Three Times A Lady
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Step into the light...
For those of you who may be unfamiliar (and really, how could you be?), let's do the numbers.
The conventional walk out is approximately seven miles. The vertical gain is 9,000'+. Almost all of the traverse is on a ridge in excess of 4,000'. The total traverse clocks in at just under 21 miles round-trip, if you walk or ski out via Mt. Marcy to the ADK Loj or South Meadow. For further and extraordinarily boring details, consult the following maps and profiles. I should state that James and I elected to cut out two minor peaks, Hedgehog and Lower Wolfjaw, from the traverse start, which is essentially just an approach. We had... done them both twice before, for starters. We decided for this trip that we would drive in to The Garden and take the trail up to the Wolfjaws Col, gain the Range there. The difference in total mileage is trivial, less than a mile on the approach, and we'd also decided to add Haystack to the traverse, which added more vertical gain overall and made the apex of the traverse more challenging. I don't feel that we cheated in any way - in fact we did a harder variation, but some purists might ding us for blowing off the initial couple of humps. Whatever. Our walk out was more like 9+ miles, since we came back out to The Garden via the Phelps Trail (total mileage was 23.1 miles - several miles longer than the conventional traverse). But we'll get to all of that. |
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