Algonquin and Iroquois

April 9, 2016

After spending the last couple of weeks cycling in shorts and enjoying the summer weather, I looked at the weekend forecast and reluctantly unpacked my -10 sleeping bag and stuffed in the -20. A forecast of -13 and two nights to be spent in an open air leanto kieboshed any dreams of summer like hiking this weekend. Neverthless, after a cozy night bundled up in appropriate gear, Debbie, Paul and I set out at 06:30 from the ADK Loj. We hiked up to the Algonquin junction, meeting Dave on the trail and having a friendly chat as we walked. At the junction we stopped to de-layer and put on microspikes while Dave continued ahead. The climbing began. Not very long into the ascent I planted my pole and felt the bottom section break off. I did not even have much force placed on it. I have been using these poles for eight years, so I guess that they do not owe me anything. In fact, I am grateful that it broke when I was simply walking along instead of during a time where I was relying on them to bear my weight! I strapped the remains of the pole onlo my pack and continued the climb. Fresh snow over crunchy ice made travel easy as traction was very good, even at the crux pitch right before the Wright junction. At the junction, Dave's footprints headed up towards Wright and we strapped on our snowshoes to plunge through the powder up towards Algonquin. We overtook a young couple of enthusiastic lads, and then we were breaking trail. By 09:00 we were on the summit, enjoying some great sunshine and views of the local peaks as they drifted in and out of small wisps of cloud cover. We switched back to microspikes, but after finding ourselves postholing through big snow drifts on the way to Boundary, we wisely switched back to snowshoes which remained on our feet for the rest of the above 4000' day. The Iroquois herd path was buried in enough snow that we lost it several times trying to follow it. After many false turns, we just gave up and made our way upwards. A few spruce traps later and a nasty final push thorugh 10m of dense cripplebrush, brought us onto glorious rime encrusted rock, after which it was an easy scamper up to the top. Dave arrived shortly after and we apologized for our poor route finding. Our plan now was to descend to Cold Brook Pass via Shephards's Tooth, so we started our way down. After observing the field of snowed in spruce traps and finding no sign of the herd path we decided to kill that idea before we got ourselves killed with a broken leg, and instead sat down on a nice sunny ledge for lunch. We took the real path on the way back, lost it again, but then quickly picked up our own tracks and followed them back to Boundary. There were lots of people now coming up Algonquin, most of them in microspikes. We left our snowshoes on and quickly descended by snowshoe skiing the powder all the way down to around 4000' after which the snow became thinner and we changed to spikes. At the junction with the Van Ho the trail changed to mud in the afternoon sunshine so the spikes were ditched. We decided to explore the Old Marcy Dam trail back to the campground and this was a bit of a wet mess, but was a pretty trail through the woods anyway and put us right back to our camp on Heart Lake. The hike was only 8 hours so we had time in the afternoon to head into Lake Placid for some shopping (mostly in the pub) prior to heading back to our leanto for the night.

Hiking through some fresh powder in the early morning.