I almost made a huge mistake Friday. I took the day off to go hiking since it was looking like the last opportunity to get out and see the fall colors before they were gone. I decided to go hike a stretch of the tongue mountain range on the west shore of Lake George – which piece I figured I would play by ear. There was a loop trail that judging by the map would be about 8 miles. Turns out that was as the crow flies, not as the Dave and Soolin hike. I got there at around 11 and hiked on the west side of the range along the lake. This is a gorgeous, relatively easy hike, most of which is right alongside the water. Soolin was in heaven – plenty of swimming to be had, falling leaves everywhere to chase, and chipmunks which she thinks are squeaky toys. We had a blast hiking in. By 1:30 we were at the southern tip of the range and had hiked about 6 miles. I stopped briefly for a snack then had to decide – back the way we came, or up into the range to complete a loop. This is where I made a mistake – I should have headed back the way we had come. Instead we headed up into the range, with three peaks to summit ahead of us.

I knew as I set off I would have to make good time in order to make it back before dark so Soolin and I kept a brisk pace. What I didn’t know was how rugged the terrain would be. Andrew and I had done the northern section of the same trail earlier in the year and while there were some steep cardio buster sections of that trail, overall it was a fairly easy 8 mile hike. Not so the southern section. There were tons of scrambles up and down ledges, boulder and scree fields, and in and around crevices in the rock faces. Normally I love this stuff but by the time I got to the second peak of the three it was after 3 and I knew I was in trouble. Soolin and I entered into forced march mode, which was especially tough since I had already been pushing us hard and my hips were hurting, my knees were literally killing me, plus I was occasionally cramping up and having to stop and massage the backs of my legs.

By the time we made it to the side trail to 5th Mountain peak’s lean to, I was completely shot and could barely walk downhill because my knees were so sore. It was a little after 4. Even so I decided to head down, which was about a 2.5 mile hike but all downhill, rather then spend the night with little food and only a liter of water. It was the right call – I made it to my car at 5:40 – by 6, it was dark. If anyone had seen me coming down the mountain they would have thought I was a 75 year old ex-football player because of how hobbled I was by my knees. It’s a good thing I had done this last stretch of the trail a number of times since it let me shave off a good bit of time by ignoring the switchbacks and just blazing straight down since I sort of knew my way.

That all sounds pretty dramatic, but for family who might be inclined to worry about such things – the worst that would have happened is Soolin and I would have spent a thirsty night huddled around a fire in 5th Mountain’s lean to. I’m still mad at myself even though the consequences would have been negligible though. I should know better, and I should be better prepared. I keep a small emergency kit but I had forgotten the flashlight in my car and really I need more gear than I currently have, particularly water treatment gear.

So, that’s my big adventure. I’ll put up pics in my album as soon as I have time to prepare them (I’ll post again when I do). I’ll be back next summer to hike that lakeside bit of the trail again, that place would be perfect for an overnight trip or two next summer.

The final tally btw was somewhere between 14-17 miles. In terms of marked trails it should have been around 13, but Soolin and I took several side jaunts in the beginning so she could swim and so I could check out the absolute southern tip of the range. Confusing matters was the fact that before the batteries died my GPS claimed we had already done 14 miles and that was at the second peak’s summit with at least 4 miles to go back to the car.

Check out the pumpabike (though beware of their retarded flash-only website design, I’d love to get the designer of this one out behind the woodshed). Another hydrafoil design, this one a trike concept where you hop up and down to propel the vehicle. It’s a lot more expensive (~$1,000 USD) than the last one I linked to but it also looks like a better, sturdier design. It’s worth dealing with their idiotic website design to check it out.

For those of you who have tried and failed to comment, I’ve fixed this. For now the site requires registration to use, in an attempt to get me out of having to do comment moderation. If no one is commenting after a few weeks because you’re too apathetic to bother registering I’ll revisit the issue. If you’re concerned about privacy or me selling your email address to spammers or something, you have my solemn vow: I will not sell or otherwise provide access to your contact information, including your email address, to anyone. Having said that, I’d also advise anyone commenting on weblogs to just bite the bullet and get a spam account if you don’t already have one, or use a service like gmail that does a really good job of filtering out the spam.

Sorry about the growing pains, it’s supposed to be another crappy weekend this weekend, meaning I should have plenty more time to work on the site.

A brief word about the site’s new appearance. It’s interesting – basically since I started blogging I’ve done a somewhat regular redesign of the site which among other things let me exercise my technical skills, but this time around, partly due to a lack of familiarity with WordPress and partly due to the change in focus of my day to day job (I’m much more of a sys admin these days and much less of an html geek), I’m going to use someone else’s templates, at least for a while. The one you’re looking at is not the one I will neccesarily stick with though, sometime over the next couple of days I’ll post links to the ones I am considering and let you all decide. Maybe by xmas I’ll get around to building out my own templates again, I’ve got a few things in mind but no time to puzzle out WordPress’s structure so that I can do it on my own. Yet.

I can finally get some work done. Spent a ton of time on the new server today – wordpress, mediawiki, mysql, phpmyadmin and a host of dependent packages are now up and running on the new box. Tonight I’m going to try importing my weblog data – if that goes well, all that remains is working on the image gallery data.

Speaking of which – I posted three new galleries here from hikes in the adirondacks. One is old, from the early spring, which I had forgotten to post – Vanderwhacker Mountain, and the other two are from the past two weeks – Treadway Mountain and Snowy Mountain. Check them out – tons of cool photos including a lot of panoramic shots and psuedo-3d quicktime VRs of the summits.

Ok, this is completely impractical, but I so want one of these. It’s a hydrofoil equipped kayak that aims to break the human powered boat speed record, yet be available for purchase at prices even I can afford. If these things come in under $1500 or so, expect to see me on the hudson and Lake George next summer cooking along at 10kph.

…would probably include a young student touching off the explosion that helps fragment a granite rockface so a new road can be laid down. I witnessed just this along with a small crowd of students this summer. Hard to believe but true. My employer is building new campus housing and some of the area has only a few feet of topsoil on top of granite, so they had to do some blasting before the could excavate. I got stopped by the road crew as they prepared to set off one of the explosions. A small crowd of students was there to watch, and the guy with the detonator coaxed one of the young women watching to come out into the road and flip the switch. There was a strangely satisfying deep bass ‘whump’ and the tire mats leaped into a jumble in the air as the students leapt back and cheered. On the one hand I don’t really find fault with this. On the other, I’m sure if the wrong people had seen it (or the right, depending on your perspective) heads would have rolled and possibly lawsuits would have followed.

I will also note that witnessing this all at close hand didn’t make me any more comfortable about being adjacent to this kind of work. Folks were smoking within 20-30 feet of the trailer marked all over with ‘this is explosive stuff, danger!’ stickers where they were storing the materials, and I was only 30-40 feet back from the field of tire mats they used to cover things up.