McNaughton Cottage at the new parking area

We started our hike at 6:20 a.m. and, determined to make the most of the hiking day, blew right past the new historical signs (planning to take them in on the way back). We had a rather inauspicious start, taking the wrong path at the first junction, and found ourselves at Henderson Dam (luckily just 0.1 miles out of the way). Realizing this, we doubled back, and proceeded up Calamity Brook Trail, quickly taking a left onto Indian Pass trail. The trail was substantially narrower than we expected (only one-person wide) and was very overgrown. It was exceedingly muddy, which was no surprise, after all the rains we’d had. Regretfully, Alex couldn’t find his gaiters, which he’d been certain he packed. No one was on the trail but us. We remarked on the poor conditions of this “maintained” trail but realized that the inordinate rains not only made the trails messy and accelerated vegetation growth, but probably limited trail maintenance work and traffic on the trails. Mushrooms grew all over—another reminder of how wet it had been. Our pace was substantially slower than usual on terrain like this, and slogging through the mud became very tedious, and mentally exhausting. In fact, Alex quickly grew tired of it, and visibly ran low on energy (which I’ve rarely witnessed with him this early in a hike).

Luckily, the monotony was broken as we began a slightly steeper ascent about 4 miles into the hike, and huge rock outcroppings made the landscape more interesting. Around this point, another slightly wrong turn to the left proved serendipitous, as we found ourselves in a beautiful grotto filled with boulders dozens of feet tall, with myriad streams burbling over, under and through the rocks, echoing through some larger chambers. We realized that the trail seemed to disappear, and backtracked a bit to find where we’d veered off (although we were glad we did). In retrospect, I think this was near a spur trail to Wallface. The discs on the trees, combined with my AllTrails app, helped us stay on the trail at times, and we kept joking, “This is a maintained trail, huh?” a theme we’d repeat throughout the day. Along this stretch of the trail, we did come upon two sets of double ladders, the second one with an interesting, twisted shape. At least the ladder proved this was indeed a maintained trail.

Video of water coming through a cave-like rock jumble in our grotto

Twisted ladder along the trail

4.7 miles and 3 hours into our hike, we finally hit Summit Rock. This had been a “bucket list” item of mine for quite some time now. I’d heard about the great views of the valley from here and the imposing grandeur of Wallface looming above from this spot. Indeed, it was a beautiful spot, but I must admit, I’ve been spoiled by views from summits, and places like Avalanche Lake, and this was less impressive than I’d hoped. We weren’t exactly at the base of Wallface, but across a deep ravine from it, and views of the Santanonis to the south were good, but not as breathtaking as countless others. After a short break here, we finally reached our long-awaited junction with the Cold Brook Trail at 5.7 miles, and about 4½ hours.

Alex on “Summit Rock”, with the cliff of Wallface looming 1000 feet above

The Cold Brook Pass Trail was also very muddy and overgrown, inspiring more joking about “maintained” trails (Disclaimer: I later learned that this has not been maintained since Tropical Storm Irene in 1999.) The trail took us up above Cold Brook, and to the small cairn that marked the beginning of the ascent up Marshall just before 1:00 p.m. We’d been toying with a detour to see the plane crash site that’s less than a quarter of a mile up the trail from here with a largely intact plane, but decided to pass on it, since the hike was proceeding at a much slower pace than usual, and we were growing a bit weary. We’d almost missed the cairn, but AllTrails helped again, and confirmed that we were at the right place, just before I noticed the cairn around the other side of a small mound of earth where we’d crossed the stream.

Rock cairn on the right for the herd path, about 1.5 miles up the Cold Brook Pass Trail

At 7.2 miles in, we took our final turn for the ascent, and started our way up this “trailless” section on the northeast slope of the mountain. About 15 minutes into this climb, we encountered the first people that we’d seen since leaving the trailhead 7 hours earlier! The husband-and-wife couple chatted with us a bit and were impressed by our grit and sense of adventure for taking the route we chose. As we continued upward, we encountered two more sets of hikers. The ascent was steeper, but not the usual Adirondack rock scrambles, and it wasn’t all that difficult (unless I’m just used to this!). There were nice views of Iroquois looming behind us in the northeast. We reached the false summit, and began our descent into the col, when I cried out, “Oh no!”—the summit of Marshall loomed above us, still substantially higher than I’d expected. I was getting hungry, and had hoped to summit by 1:30, but now I saw that was very unlikely. The climb from the col was about 350’, and I began to move quite slowly, realizing I’d had very little food since breakfast, but determined to make it to the summit, and eat there.

At 2 p.m., we finally hit the summit after over 7½ hours of hiking. No one else was there, and we took some very quick selfies at the signed summit marker, then sought out a lunch spot. Boy, did we find one! A short spur that we’d passed on our way in led south to a phenomenal viewpoint. We were astounded by the vast vistas looking southeast that extended from Mount Colden to Panther Peak. Alex noted how we could see our entire route back to Henderson Lake from here. I fully enjoyed using my PeakVisor app, which uses augmented reality to show us what we were looking at. What a fabulous break for us. We found a great rock to perch on, took off our shoes, ate our lunches, and thoroughly took in the beautiful day, with dry air, puffy clouds, and temperatures around 60 degrees. I loved the fact that the slope down from here had no edges or ledges, so it was wonderfully relaxing. From our vantage point, we looked out over the heavily treed slopes. Eventually, we heard some others hit the peak behind us, and decided it was time to get going. We took a quick look at the more limited views off the northwest side, and the view a bit further up the trail, after climbing over the rock at the summit, but agreed that our lunch spot reigned supreme.

Loved the vista from here. You can see Alex in blue, with hat, sitting at our lunch spot.

We began our descent at 2:30 p.m. We knew there were several false trails on the eastern side of the mountain, but going down, it was fairly easy to keep a bead on where we needed to go. We hit a boggy area and lost sight of the trail for a few minutes but were able to quickly regain it. About two miles down, we passed a father with his daughter (about 11 years old) who were on their way up, after having done Cliff & Redfield, planning to do all three as a day trip. Wow! Impressive. There were lots of beautiful waterfalls cascading over the rocks as we continued down, and everything was incredibly lush and green. As we walked, we discussed options for our planned canoeing trip later this summer.

We hit the junction with Calamity Brook Trail at 4:30, turned right, continued down, and signed ourselves in/out at the Flowed Lands register. This trail was also incredibly muddy, though clearly much better maintained than any others we’d been on all day long. Just 10 minutes past the register, we stopped to visit the memorial to David Henderson, the owner of the Upper Works Iron processing facility, who accidentally fatally shot himself in 1845, while putting his gun back into his pack. Ironically, although we were exhausted, our feet ached, and we were eager to return to the car, we picked up the pace substantially, and did our last 4-5 miles at a pace of about 3-4 mph. We signed out at our initial register, and I grabbed photos of all the new OSI (Open Space Institute) signs at Upper Works to read “later”.

We were back at the car at 7:24 p.m. Just as we got back, a husband & wife couple came into the lot, proud to have just completed their 46 High Peaks. We excitedly congratulated them with smiling high-fives. This was not a complex hike, nor was it difficult or treacherous. It was absolutely exhausting for us, but we firmly believed that was due to the mud, and not the length or the trail itself. We evened our numbers up too. Alex now has 30 High Peaks under his belt, and I have only 10 peaks left to go. We took our time getting comfortable and made it back to the lake house at 8:45 p.m., where Richie greeted us with some burgers fresh off the grill.