the left is going to get painted a color and go into the garden with a flower pot where the missing seat is. The one on the right will get reupholstered for the inside.  Grand total for both chairs was $4.  Can you believe that?  One was $3 and and one was $2, but then the lady said it was $4 for both.  Who can pass up a deal like that?  Not me  🙂

We booked a place in Killington at Mountain Valley Resort, which is a B&B.  What a gem this place is!

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Our room was lovely looking out the back:

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Our hosts were very nice.  They also told us about a hiking trail just down the road, so we headed down to check it out.  It started in the marshy area with a nice bridge:

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Then we got to the climbing area. You could head 2 different ways and we took the shorter one to the falls since it was in the evening.

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So beautiful and what a nice treat to find!

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We decided the next morning to go back up there and hike the other side. After a wonderful breakfast from our hosts, we headed back.

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This climbed up quite a bit.

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Turns out it is part of the Appalachian trail!

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It went on for quite a while going up.

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It’s a very well marked trail as well.  Our new hiking shoes did great, too!

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We could have gone on for a long, long time, but we weren’t really set up for a whole morning of hiking. We ended up doing about 3 miles.

I would for sure come back here to hike these trails again.  I love my biking first and foremost, but we are enjoying the hiking 😀

It was also great to get away and relax for the weekend!