Hiking 5:00:00 [3] 12.0 mi (25:00 / mi) +1473m 18:06 / mi
shoes: Brooks Running 28
Hiking up Lower and Upper Wolf Jaw Mountains with Sam and Zephy in the Adirondacks! Woohoo! Summer! Time for Adirondack High Peaks! We were hoping to go for a full weekend of backpacking, but, alas, I had too much work backlogged to be gone for the full weekend. I'm hoping to dig myself out of this work hole this weekend and next week, but I guess we'll see. Anyway, instead we decided to do a VERY full day and get out for some high peaks. We got up at 5am, had breakfast, and scurried out before the Cornell commencement traffic could pick up. We managed to nab a parking spot, and set out on a mostly unused trail up to Lower Wolf Jaw (the more popular trails don't allow dogs). The trail was kind of hilariously steep and hard to follow, but we didn't encounter many other people, so that was good. The hike was pretty easy for the first 4 miles or so. The last ascent to Lower Wolf Jaw had a super steep slide section that Zephy had a bit of trouble with, but we managed to get up it without too much trouble and then it was just a quick zip over to the Lower Wolf Jaw summit. There was a bit of a view, and we had half of our sandwiches before continuing on to Upper Wolf Jaw.
We knew there was a notch between the two mountains, but we hadn't fully appreciated the extent of the descent, which was like 700 ft. before we started back up to Upper Wolf Jaw. The view from Upper Wolf Jaw was quite nice, and we had more lunch up here. Our original plan was to continue on to Anderson and Gothics, but the map Sam was using to plan the hike was kind of wrong on length, and we realized we weren't going to have time or energy to do the full hike, so we decided to turn back at Upper Wolf Jaw. This was a good choice because we were completely out of water 3 miles from the bottom. Whoops. Anyway, we got back through the giant backclimb (with people who did not have a dog and were doing a loop instead of an out-and-back very confused as to why we were doing the less awesome Lower Wolf Jaw twice in a day), and scootched our way down the super steep slide, and then it was just down, down, down, down, down to the car. Super fun hike and our first High Peaks above 4000ft that weren't in the clouds! Awesome day!!