Phelps Mtn

We had hiked this on February 21, 2004. It was Mark, Chris, Justin, Derek, and myself. It was an over cast day with snow flurries. I cannot remember what the temps were, but I don't recall being overly cold. The trail from the Loj was hard packed all the way to Marcy dam. When we had hiked this Marcy dam was still intact, it has since been destroyed by hurricane Irene, and the remnants removed. The Van Hoevenberg trail from the dam to the junction with the trail for Phelps was not as hard pack, and had fresh snow on it. This is a nice trail especially under snow pack since all the rocks and roots are covered. This is a nice relief with tired legs. The trail to Phelps is uneventful until you just start to come out of the trees where we were presented with a nice ledge of flow ice. We used crampons for this section. It does not take long to reach the summit which is basically a ledge with a view of Marcy. We did not have any views since it was all over cast with snow showers.

Cascade & Porter Mountains

On February 1, 2004, Derek and I set out to hike these two mountains. Unlike the first attempt we were prepared to hike our first of the 46 high peaks. It was a beautiful day with clear skies and temperatures expected to be in the low 30's. It certainly made for a beautiful day. We started on the trail at 7:45am on a very hard packed trail. We had taken a few breaks along the way. At the intersection with the trail to Porter we decided to go over to Porter mountain first. We had hoped to be the first on the summit, as there is always something nice about being first on the summit for the day, I'm not sure why. That didn't matter because we were eventually passed by a gentlemen about 10 minutes before the summit. His name was Tony, and he was originally from England. He had traveled that day up from Ithaca. He stated he was already a 46er, and was working on his winter round of the 46. We had a break on Porter, enjoyed the views and then set off to climb Cascade. We reached Cascade summit at 12:50pm stayed for about an hour then headed back down. We were back at the car for 3pm feeling energized, it was awesome. Submitted to Historian 2/18/04