Ambling through the Adirondacks

Last weekend, Aaron Melander came back to NYC again.

This time he was here to go camping upstate in the mighty Adirondacks with me, Vince and Dan.

He arrived Thursday night and I went out to meet him at JFK airport.

He was nice enough to lug an extra set of camping gear (his girlfriend Lisa's - thanks Leezor!) all the way out here from Minneapolis since I don't have any.

After picking up our tiny little golden colored rental car, we drove into Brooklyn to pick up the Vincent and then headed out towards Albany.

After a thousand delays and horrible traffic, we finally arrived at Dan's house at 12:30am.

Almost immediately after getting out of the car, I felt a squish under my foot. I thought for sure that I had stepped in some dog poop, but instead...

...I killed a poor frog.

It totally bummed me out.


Luckily, Dan is the ultimate host. Immediately upon entering his apartment, we were treated to cans of Coke, pizza, Doritos, Xbox, beer, and then, from out of nowhere:

Dairy Queen!

It was seriously one of the best hours of my life and I almost totally forgot about that squished frog.



The next morning, we got up early and drove another two hours to get to our hiking trail.

And we were off...



The plan was to walk a giant loop: 10 difficult miles the first day, then camp for a day, then 6 easier miles back on the third day.

Pretty much right away, we started going over crazy obstacles like this:



As promised, the first ten miles were strenuous, but a lot of fun.

We spent a lot of time climbing over and in between boulders and generally going straight up into the hills.

Here's Dan being assisted by his two walking sticks, affectionately named "Two Pronger" and "Stamper".

We got to the top and took a break to take in the epic view of the thousand foot rock cliffs that the guidebook told us about.

Aaron also stared at this little green inch worm that was on his hand.


There was no rest for us though, since as soon as we reached the summit, it was time to start heading straight down towards Lake Colden, where we were going to set up camp for the night.

After a seriously delicious freeze dried meal (just add hot water) while sitting next to the lake, it was time to set up our tents.

Almost instantly after unpacking our sleeping bags, the sun went away and it became dark.

There were no fires allowed here for some reason, but luckily we had our cool little head lamps to shine in each other's faces.

Aaron made us some coffee, we ate some M&M's and drifted off to La La Land.


The next morning we got up and brushed our teeth in this stream.

Then we just sat on the rocks in the warm sun for a while and zoned out while Dan told us about how cold he had been the night before.

Apparently he bought a new sleeping bag for the trip, but accidentally (I think) got a "Junior" size. This only came up to about his nipples once he got inside of it. Since the temperature got down to 45 degrees that night, Dan battled the cold by pulling his socks onto his arms and wearing his t-shirts over his face.

Yikes.


Anyways, after a hot, revitalizing breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, we set out to take over one of the nearby lean-to's.


We ended up with this great one that overlooked Lake Colden.

Still feeling lazy, we plopped down and played some Whist.


I had to re-learn how to play, thus Aaron and I got whipped by Vince and Dan.

Dammit.

At one point shortly afterwards, this happened:

You start to do strange things when you're out in the remote woods.

Vince went for a swim in the freezing cold lake.

And then he headed out to another lake to do some fishing.


The rest of us stayed put: my knee hurt, Dan's everything hurt, and Aaron wanted to read a book.

Instead of reading though, big Aaron went down to the lake and filtered some water for us to drink while Dan and I played frisbee.


After about a half hour of this, Dan somehow convinced us that it would be awesome to somehow beat Vince to the fishing lake. He swore that we could do it. I had my doubts, but soon we were off, racing through the forest.

At some point an hour later, and with the help of the forest ranger (seriously), we found him in this dried out lake bed.


I totally couldn't believe it.


Supposedly, according to that ranger, the lake was somewhere in here. I also heard that the Pet Sematary was in there too.

We ended up giving up on this mystical fishing spot after a while since the forest became literally impenetrable.

Somehow we made it back to our camp before it got dark.

Just in time for Dan to crawl into his junior sleeping bag.

How awesome is that thing? You can tell he's pretty excited about sleeping with socks on his arms again.


Well, we all made it through the night to face a chilly upstate New York morning.


After a lowly breakfast of only a Cliff bar each, we raced off onto the trail home.

Of course we stopped for pictures along the way.


Probably the oddest thing that we came across along the way was this memorial stone that was literally in the middle of nowhere, six miles from the nearest road.


We were all perplexed as to how and why this was here.

Well, thanks to the mighty internet, you can find out about David Henderson here.

Pretty crazy.


After this point, we started to get hungry.

We nearly sprinted the six miles back to our car with dreams of hot coffee and eggs dancing in our heads (well, at least that's what I was thinking about).

About two hours later, we made it.

Here's Dan signing us out of the trail.

Victory!

And what better way to celebrate such a great trip?


Yep.


In all, it was a fantastic time. My foot still hurts for some reason, but I'd go again in a heartbeat. This time I'd bring some pants though.