N is for A Nice Walk

We decided to take a nice walk in the woods last week. From our front yard we can see two of the more popular mountains for hiking in the lower Adirondacks - Buck Mountain and Sleeping Beauty Mountain. For years we've said that we should take a hike up one or the other, and last week we decided that we would.

Buck Mountain rises 2,330 feet from Lake George and offers some great views of the lake once you reach the summit. There are two ways to the top - one coming from Pilot Knob Road on the lake side, and the other off or Shelving Rock Road from our side of the mountain. We chose that way to make our climb.

In reality we were planning to hike Sleeping Beauty Mountain that day. Both can be reached from Shelving Rock Road. We began our day with a drive up the always interesting Hogtown Road to Shelving Rock. Once there, we passed the trailhead for Buck Mountain, and when we saw that it was "only" a 2.5 mile hike, and decided to give that one a try first. Armed with a bottle of water and a compass, off we went to follow the yellow trail markers.

The walk from that side of the mountain started out easy enough. We had driven quite a ways up the mountain to get to the trailhead, so it seemed we would have a short, straight walk to the summit. Were we ever wrong!! After walking for about 2 hours, we began to climb - up and up and the more we climbed, the more we began to doubt if we were even on the right trail. The summit seemed elusive, and we thought we had easily walked the 2.5 miles several times over by then. After another 15 minutes or so, and after an ever steeper climb, we decided that we must have made a wrong turn and wearily turned and headed back down the mountain.

After walking down for about an hour, we were quite suddenly overtaken by another hiker coming down the mountain - only the third person we had seen all day.He seemed quite familiar with the trail, so after talking for a short while we asked him if we had indeed been on the wrong trail, and he told us that no, the summit was probably just a bit further up the trail from where we had turned back. His suggestion - which we didn't follow - was to go back and keep on hiking till we reached the top!

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