For my birthday this year I went to the Adirondacks again. This time I hiked Street and Nye. There is a river crossing, and I wasn't fully aware of what to expect. I brought a camp towel with the expectation that I would put my boots and socks in my bag, walk through, dry off, and continue on.
It was raining the entire day before, and some parts of the river were much, much deeper than it looked. And it was moving pretty fast.
The picture doesn't really show it, but they seldom do.
One of my companions learned the hard way how deep it was, and promptly took a bath. I found a few boulders I could jump to (trepidatiously, seeing that I refused to jump that distance barefoot, and failure meant landing in the water, boots and all). I successfully hopped across most of the river, while using trekking poles to gauge how deep it was the rest of the way.
Then I went up and back down. It was nice.
Getting back across the river, I figured I'd just go back across where I did before. Problem with that was, nobody could quite figure out where that was. My sopping wet companion just walked across while those of us that remained dry attempted to stay that way. I can say that I did just that.
Now as for the time it took... all the trail guides and apps said it took anywhere from 5 to 6 hours. It took us a fair bit longer than that. I'm positive these were written up by 18 year old freshman going for their degree in conservation or some other hippy diploma that can't fathom anyone not running full tilt up and down. Or maybe there was cocaine involved, either way these are not real people.
I had a good birthday.
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