Time for another Adirondack hike! Saturday was a good day for hiking, not so great for biking because it was pretty windy.  We chose the Prospect Mountain hike, which is one of the most popular trails. It starts pretty much in the village of Lake George, so easy to get to. 

It starts with a staircase to the bridge that crosses the Northway. Lots of steps!

Then the bridge over the highway:

I must admit here that my heart was pumping faster crossing this than going up all those steps. You can see right through the bottom!

On the other side, the trail started going up right away. It was pretty rocky, too.

The trail isn’t too long. It is an out and back route. The length of the hike as the crow flies is 3 miles, but it ended up about 5 miles. You never quite go straight up, but because of the rocks you go back and forth, which adds a lot of steps.  The elevation rise is around 1500 feet, which is a lot of climbing.

The trail crosses one more road, which was a nice resting spot.

Thumbs up – going well so far!  After crossing this road, then we hit the really steep part.

See John looking up to where we will be climbing? LOL.  It was challenging.  There were a fair number of people on the hike in the morning as well. It was in the upper 40s, which was kind of nice considering how hot and sweaty we were getting while climbing. I can’t imagine doing this on a hot and humid day.

There was leapfrogging of people because of the stopping and resting during the climb.  People coming down would say “You’re almost there”. I’m thinking their idea of almost there was not my idea of almost there.

Finally we made it and the views were worth it!

We started down there at the water level. Now that was a hike! The interesting thing is that you can actually drive to the summit here, which is why it is a popular destination. There used to be a cable tram that would bring people up to the hotel that once stood here. This is the last remnant of the tram line:

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There is a really nice picnic area with tables and outdoor grills. I would love to come back and picnic here.

More views:

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After a rest and snack, it was time to head down. It was almost as hard coming down. The flat rocks with pine needles were actually a little slippery. Good thing it wasn’t wet!

We passed some kind of memorial. Not sure what it is for as there was no signage.

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Rocky from top to bottom!

Then back across that scary bridge. Wave to the nice people!

Seriously – that bridge was really scary to me.

When I checked my health app after we were done, it said we climbed 99 flights! That’s a lot of stairs 😀  Our legs are feeling pretty sore today after all that climbing. It was definitely a challenging hike.

Sunday I did a little solo hike. The afternoon was really nice and I decided I wanted some foot work instead of bike work.  Since I was going alone, it’s all about safety and I went to our local nature preserve, which you can’t get lost in and is really close to home.

It was a sea of Joe Pye weed and goldenrod:

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There are several loop trails through this totaling 2-2.5 miles all together. I went around most of them with a little doubling back. I brought the Rebel along for pictures today. The preserve is as flat as can be, so carrying camera gear is not a problem.

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Enjoying the day!

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I heard lots of Jays, saw some Red winged blackbirds, but no turkeys. We do see turkeys around when riding sometimes.

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Sea o’ ferns:

I don’t know what made this hole, but I didn’t want to stick my camera in there!

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Back out in the goldenrod meadow. It was full of bees.

My nose was running a little bit during this hike.

All in all a beautiful day. Between my other walking and intervals, I ended up with about 7 miles on the day!  It’s good to be active.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

We had company this weekend and one of the requests for things to do was go on a hike.  We looked for easier trails and settled on Pilot’s Knob, although it might have been a bit more challenging that we expected. 🙂

The trail head is about 10 miles from home, so not very far at all!

It started out somewhat more uphill that we were anticipating, but it was shaded and pretty.

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The trail was quite well marked and well traveled. It wasn’t quite as rocky as Sleeping Beauty, but still a little challenging with tree roots.

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We hit a fork in the trail, both of which led to the gazebo.

We weren’t sure which to take, but then someone coming down said the trail was a little easier and more interesting to look at, so we went to the right.

My love:

Finally up to the clearing and the gazebo 1 mile up.

We had some protein bars and fruit here and enjoyed the view!

That’s Lake George.

I finally got my first butterfly shot of the year up here. This was taken with the 300 zoom.

