wet slab, balsam cover, thin soil above the last trees
Reserve a seven night Adirondack High Peaks trip with a car and two permits held
We hold one room for seven nights in a lodge on the north side of the village, a car with all seven days written on the contract, and two dated permits that run out by early July, from $2,463 per person on two sharing. Forty six summits surveyed above 4,000 feet stand within a forty minute drive of that room, the tallest of them 5,344 feet and the shortest under six miles round trip. What you climb, and whether you climb at all, gets settled at breakfast.
Send a booking requestThe Pine Gazette answers every request within one business day.
Reserve a seven night Adirondack High Peaks trip and three things get held: a bed for a week, a car for the same week, and two permits that carry dates because they run out in the middle of summer. Nobody meets you. Nothing sits on Tuesday, and nothing is going to be put there.
The room is at 1,801 feet on the north side of the village, and sleeping in one building for seven nights rather than moving is a matter of arithmetic. Marcy, the highest ground in New York at 5,344 feet, is 14.8 miles there and back with 3,166 feet of climb from the lot at the end of the Heart Lake road, twenty minutes from the door. Algonquin, 5,114 feet, is eight miles and 2,936 feet of climb from the same lot. Cascade, at 4,098 feet, is under six miles and people are back at the car before one o'clock. Eleven of the forty six sit inside a forty minute drive, and no arrangement of two or three hotels improves on that.
On the ladder this office keeps, this is the fourth rung of five, and the ladder is sorted by how much of the week you run yourself, not by how good the week is. The rung above puts a guide beside you every morning. The rung below hands over keys and leaves even the bed to you. None of them is the better one. They answer different questions, and the question here is what to do with seven mornings when you cannot yet know which of them will come up dry.
The office books the base, the car and the one or two things that have to be held ahead. The days themselves are empty.
No rung is better than another. Each one is a different amount of work for the traveller and a different figure.
A car is not a convenience on this ground. The trailheads are strung along twenty six miles of two lane road between the village and the valley to the south, the busiest lots fill by half past six on a July Saturday, and there is no service on the miles that climb through the notch. Whoever wants the long day leaves at five in the dark with a headlamp on the wheel. Whoever wants the river leaves at nine with a rod across the back seat. Those two people cannot share a ride, and on this rung they never have to.
- What it costs
- 7 nights, from $2,463 per person. Two sharing.
- What this reserves
- The office holds the room for seven nights, the car for the same seven days, two dated permits and the trailhead vehicle fee on two of your days, and it holds no guide, no dinner table, no summit day and not one hour of a schedule.
- Shape of the booking
- One reservation: a double room in one building for all seven nights, one mid size car with unlimited miles picked up and dropped within twenty minutes of the lodge, nothing repacked after the first evening, and two entries held on named dates in the name on your driving licence.
- Who books it
- Somebody booking this wants a bed and a set of keys already arranged so that at half past five in the morning the only open question is which trailhead the car points at.
- Why somebody chooses another rung
- If you would rather walk behind somebody who has read the overnight forecast and knows where the ice is, take a rung with a guide on every day; if you already know these roads and want to sleep in a different valley each night, rung five buys less and leaves more of the week undecided.
- In the figure
- Seven nights for two in one room in a lodge at the north end of the village, the same room every night; breakfast cooked between seven and half past nine, which is early enough to be at a trailhead by ten and too late for a Marcy day, so ask and they will leave it out for you; a mid size car with unlimited miles for all seven days, collected and returned within twenty minutes of the lodge; a dated parking reservation at the gate of the private reserve in the Ausable valley, on a day you name; a dated vehicle entry for the toll road on the mountain north of the village; the trailhead vehicle fee at the end of the Heart Lake road on two of your seven days; a printed sheet giving distance, climb in feet and typical round trip hours for eleven summits, measured from where you are sleeping rather than from the sign-in board at the trailhead; a heated room off the entry for wet boots and packs, and a line to hang shells on; bed linen and towels changed midweek; and written confirmation of every one of those, in your name, from each company that owns the thing being confirmed.
