July 3, 2012 - Allen Mountain

No big parties planned for Independence Day, so Jack and Rich packed up and headed to the mountains for a couple of days to try and top some of the most difficult hikes on our list.  With good weather anticipated, we targeted Allen Mountain first.  Only a couple of cars at the Upper Works trail head when we arrived, and the register told us everyone else was going towards Mt. Adams.  We had a easy Hudson River crossing, aided by the lack of recent rain.  However, it was a little more interesting trying to traverse the "floating" bridge across Lake Jimmy, as some of the sections were extremely loose and unstable.

We made good speed through the meadows and swamps past the juncture for Mt. Adams, but Jack quickly dubbed this area the Valley of Death because of the incessant flies and bugs that were torturing him.  To make it worse, the vegetation was pretty thick and damp from the previous night's rain, so we quickly got pretty wet.  Once we arrived at the trail register that signalled the end of the marked trail, it had also gotten hot (just in time for the meat of our climb).

It was not difficult to follow the trail up the stream bed that now runs through the slide on Allen's west slope, but the rocks were extremely slippery and there was a lot of blow-down that we had to scramble over or under.  It took us almost 3 hours to track the final 4 miles to the summit, and when we got there we were rewarded with more bugs.  Some of the out-croppings offered views of Redfield and Skylight to the North and the Santanoni's to the West. We only encountered two other groups on Allen; both had hiked down from the campsites around Lake Colden.

We made much better time on the return trip, but it was still a really long trail.  Either the bugs were a little better when we got back to the Valley of Death, or we had just gotten used to them crawling down our backs and flying into our ears.  The only real problem that we encountered was when we got back to Lake Jimmy.  The sections of the bridge had become decoupled, and one section actually sank when we stepped on it, getting us wet up to our knees.  That was not a big deal since we were less than a mile from the car, but with a hike planned the next day, we were assured wet feet all day.

Once we were done, we drove down to Indian Lake to see Uncle Rick's new house and spend the night with them.  The total hike was about 18 miles in 11:30; a long trip for only one peak.  Thirty-three (33) High Peaks down; 13 to go.