After a rest, our friend wanted to continue on, so we headed on the blue trail to the waterfall, which was supposed to be dry at this time of year:

We haven’t had a ton of rain lately and even the normally muddy areas were dry:

We didn’t have to walk on that to stay dry.  This is my favorite shot of the guys right here:

We made it to the waterfall (at a total of 2.5 miles from the start), which was pretty dry – obviously or I wouldn’t be standing in it!:

Itty bitty trickle of water.

This is mostly full in the spring. I would like to come back and see that.  We decided to turn around and hike back at this point.  Back to the gazebo and back down the orange path:

I found a little toad friend.  I actually almost stepped on him!

It was a bit of a steep descent, so I packed the camera away after that so I wouldn’t drop it or if I slipped it wouldn’t get damaged.  Didn’t care about me, just save the camera!

We did about 5 miles of hiking.  It was a good hike and I would do this one again as well.  Although, there are so many great trails yet to explore.

We had a post hike treat!

It’s not a cupcake, but still pretty darn good 😀

We finally did our first official Adirondack hike.  We took the Sleeping Beauty trail in Adirondack National Park. The trail head was about 40 minutes from our house, so not bad – although we were up early 😀

We knew the hike would be around 6 miles, but it turned out closer to 7 miles since we took a loop around Bump’s pond instead of straight up and down.

Partners in crime for the day:

This is my new hiking stick I got at the art festival a couple months ago.

We actually had to walk 1.5 miles just to get to the trail head from this parking lot.  That was the easy part, then it got pretty rocky and hilly.

It was humid, but we were in the shade of trees for the majority of the climb, which was really nice.  I was sweating like the dickens, though.  That humidity thing.

The trail was really well marked and a fair number of people on it as well. Lots of people had the same idea of an early hike to beat the heat!

Lots of neat pictures to take. I won’t post too many since I don’t want to flood your reader 😀

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Finally we saw a happy sign!

And what a view it was:

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That’s Lake George down there where we bike to all the time.

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Here is a little movie of the view from the summit:

We ate some lunch at the top and then headed back down taking a loop around Bump’s Pond.

If we had known it was going to add that extra mile, we wouldn’t have done it because we were pretty darn tired when we got to the bottom.  Although Gryffon was really happy to take a swim.

I think we should have brought more food, but otherwise it was suited pretty well for us since we bike a lot.  It was a little bit long of a hike – and next time we do this one, we will skip the pond.  It would be such a gorgeous view from the summit during fall colors!

Finally – a trip away! It was a short one. My birthday was Friday and I managed to get in my 47 miles of riding. That was a bit tiring, but very good to get it done!

Saturday morning, we left for an overnight trip to Vermont.  We stopped first in Rutland to do shopping. Poor John, I dragged him to all the Vintage shops I could find 😀

I did manage to score a couple chairs at a sale from an auction house. 

The one on the left is going to get painted a color and go into the garden with a flower pot where the missing seat is. The one on the right will get reupholstered for the inside.  Grand total for both chairs was $4.  Can you believe that?  One was $3 and and one was $2, but then the lady said it was $4 for both.  Who can pass up a deal like that?  Not me  🙂

We booked a place in Killington at Mountain Valley Resort, which is a B&B.  What a gem this place is!

Our room was lovely looking out the back:

Our hosts were very nice.  They also told us about a hiking trail just down the road, so we headed down to check it out.  It started in the marshy area with a nice bridge:

Then we got to the climbing area. You could head 2 different ways and we took the shorter one to the falls since it was in the evening.

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So beautiful and what a nice treat to find!

We decided the next morning to go back up there and hike the other side. After a wonderful breakfast from our hosts, we headed back.

This climbed up quite a bit.

Turns out it is part of the Appalachian trail!

It went on for quite a while going up.

It’s a very well marked trail as well.  Our new hiking shoes did great, too!

We could have gone on for a long, long time, but we weren’t really set up for a whole morning of hiking. We ended up doing about 3 miles.

I would for sure come back here to hike these trails again.  I love my biking first and foremost, but we are enjoying the hiking 😀

It was also great to get away and relax for the weekend!