Reading (For Dummies)

Mount Marcy^WColden

Jithka and I planned a trip for Mt. Marcy over the weekend. It would be a great way to work through some of the stress that work has been putting me through lately. Fortunately I've been re-discovering my sense of humor with the asinine nature of government work, so my psyche is even more intact than usual. This weekend's multiple brushes with death certainly helped a lot...

We took off Friday afternoon, taking my truck because it was snowing something fierce and I have 4wd. Except when we got to the part of the road that wasn't plowed anymore, my 4wd wouldn't engage. Teh suck.

So we're driving up the dirt road to Tahawus in rear wheel drive. Fortunately it is plowed, but it still has a nice layer of ice and snow on it. My truck is handling nice, and we're getting there around 5:30, so I'm going 20-30mph. We crest a hill, and start coming down, and at the bottom, a tree is across the road. Some expletives were shouted by Sean, Jithka, and myself in our respective native tongues as I jammed the brakes, trying to make a decision: ditch or tree. I cut left, where the tree was slightly higher off the road, hoping it would only smash the roof down rather than catch my windshield dead-on. A loud crunch, and only a bunch of scrapes in the paint tell the tale of that little escapade.

We got to the Upper Work parking lot around 6, had a swig of whiskey, and thanked the Flying Spaghetti Monster for letting us live. Then we strapped on our snowshoes, shouldered our packs, and hit the trail for Uphill Lean-to.

The hiking was slow. Sean fell into a stream about 20 minutes into the hike, but we pressed on. We were breaking trail in a few inches of snow, moving about 1 mi/hr. I lost one of my water bottles on the way, on one of the several times I fell over. We stopped short of our goal and camped in the lean-to near Lake Colden Dam. "No problem," we thought, "if we go one mile an hour tomorrow we'll make it up and down Marcy with time to spare before sunset."

Where we would eventually go: Mount Colden

We cooked breakfast and started melting water in the morning, but our stove quit. Plenty of fuel, it just wouldn't stay lit for more than a few minutes. Unfortunately someone put the wrong instruction manual in the stove bag, so we weren't too eager to go taking it apart. So we left in the morning after a good night's sleep, but only 3.5 liters of water for the three of us.

We hiked up towards Marcy but the snow got deep. Like 2' deep. And we were still breaking trail. I was smart enough to forget gators, so my boots were quickly getting wet on the inside. We slowed to about a half mile an hour. We reached a fork where we could go 2.2 miles up marcy and then another 4 back down to our campsite, or 2.9 up Colden and and another 2 to our campsite, so we decided to do Mount Colden.

We didn't reach the base of Colden until 3pm, with 3.3 miles left to go. We were going to turn around and just go back, but we ran into some luck: the trail was broken ahead!

We started up Colden with renewed vigor, until about 30 minutes later when the previous hikers had decided to give up and had turned around. "We're already most of the way up, for sure," we figured.

3 hours later, exhausted, we reached the top of Mount Colden. By then it was dark, and we had a lot of trouble finding the trail on the top. That, and the trail goes right over the big slide on the Marcy Dam side. I tried not to look down...

Jithka took a few photos at the top, of me looking bewildered and hypoglecimic (will backpost those as soon as I get them).

The funniest thing about being as cold and as exhausted as we were was that we could barely talk. My voice was weak, my jaw couldn't move, my tongue was numb (so were my toes...that water in my boots from earlier? Very cold and worrisome). We were all actually a bit worried up there.

We did find our way down (obviously), and hiked back to camp, landing sometime around 7:30pm. Of course, our stove still didn't work, so we had to eat snow and cold bagels and gorp for dinner, and shiver ourselves back to warmth in our sleeping bags. We woke up Sunday morning with mostly stiff clothing (at least, the stuff that we couldn't fit in our sleeping bags). My boots were blocks of ice. The socks I had taken off hastily and left on the lean-to floor were quite difficult to pry up. But hey, we hiked out and we're alive, so I ain't complaining too much.

People ask me how I stay sane working for the government. Now they have half the answer...