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The Route In More than A Nutshell:
We needed a way down and this was it.  We had been hiking since 5:30 AM and it was now late afternoon.  We were en route to Macomb from South Dix, having  summited all the peaks except Macomb which we'd climbed the previous year.  Our intention was to find the summit of Macomb and descend via the West Slide which is just below the summit, and bail out down Slide Brook.

However... we were likely some hundreds of yards short of Macomb's summit when we noticed some cairns to our right marking a route over a broad expanse of open rock.  Motivated by curiosity, fatigue, impatience, the late hour, and the hope that this route might save us time, all key elements of BAD JUDGMENT, we followed a steady succession of well-made cairns downward.  We left the S. Dix-Macomb ridgeline on a WNW heading and passed between the ridgeline and a knob W of Macomb's summit.  

This route was a poor-to-good herd path that dropped fairly quickly.  Soon we were alongside a small brook and were passing from one side of it to the other  regularly.  The metric topographical map shows a branch of Lillian Brook that flows north away from the aforementioned knob.  We believe this is the brook we were following.  It is a much faster route down Macomb than the West Slide route and at the start it was very definitely faster.  

As we descended, at about the point where the slope had become gentle, the trail became increasingly difficult to discern.  Simultaneously,  blowdown became more and more of a problem.  We could hear what we knew to be the main course of Lillian Brook at some distance north from us.  

Soon the blowdown became horrendous in every direction.  Trees were piled, in some cases, 5-10 feet high in every direction.  Forget the path, just finding a passable route through the blowdown that kept us on a westerly heading that would sooner or later intersect the red Dix Range Trail became extremely difficult.  

At 11:30 PM we were still hiking, now with headlamps.   We had started out from the Elk Lake trailhead 18 hours before.  Much of the hike had been in the rain, we were very tired, yet we had not found our way back to the red trail due to the blow-down and our ill-chosen route of descent.  We realized we could not continue.  We would have to construct an emergency shelter amidst the blowdown before one of us was injured.  We were hiking with daypacks, but still had a good supply of nourishment and water (had carried extra bags of water as we recommend elsewhere on this page when doing the Dixes) and each of us had an emergency blanket.  (So we weren't entirely stupid!)  We constructed basic (all things are relative) 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 it resume raining.

We were aware of hypothermia setting in, but all things considered, we were safe, even if we were not comfortable or dry.  It was at this point that I was happy that I had spent some money to switch from Cool-Max to merino wool tee shirts, that I had on my Marmot wind shirt (indispensable) and my Marmot Thunderlite rain jacket (also indispensable)  with all the elastic gizmos to close off every entry point to the cold.  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! (It's 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 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, we would rather have been left dead---our stinking bodies rotting undiscovered in the forest---than suffer that embarrassment!

Why didn't we get closer to Lillian Brook and follow it down, you might ask.  This was 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 hike in the water due to the blowdown 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, hence, we chose to simply keep the brook within hearing distance to our right and continue downward on the appropriate compass bearing.  We were cold enough by nightfall without going swimming in Lillian Brook!

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