Or: “Your name wouldn’t happen to be DIX, would it?”
Dix Mountain: 4857′, Difficulty: 5 (out of 7), 13.2 miles, 10 hours. This COULD have been a day hike, however…We’ve had our sights on packing in and camping in order to do a peak for a while now. We’ve done car camping, but we’ve never packed in. It has always seemed like such a big deal. You need so much equipment (and it’s so expensive) and you need to be strong enough to carry it and you have to worry about whether or not you’ll get a lean-to and blah, blah, blah. We were sort of chicken. We were also worried about parking at the trailhead since it was Memorial Day Weekend and FINALLY, we were nervous about the black flies.
However, talking with our friend John helped. He assured us we could do it. And between him and his daughter (and my running partner), we were able to get together the equipment we needed. We bought a tent and a pad, but everything else, we already had or we borrowed. The kids are old enough now to carry a substantial amount (Oldest daughter carried about 31 pounds, our son had 28 and our youngest had 12.) I carried 35 pounds, my husband carried 40. It was a hot and humid day, but we were able to pack in 4 miles in 3 hours to the Boquet River lean-to with no problem.
As I mentioned, we packed in on the Saturday of Memorial Day—not only did we have no problem parking at the trail head, we couldn’t believe our luck when we got to the lean-to and found it recently vacated! Suh-WEET! Of course, our oldest daughter’s response was, “I carried in this stupid tent for NOTHING???” Hee hee.
We unpacked and had all kinds of fun at our little campsite, including: trying to start a fire with a flint (we tried for THIRTY minutes and could NOT do it—I think Bear Grylls is a big, fat POSER), reading books (oldest daughter packed one in), playing in the creek, fun with pocket knives and, scaling Mt. Poopy (the outhouse—NOT fun, but necessary).
The weather was gorgeous, no wind, and (weird) NO BUGS. I was beginning to think we had stumbled on to some sort of strange parallel universe. There was almost a full moon and the night was so pleasant. We slept under the stars with the babbling of the creek next to us. Very nice.
We were up at dawn and ready to go at 7:00. The trail was excellent, in no small part due to the very dry conditions—that was nice for us, but NOT good for May. We had awesome views of the slide up Dix. I kept thinking, “God bless Teddy Roosevelt for Forever Wild in the ADK!”
I read somewhere that Dix is known as one of the hardest miles in the ADK 46. I agree. We gained 1600 feet of altitude in less than one mile. My gluts and quads can attest to it being tough. I’m glad I didn’t know how vertical it was when I was doing it. Next time I’m bringing a sled and a living will.
The kids are getting so much stronger. I’m officially now the slowest of the tribe. It took us three hours to the top. There were gorgeous views, even if it was windy.
We are 21ers.
After lunch on the peak, we began toward Hough. We had to climb the Beckhorn on our way there. This was terrifying for me. However, I sucked it up and got through it (with a lot of encouragement from the kids) and we went on our way. Sadly, we were about to be lost. We started going down, down, down (and wrong, wrong, wrong).
We had been descending for about two hours (with me thinking, even *I* am not THIS slow) when we realized that we were lost. We turned around to come back to the Beckhorn (yeah, I get to go back UP). We realize we’ve been out there too long to do Hough now. We won’t be getting our 22nd peak today. We’re bummed, but surprisingly, not as bummed as I thought we’d be. There will be time to do it in the future.
Now that we know we’re going back, we decide we want PIE. (Noonmark Diner, HELLO.) It’s a good motivator for the kids and we make it down in record time, pack up the camp in 30 minutes (wow) and hike out in two hours! We get to the Noonmark, sore and tired, with 15 minutes to spare until closing! Yeah! Blueberry pie a la mode all around.
I’m a little muddled as to times and such. Hike in: 4 hours. Hike up: 3 hours. Hiking around (lost) 2 hours. Hike back down: 2.5 hours? Hike out: 3 hours. Total hiking time: 14.5? Maybe. Not too bad for our first time with packs and getting lost, etc. I think we did more than the 13.2 miles.
It was a GREAT weekend, even though we didn’t get both peaks. Once again, I am astonished by my awesome family and so grateful we get to do this together!
