Not So Bad After All

George sometimes keeps little facts from me knowing I'll try to persuade him to make the safe choice.  Often, he's right.  Like the fact that most people don't climb all of the 5 Dix peaks (of the Adirondacks) in the same day, during the summer season.  It turned out just as well that I didn't find that out until we were back at the car on a frigid winter evening, because it wasn't so bad.  Momentary moments of panic aside.  We even managed to get two mountains in on Sunday before dinner at Lake Placid Brewing.

We got off to a pretty late start, I'd gotten stuck at work on Friday night, not leaving until 10pm.  By the time I'd gotten home eaten dinner and finished arguing with George for giving me a hard time about doing my job it was midnight, oy.  When the alarm went off at 4am, Grumpy George grumbled something about not bothering.  Normally, at 4am, I'd jump on the "not bothering" suggestion.  Regardless of how much I want to do something, come on?  4am!  That is an appropriate bed time, not an appropriate time for an alarm.  But this was the last available weekend before the equinox, and I knew if I agreed to keep sleeping, I wouldn't hear the end of it until December 21~ our goal is to hit all the ADKs in winter before setting foot on any in summer~ so I dragged our butts out of bed.  We were finally crossing the border into New York at around 6am.  ooof it's gonna be a long one.  We weren't at the trailhead until sometime around 9, the sun was long up.  But lucky for us, there was another car, and well packed footprints.  That went every which way.  It was easy going, and I feel bad for the guys ahead of us, with all the in and out's breaking trail.  It was evident that the existing herd path was very hard to follow (the Dix's are trail-less peaks) and they kept hitting dead ends.  We made every wrong turn they did, but it's not as bad in someone elses tracks.

When we finally caught up to them, they were pretty concerned that we planned on hitting all five.  Up on Hough, they warned us not to do it.  Last week one of them had been attempting to cross from windswept Dix to Hough, and kept falling in chin deep powder.  Well, we'll see how it goes.  Well it went.  I wished we had turned around when, giving up on the tree covered ridge, we scrambled down the icy rocks to what looked like an easier path.  I whined.  Uh, quite a bit.  But when we got back up to the ridge, somehow we found our way, pretty easily.  When the sun set, my jacket started freezing, quite literally, the water on the outside of it froze, if I didn't bend my arms for more than a few seconds, I couldn't.  But it was okay.  We summited Dix and made it back down without any issue.  The view off Cascade the following day was bliss, the beers at Lake Placid, heaven.