1 Photo (below)

Maps

We needed a way down and this, by god, was it! 

We were dead tired.   We'd been hiking since 5:30 AM and it was now twilight, yet we were still high in the Dix Range en route to Macomb from South Dix.  Only Macomb was left.  Once over Macomb's summit we would descend via the West Slide which begins right Macomb's peak.  Once at the bottom of the slide we would follow Slide Brook down to the Slide Brook Lean-to and the RED trail leading to the Elk Lake trailhead.  I'd been down this route before.  ... A piece of cake!

We passed over the saddle between the summits of South Dix and Macomb summit and were some two hundred yards short of Macomb's summit when we noticed some cairns to our right marking a route over a broad expanse of open rock.  It went sharply downward, but it was clean rock with excellent footing.  Motivated by curiosity, fatigue, impatience, the late hour, and the hope that this route might save us time we made a sharp right turn and were "off to the races", following a steady succession of obvious cairns downward.  We left the S. Dix-Macomb ridgeline on a WNW heading and soon passed between the ridgeline and a knob just W of Macomb's summit.  

It was a poor-to-good herd path that dropped quickly.  Not far below 4000' elevation our path intersected a small brook.  Knowing it had to eventually flow into Elk Lake we followed the brook downward.  Soon, we were regularly passing from one side of it to the other.  The metric topographic map shows a branch of Lillian Brook that flows north away from the aforementioned knob.  We realized that this was the brook we were following.  It is a MUCH faster route down Macomb than the West Slide route.  

As we descended, at about the point where the slope became gentle, the trail started to fade out becoming increasingly difficult to discern.  Simultaneously,  we were clearly entering an area of  severe and almost impenetrable blow-down, a product of Hurricane Floyd which had passed through here the year previous.  But we could hear what we knew to be the main course of Lillian Brook at some distance north from us.  Our compass said we were running parallel to its downstream course.  That was good!  

But dark had arrived and the blow-down had become horrendous in every direction.  Full-grown trees were piled often 5-10 feet high, criss-crossed in every direction.  There was not so much as a hint of a path.  It was total devastation and we were .  We were climbing through walls of fallen trees.  Just finding a way to go ten more feet through the blow-down required, first, study and, then, trial and error movement forward, meaning up-and-over or down-and-under the debris.  This was all anyone could have done without a helicopter.  Our hearing told us, though, that we were still paralleling Lillian Brook on our right and that if we stayed on the westerly bearing we were on, we would have to intersect the RED Dix Range Trail someplace between Slide Brook Lean-to and Lillian Brook Lean-to.  

At 11:30 PM we had been hiking for over 18 hours, having started out from the Elk Lake trailhead at about 6 AM.   Much of the hike had been in intermittent rain, we were very tired yet we had not yet made it back to the RED trail that ran along Elk Lake's south shore.  We certainly realized that our fatigue made it dangerous to continue through the blow-down any further.  

We decided to construct an emergency shelter amidst the blow-down rather than risk injury.  We were hiking with daypacks, but still had a good supply of nourishment and water having carried extra bags of water as we recommend elsewhere on this page when doing the Dixes.  Each of us also had an emergency blanket.  We constructed "basic" shelter under the monstrous root ball of a downed tree and covered it with the branches of saplings to minimize the entry of rain should rain resume.

We were both aware that hypothermia had set in, but all things considered, we were safe, even if we were not comfortable or completely dry.  It was at this point that I was happy that I had not long ago switched to merino wool tee shirts and that I had on my Marmot "Wind Shirt" and my Marmot "Thunderlite" rain jacket with all the elastic gizmos to close off every entry point where the cold might get in.  Same for my hiking partner, Elaine, who was definitely an asset that anybody would appreciate at a time like this:  a cool head, a positive attitude, and a warm body!  From this guy's point of view, it's truly an ill wind that blows nobody some good! 

Next morning, as luck would have it, we hit the red trail within the first 200 yards.  As we had calculated, we had paralleled Lillian Brook as we descended through the blow-down.  It was a few tenths of a mile back to all our gear that we had stashed at the Slide Brook Lean-to.

It is interesting and maybe humorous (now!) to note that our biggest fear was that we would wind up---deservedly---as an accident report in Adirondac magazine, the magazine of ADK.  I can assure you, I would rather have been left dead---my stinking body rotting for years undiscovered in the forest---than suffer that embarrassment!

Some might ask why didn't we get closer to Lillian Brook and follow it down since there is supposed to be a decent herd path along it.  We didn't attempt that because I had previously exchanged some e-mails from a hiker who had ascended Lillian Brook to the South Dix-Macomb col.  He reported that it had been necessary for him to wade in the brook due to the blow-down along the brook's banks and the absence of any trail.  It was not hard to determine that hiking in the brook at night was an additional danger we didn't need, so we chose to simply keep the brook within hearing distance to our right (East) and continue downward on the appropriate compass bearing.  We were plenty cold enough by nightfall without going swimming in Lillian Brook!

1

My good buddy and hiking companion on this hike, Elaine, creates a calendar every year with a different photo for each month taken from our past hikes.  This photo shows webmaster cringing inside his sleeping bag.  Such a cruel sense of humor!