Trap Dike

Couple of weekends ago Craig and I made a quick trip to the Adirondacks to climb the Trap Dike on Mt. Colden.

It’s a 5 mile approach on snowshoes to Avalanche Lake (favorite place in the world in winter), where the Trap Dike starts. Took us two hours to make the hike in.

The climb to the top is about 2,000 ft. Half of which is 3 pitches of ice, while the second half is exposed slab to the summit. The climb took us roughly 2 hours to the summit.

I was hoping to time the trip just right so that the climb wasn’t completely covered in snow, nor too wet and unfrozen. I think we managed that pretty well.

Like any slab climb it seemed to drag on forever, but we made it. The top was beautiful, clear, no wind and almost warm. We feasted on our lunch, then made the 3 hour decent back to our car. Overall the trip went 15 minutes over 8 hours. Not bad. A performance probably never to be repeated.

The next day we headed back to Chapel Pond and each lead Quinn the Eskimo.

After the previous days efforts, Quinn was much harder than we remembered. I had started off, decided it was too much, tried to back down, but finally decided to keep at it.

All in all another good trip.

See all the photos in the gallery here.

– b