Reading (For Dummies)

Bushwhacked

Against my better judgement (I've had a chest cold since Thursday), I went backpacking in the Macintyre range over the weekend. We came into to the Lake Colden lean-to at about midnight or 1am Saturday morning after hiking and wheezing down the trail. When we started our 10pm death march, it was 13 degrees fahrenheit (-11 celsius), and dropped a bit as we hiked -- no cloud cover meant lots of surface heat bleeding off into the oblivion of space.

I awoke Saturday morning at around 7:30, shivering. My bag is rated to 0F. Most of me was warm, my feet felt like blocks of ice. I rolled over to get my glasses, which I left on the floor of our lean-to. I hit them a little bit hard. Not too hard, just kind of a rough pick-up. The frame cracked around the lens, brittle from the cold (and a few years of UV radiation, no doubt). Duct tape to the rescue.

We got a late start, hitting the trail at about 10am. I had all the right gear, I just wasn't ready psychologically for such a cold start. At about 3pm, we summited Algonquin. Above the treeline was frigid, and windy as hell. It was a bit hard to take photos up there...my gloves were stiff from the cold, and it wasn't very comfortable to hold my hand out and take photos.

We opted to not summit the adjacent peak, as the sun would be setting fairly early. Heading down, Bull (our "ghost leader") and Amalia decided to split our group up. David (one of our Czech Republic members), Amalia, and myself were all hiking a bit more slowly. Lack of sleep, my chest cold, and the cold in general were making me feel sluggish. Plus I could feel myself low on electrolytes -- a feeling not unlike I experienced on my Lake Placid ride.

The stories about the trail distances on the signs being totally out-of-whack in the Adirondacks is quite true. After hiking down past Avalance Lake, we found a trail sign indicating that our lean-to was only 1.1 miles away. Another hour of expeditious hiking and we weren't there yet. After trying to convince poor Amalia that maybe we had taken a wrong turn, Jithka (David's wife) could be heard calling for us. They had moved the campsite anyway, so much embarassment had been saved (as the story went, "yes, we knew where we were but our equipment was missing!"). Still, freezing to death in the Adirondacks wouldn't have been a bad way to go.

Another frigid night, this time in tents, gave way to a morning barely below freezing on Sunday. We couldn't believe it, we danced about the campsite in polypropylene undergarments. And that was that. I am certainly looking forward to more winter hiking this season, hopefully with Bert (who has conveyed some interest in preparing for a run on Rainier in the not-so-distant future...).