Snowy Mountain

Today Randy and I decided to hike up Snowy Mountain. It's next to Indian Lake and is a 3.4 mile hike in, 6.8 round trip. The mountain is 3899 feet, just shy of being one of the NYS 46'er mountains. Our total ascent was over 2000 feet. Anyway, today is just a perfect hiking day. Moderate temps, low humidity, sunny, everything a hiker can ask. We signed into the trail register at 0810. The 1st part of the trail is relatively easy. My knee is still bothering me and I also wanted to test out how painful the nearly healed blister and achilles tendons are. So I was going kind of slow and careful. Anyway, we did have to cross some pond on boards and logs. A little scary for me since my bog incident on the NPT. But we managed to get across OK. The climb got really steep and rocky about 1 mile from the summit. It took us 3 hours to get to the top but boy, is the view worth it. We also found the fire tower and climbed up that. Great views from all around. We went back down to the "ledge" with the view and had some lunch. We left about 1200 and weren't 15 minutes on the way down when we encountered a couple coming up. After that I think there were about 5 or 6 more groups of 2 or more coming up the trail. Some starting close to the time we were nearly back to the trail register. A late start but what the heck, it doesn't get dark till 9pm. We got back to the register and signed out at 2:40pm. A pretty good trek. My feet are a bit tired. The back of my heels didn't bother me at all. The knee (actually both knees) behaved and I didn't try any fancy manuvers with them either. The blister site was a little sensitive but also didn't cause any problems.