We had a very mild weather weekend here. In fact, it was 48 degrees Saturday morning when we got up!  There was hiking planned for the day and the trail was Berry Pond. There was supposed to be a beaver colony on the pond and I wanted to see that. We had nixed our original hike route as we thought it was going to be a bit much for the day, but we underestimated this hike LOL!

It took about 20 minutes or so to drive to the trail head. There is a large complex of trails at the Lake George Recreational Center to choose from.  We were thinking based on the mileage given by the map it should have been about 4.5 miles, 2.7 for the blue trail and 1.7 for the orange trail.

It was very quiet on the trail. We were the only ones on it for almost the whole day.

.

This lean-to overlooked West Brook, which was probably my favorite part of the whole hike. The stream was covered in moss and looked so pretty.

.

.

.

I could have just parked myself by this with a picnic lunch and spent the day here. But, we had plans!

The trail began to really climb. We had no idea it was going to be such a grade at times.

It was certainly a workout climbing.

We reached a summit outlook. This is the west side (?) of Lake George:

We kept going and going waiting to hit the orange trail. We finally came across where it met the blue trail.

The orange trail went to Berry Pond itself and the beaver colony.

You could see a lot of old and new beaver damage.

.

Here is an old dam:

There were lots of lily pads on the pond.

I think that one and this picture are among my favorites of the day.

We finally found the new beaver dam on the other side of the pond. It is really huge!

It was kind of weird being below the level of the pond on this side of the dam.

Very cool. We didn’t see any beavers, though. I was hoping to see the, but I guess they were sleeping 😀

From this point, the trail looped back onto itself back to the start.

We ended up with 7.5 miles! I don’t know how that extra 3 miles happened LOL. I had 19,000 steps on my phone. That’s a lot of walking.  I would do this hike again, but I think we might take a shortcut for part of it.