Lower Great Range + Saddleback

 


"The Wild Woman has a deep love of Nature, A love for the Ancient Mother, though possibly misunderstood, it has always been in her. When she goes into the wilderness, a part of her is Soul is going home."

Friday morning, I dropped Rickypup off at his boarder for the upcoming days. Laura and I had been planning a trip the first week in August to the Adirondacks for the last year. This time, we would stay 5 days. We met up in Vermont at a Park and Ride where we would leave one car and carpool the rest of the way. This always makes the ride a bit more enjoyable.

We arrived Friday afternoon around 2pm to our place of stay. For the first time we decided to take it the next step up. We booked a room at the Rooster Comb Inn. It's a shared space, but it was quite frankly, really nice! As we pulled in we met the owner who was a sweet polish woman.

We brought all of our gear in to plan for the days ahead.

The plan was to hike the Lower Great Range in a single day. A long day, but a single day on Saturday. Sunday would be our "rest day", and Sunday would begin our 2-day backpacking trip into the Dix Range.

We had heard rumors of the Garden Trailhead Parking area was full by 3:30am on the weekends so we were a bit nervous about this. We decided to park our car the night before and ride our bikes back to the Inn. We would then proceed to ride our bikes the next morning back to the lot to start our hike.

We totally lucked out and were lucky enough to have the owner give us a ride the next morning.

On trail by 6:30am, we were off for an exciting day ahead. Our plan was to hit the Gothics first, going up and over the cables, over to Armstrong, to the Wolfjaws and looping back. We had the option of adding Saddleback for an addition mile. We both decided when we got to the junction, to drop packs and head up the .5 mile to bag it and come back.

We were feeling so good, we went for it!

Once back down at the junction, we knew this would be the beginning of a steep stretch up to the Gothics. We did not prove different.



This was a steep .6 up a rock face ledge, with cables for assistance. Total type 2 fun in my opinion and certainly not for the faint of heart. We both were using trekking poles for this trip and didn't need the cables as our poles did most of the work and our Salomon Speedcross did an excellent job at gripping to the rock.

Once at the top of Gothics, we took a fairly god break to refuel and take in some of the best views we have seen thus far in this adventure of peakbagging the 46.



Once we were refreshed and refueled off we went to hit Armstrong, Upper Wolfjaw, and then Lower Wolfjaw.




We had a long boring walk the rest of the way out after Lower Wolfjaw, but we were glad to be done when it was all over. We could not have asked for a better day.

Garmin Forerunner 45S:
16.49 Miles
5,381ft Elevation Gain
7h 37m Moving Time

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