View-filled hike ends in the dark
If you’re planning to take your child (or anyone, really) on their first night hike, it should probably be somewhere relatively easy — not too rough, not too steep and not too long.
It should almost certainly not be an unplanned march up and down wet, slippery trails after hours of grueling hiking over three mountains known for being rattlesnake habitat.
Yes, mistakes were made.
Even with headlamps (thank goodness for headlamps), our little tribe recently found itself stumbling along the Northwest Bay trail in the Tongue Mountain Range in the Lake George Wild Forest after darkness fell.
Our first mistake of the day — our usual mistake — was getting a late start. We didn’t leave home until mid-morning and started hiking at noon. We made the first summit of our trip, Fifth Mountain, by 1:30, not a bad pace considering we’d gained almost 1,400 feet from the trailhead at Clay Meadows. From there, we would continue down the Tongue Range, summiting French Point Mountain and First Peak before going down to Montcalm Point and hiking out along the Northwest Bay trail.
On Fifth Mountain, I still thought we could finish before dark. So we dallied at the lean-to on the summit, waiting out a brief rain shower before continuing on to the next peak.
In her “Discover the Eastern Adirondacks” book, the late legendary guidebook author Barbara Mcmartin called the trail a “roller coaster,” and she was spot on. You would think that having gained the ridge that ties the mountains of the range together, a hiker would have put most of the climbing behind them. But the trail between the mountains dips down hundreds of feet, sometimes quite steeply, before gaining most of those feet back again as it climbs to the next summit. Over the course of the day, we would see more than 3,000 feet in elevation change.
Mcmartin may have called it a roller coaster, but she also deemed this section of the Tongue Mountain Range Trail “the most delightful 5.8 miles of hiking imaginable.” The trail, winding over open summits with expansive overlooks of Lake George and the surrounding mountains, offers some of the best fall scenery we had seen all season.
On the second summit, French Point Mountain, we took another break, admiring a rainbow peeking out among the clouds, and the color on the mountains rising over Lake George’s opposite shore. The lake, in summer noisy with motorboats, stretched peaceful and blue below us. But the angle of the sun was wrong for the halfway point of a long hike — we were losing daylight.
We hiked onward to the final summit, through another brief shower. First Peak, with few trees and an abundance of long, pretty grasses, had the best view, looking down the length of the big lake. The open views continued as we started down the ridge to Montcalm Point. We paused only to make rude faces at the drone that hovered over our heads for several long minutes, buzzing annoyingly.
The trail to the point heads due south for several miles, then jags back in a northwesterly bent, following the lakeshore back to the trailhead. My husband, Herb, suggested we could bushwhack off the ridge to save some miles, but we quickly decided this was not a great idea. Who knew what kind of ledges and cliffs we would encounter off the trail?
So we plodded on to Montcalm Point, arriving a half-hour before the sunset. Hikers who have done some advance planning can arrange to have a water taxi pick them up there. With
our lousy planning and poor timing, we were stuck hiking back to the trailhead.
As the evening progressed from gloomy to “I-can-still-sort-of-see,” to the deeper darkness that required lights, our 11-year-old slipped repeatedly on wet leaves, tripped on sticks and rocks and stumbled sometimes over nothing but fatigue. I was not doing much better — after all the ups and downs of the day, my knees were protesting at every step.
We crossed numerous streams, found two bridges out — knocked apart by fallen trees — and squelched through mud puddles. As we approached the trailhead, we could see the moon rising through the trees, bright and full, casting almost enough light to hike by.
If we had read Mcmartin’s book before starting out instead of after returning home, we would have seen her admonition that the southern section of the Range Trail is “strenuous” and requires nine hours. We knocked it out in eight (“In your face, Barbara Mcmartin,” Herb joked). The gorgeous views and pretty summits are deserving of a more leisurely pace, though, and maybe just a little more advance planning.