Back in July of 2014, I went on a day hike in upstate New York’s Lake George Wilderness, at the southeastern edge of the Adirondack mountain range, that would expand on the typical Black Mountain Loop trail, traveling not only up and over the 2,649′ mountain, but also down to the shore of Lake George. From there, I planned on taking the Fishbrook Pond Trail as part of an extended loop back to where I began. Though I made it back to where I began, things didn’t go exactly as planned, and I’m glad they didn’t.
From the parking lot there is a one mile approach along a dirt road before you reach the trailhead. Most people follow the Black Mountain Loop, which takes you up to the peak of Black Mountain, and then down the other side where the trail skirts along part of the mountain’s southern base, past the Black Mountain Ponds and Lapland Pond, forming a seven mile looped trail that on average, takes about four hours to complete.
The area is popular for overnight and weekend camping, having a number of lean-to shelters around several ponds dotting the valley floor between the Black and Erebus mountains. Because of the close proximity to so many ponds, hiking these trails too early in the season isn’t advised, unless slogging through mud and newts is your thing.
I wasn’t satisfied with a seven mile hike, so I’d planned an extended loop of twelve miles, whose midway was Black Mountain Point, on the shore of Lake George. From there, I’d take the Fishbrook Pond trail past the northeast base of Erebus Mountain, skirting the northeast shore of Fishbrook Pond, and then pass by Millman and Lapland ponds on the way north, back to the trailhead. It was all going to take a little under seven hours to complete, by estimation.
Naturally, the one mile approach road is pretty boring, but it doesn’t take long before you reach the trailhead and start working up Black Mountain. The peak is confusingly underwhelming when you first reach it, about three-and-a-half miles into the walk. I wore some new boots that I hoped had broken in prior to this hike, but they weren’t, so I found a rock embedded with the peak’s U.S. Geological Survey marker and taped up my blisters. The view was hemmed in by pines that completely obscured everything, aided by a fenced in radio tower shed. My disappointment in the peak turned around when I got moving, because that’s when I discovered the peak’s view, and it was a good one. Just above me, on top of a very large group of boulders, a small cluster of people were having their lunch break near the base of a fire tower. On top of that rock the view could only have been better, but I left them to their peace.
[singlepic id=1 w= h= float=center]As I started down the mountain, the once wide trail tightened up from shrub growth, and started gaining a little congestion with a few people walking up from Lake George. At the base of the mountain the trail forked, and I decided to follow a short length of trail leading to the Black Mountain Ponds. At the first pond, I stopped to take a few pictures and then turned around to head back toward the fork, in order to make my way down to Lake George and to remain on course with the hike I’d planned. It was on the descent that I started feeling friction pain on one of my left toes, caused by my feet constantly jamming up against the top of the boots toe box.
Black Mountain Point is where I took a short snack break and watched the activity on Lake George for a few minutes. Leaving the Point, I followed a Jeep Trail along the shore for a short distance; just long enough to miss the Fishbrook Pond trail. I’d been looking for trail markers or the first trail leading away from the shore, and hadn’t seen either, so when I took the first obvious one I came to, it turned out to be the Ridge Trail. I’ll just have to blame distractions of the lake and turtles jumping off logs, alarmed by my intrusion of their sunbathing, with missing the right trail.
From an elevation of 329 feet above sea level, Ridge Trail headed straight up 2,527′ Erebus Mountain, just like the Fishbrook Pond Trail does. It wasn’t until I started heading south and still had a great view of Lake George in sight that I began to question where I was. The trail wasn’t supposed to do that, and by now, I wasn’t supposed to have a view of Lake George either. At this point I was about nine miles in and getting low on water.
[singlepic id=5 w= h= float=none]I had packed along two liters of water, but it was a pretty humid day. With most of the trail heading nearly straight up, or straight down a mountainside, I was drinking more water than normal. After discovering I was on the wrong trail, I could see on my map that the one I was on intersected with another that would get me back on track, so I kept going. There is one thing I’ve noticed about the trails in this area of the Lake George Wilderness, and it’s that outside of the main trails, they are poorly marked. It didn’t take long before I was mucking through a muddy marsh, devoid of trail markers, littered with blown down trees, tons of deer scat, and no sign of any trail. Even a visible game trail led straight toward a downed tree and then disappeared. The sparse markers, blow down, and crisp leaf cover help to hide the trail well, creating a navigational challenge at times, and this time, even though a short bushwhack east would have taken me further up and over Erebus Mountain, where another trail was waiting to get me back on course, a lack of confidence in my experience, painful blisters, dwindling water supply, high humidity, and time of day, had me taking the safest route of trails; the trails I had just walked. So, reluctantly I started to backtrack.
By the time I reached Black Mountain Point again, and the shore of Lake George, I was out of water, low on energy, and eleven miles into a hike that was only supposed to be twelve. There were still five miles left to go from here, and two of them were going to be right back up Black Mountain.
On the way back up the mountain most of my remaining energy disappeared, and it felt like I was walking about one-mile per hour. Mostly, because I probably was. The steep ascent was tough and I wasn’t in the kind of shape I needed to be to counter my navigational error. About halfway up, all I could think about was water and that’s one great thing about hiking in this region; there is no shortage of it. As if on cue, I could hear a nearby stream, cascading down from the Black Mountain Ponds above, where I filled up one of my one-liter Nalgene bottles. I have learned enough about the dangers of untreated water that even though I was on a day hike, I wasn’t risking giardia. without a water filter on me, I dropped a couple water treatment tablets in the bottle, but could only wait 30-minutes, instead of the recommended hour before taking my first swigs. Water has seldom been so good and its positive effect on my energy and freshly cramping leg muscles was instantaneous.
[singlepic id=6 w= h= float=none]With a fresh liter of water on me, I was at the fork in the trail I’d gone down a little way earlier. I knew the trail to the left, going up and over the peak, but I didn’t know the majority of the trail to the right that led past the Black Mountain and Lapland ponds. The sun was going to set in an hour and there was one thing I did know about the Ponds trail; it was flat.
I reached the car I’d parked at 10:00 a.m. just as the sun set around 8:30 p.m., and a hike that was supposed to cover twelve miles, metered in at sixteen. That last approach mile, the one that was fairly boring on the way in, was torture on the way out. It was a mile that went on and on and on. Looking back I’m really glad things turned out like they did. I was able to improve my hiking skills, push myself further than planned, and ultimately, got to spend ten hours, virtually alone in a beautiful wilderness.