At fourteen miles, 4400 ft in elevation gain (292 floors climbed aka 3 empire state buildings), reaching a peak of 4600 ft (Nippletop) and over 8 hours in duration...This was one of the toughest hikes I have done. Ill start by first saying that I should not have gotten drunk the night before. This did not help me get off on the right foot for the day, more on that later. We actually began the hike pretty late in the day, far later than we planned. We began around 12 pm. We planned to summit Dial first, as we hear Nippletop offers better views, so we took St. Huberts Trail-head off of Lake Road. The first couple miles of the trail proved to be quite steep as we gained a significant amount of elevation in a very short time (see graph below). This is where the previous night really came into play for me. As I was exerting myself I became extremely nauseous, resulting it a high level of discomfort for me. As you can expect I found a rather blunt solution to my problem.
After my *ahem* ejection of matter I began to feel ready for the rest of the hike. About 2 hours in we got a great view from Bear mountain of both Nipple-top and Dial (they all reside on the same ridge line). After a momentary stop we continued on. The one thing that proved to be key for the hike was how humid and hot it was. At no point during the accent of both 46ers did any of us stop sweating. Thus it became apparent how important the need to pack sufficient enough water. After another hour or so of sweaty, dirty, climbing we reached Dial Mountain, which just has a large boulder. As expected the view is far from the best but you get about 180 degree view of the Adirondacks. It may not have been much of a view but we were all glad to take a few minutes to rest. After about ten minutes we decided to continue the rest of our hike and have lunch atop our second mountain.
Moving sweataly along we reached Nippletop at around 4 and a half hours in. As you can see from the panorama above the view was beautiful and the lunch I ate was just as good. I was starving. We were all tired but after an hour and some storms started to roll in, we decided to get a move on back down to the car. The decent was very steep as you can see in the graph, but we were able to get down in about 3-4 hours. All our feet were hurting but it was a hell of a hike and I cant wait to put another one under my belt.
