Hiking Hackensack Mountain, NY
Great Barrington, MA to Tupper Lake, NY | Camping in Shelving Rock Area | Hiking Hackensack Mountain | Camping at Lake Eaton | July 2024
After our weekend in NYC, we spent one more full day at Curtis’ brother’s place in the Berkshires. We enjoyed spending time with them at home, in nature, and visiting their church. We especially loved getting to know Joel’s fiance better through many in depth conversations — she’s a wonderful person and we’re so excited to have her join the family!
On Monday morning, we said our goodbyes and got back on the road. We had one week left before Curtis’ next assignment in upstate New York, and we were eager to spend that time back in the Adirondacks! Our last visit to the area was cut short by Charlotte’s glaucoma, and we were now ready to return and make some good memories here to reclaim it as our ‘happy place’. On our way up, we stopped North of Albany to run a couple errands and stock up on groceries for the week, then continued up to the Shelving Rock area near Lake George. While driving around looking for a dispersed camping spot, we started to realize how busy this region could be even on a weekday, but luckily found a spot where we felt comfortable staying for the night. We ended up camping on the road that leads to Sleeping Beauty Mountain, but because of the heat and humidity decided to pass on hiking it or another peak for tonight. Instead, we just relaxed and walked Charlotte up and down the forest road.
The next morning, we started to make our way Northwest towards Tupper Lake. On our way, we decided to stop for a short hike to a peak that is on one of the many Adirondack hiking challenges, Hackensack Mountain. We navigated through the town back to the small trailhead at the end of a neighborhood road and prepared for the hike.
As we were beginning, we were the only ones here, but that didn’t last long. Shortly after we started hiking, several big 15 passenger vans pulled up and middle school aged boys started pouring out. Turns out we weren’t the only ones with the idea to hike this short peak this morning — it would seem that it was also on the agenda of one of the nearby summer camps. We tried to hurry Charlotte to get more of a head start, but there was no way she was going to walk fast enough to stay ahead of the large group — we weren’t counting, but it could easily be between 80-100 boys, with college aged guys leading the group.
Eventually, we just decided to move to the side of the trail while the long line of boys passed by, loudly chanting “HACK-EN-SACK! HACK-EN-SACK!” as they hiked. They just kept coming, mostly ignoring us, leaving Charlotte completely confused as to what was going on. And then, when about 90% of the group had passed and the final guys in the back were in front of us, all the leaders pulled out whistles and flags — the whistles screeching, the guys yelling “SIX FLAGS!!!” It turns out the whole hiking up Hackensack was a ruse, and the boys were actually going to spend the day at Six Flags, which they all seemed even more excited about. And so then we had to wait as the entire group turned around and returned to the trailhead, even louder than before. This was easily the most traumatic thing that’s happened to us on a hike. Once they were all gone, we just stood there in the silence, ears ringing, wondering what in the world just happened. I mean, at least we wouldn’t have to share the trail or summit with them anymore, but maybe if the leaders had put their few brain cells together, they could have been a little more considerate and decided to pull the whole Six Flags surprise before reaching us?
Anyway, we finally resumed our hike up to the peak. The trail was in good shape, not too rocky for Charlotte, and it really didn’t seem that long, so we hoped she’d be able to go all the way up. But the last stretch of trail became steeper and went up some rock slabs, and she was becoming less and less interested in continuing. The bugs were also out in full force, and they were worse when we were moving so slow. I told Curtis to go ahead and finish, that we could take turns summiting while I waited with Charlotte. Curtis continued, and after giving her some water, Charlotte turned around and started hiking back down the trail with great enthusiasm. I believed that the summit wasn’t much further, so I figured it was fine, that I’d go as far as she wanted until Curtis caught up, then retrace my steps back up.
As it turned out, the summit was further than either of us anticipated (or rather, Curtis was sure that there was a better view further up so he continued going past the summit looking for it) and Charlotte was even more motivated to get off this trail than I realized. So much so that Curtis didn’t even catch up until we were less than a quarter mile to the trailhead, and by that point I wasn’t even interested in basically hiking the entire thing again. And so we returned to the van, sweaty and ready to go start looking for a campsite. Curtis says I didn’t miss much anyway.
In our minds, the ideal situation for camping up here was to have the same spot for several nights, preferably with cell reception so we could work, and be close to trailheads so we could do more hiking throughout the week. But when we drove through the first dispersed camping area and found it completely full, with other vans and RVs also searching and turning around, we decided to find a campground where we could reserve a spot and not worry about searching and claiming other places. We ended up at Lake Eaton, which was a bit more than we wanted to spend, was full of RV’ers, and had pretty small sites, but still met our needs for the week and was close to some hikes that we wanted to do.