- Not in the figure
- The flight, which you arrange yourself and which this office does not sell, running about $310 to $680 round trip out of the American South for the months this trip works; the two hour fifteen minute drive up from the airport, $26 to $38 in fuel each way; fuel for the week of trailhead driving, $60 to $110; lunches and dinners, $22 to $65 a head within walking distance of the lodge and more if you drive out; the trailhead vehicle fee on the five days it is not covered, $15 per car per day; a head net and repellent if your dates fall before the end of June, $9 to $30; canoe or kayak hire on the through road, $45 to $75 a day; a guide for any single day, which this rung does not carry in any form; laundry at the lodge, $6 to $14 a load; one person in the room instead of two sharing, add $940.
- Who should not book it
- Marcy is 14.8 miles and around eleven hours, and the last mile is bare rock above the trees with nothing to get behind when the wind comes over the shoulder at forty. A climb of 3,000 feet over root, mud and broken rock, taken three or four times in one week, is what this trip is for, and knees that will not do it once will make the car and the room a waste. There is no phone service in the interior, no shelter you can count on and no way to be found quickly, so a turned ankle at mile six is a slow walk out on somebody else's shoulder in the dark. And anyone who wants the week arranged in advance should not take a rung whose entire content is that it is not arranged.
This is a starting figure, worked out for two people sharing a room. Costing the exact days you name runs two to four working days, since the firm operating the trip has to answer first. No air ticket is ever inside it.
The two permits, and why they carry a date
The first is the parking reservation at the gate of the private reserve at the head of the Ausable valley. The land belongs to a club, the walking across it is open to anybody, and the seventy odd spaces at the gate have gone by reservation only from the first of May to the end of October since the system came in. You cannot drive up and take one, and there is nowhere legal to leave a car within a mile of it. Past the gate a gravel road runs three and a half miles to the lower lake, no dogs and no bicycles, and the ledge most people are walking toward is about five miles in with a short scramble at the end of it.
The second is a dated vehicle entry for the toll road on the mountain north of the village: eight miles of switchback ending at a stone building at 4,600 feet, where you either take a tunnel driven 426 feet into the rock and the lift at the end of it, or walk a stone stairway of about a fifth of a mile up the ridge in whatever the wind is doing. The summit is 4,867 feet and it is the only one of the high summits you can reach with a car under you. The road opens when the crews get the last drifts off, usually the third week of May, and it shuts in the middle of October.
Both permits are issued and held by the companies and bodies that run those two places, in your name, not in ours. Nothing that carries a traveller or houses one belongs to this office. We put the request in, we get the confirmation back with your name spelled the way your licence spells it, and we send it to you.
Weather, water and the weeks people ask for
Ask for the second week of September and you are asking for the same week as everybody else, for reasons that are worth stating flatly rather than dressing up: the blackflies are finished, the water is still warm enough to get into, and the lots are half empty on a Wednesday. That week goes first. The rest of the season is a set of trades, and the trades are legible enough that most people can pick their own.
- mid May
- the toll road opens once the drifts are cleared, and trails above 3,500 feet are still rotten snow and running water
- late May to late June
- blackflies come off the water in numbers that end a day early, and a head net gets worn rather than carried
- July
- valley highs near 78 degrees and nights near 54, with summit air fifteen to twenty degrees colder before the wind is counted
- late June
- longest light of the year, sunrise close to ten past five and full dark after a quarter to nine
- August
- warmest water of the year, the small lake by the trailhead into the high 60s and the deep pond in the notch holding low 60s
- early September
- bugs done, water still usable, weekday lots half empty, and the week most requests name
- late September
- color starts at 3,000 feet and works downhill while the summits stay bare and take a hat off your head
- second week of October
- color reaches the valley floor, the toll road closes within days, and north facing slab carries its first ice
The week costed out, and the company that bills you
Once the room, the car and the two permits are held, the rest of the week is small money spent daily. The vehicle fee at the end of the Heart Lake road is fifteen dollars a car a day and is covered on two of your seven; on the other five you pay it at the booth or you park along the state road and add a mile and a half each way on foot. Fuel across a week of dawn driving comes to sixty to a hundred and ten dollars, because every summit day is a forty to sixty mile round trip before you have walked a step. Food is whatever you want it to be: two kitchens near the lodge stop serving hot food at nine, and the store on the through road closes at eight, so a Marcy day that ends at half past nine ends with what you bought that morning.
The billing runs the way it runs on every rung of this ladder. The company that operates the lodge sends its own invoice under its own contract with you, the rental company charges the card you present at its counter, and the two permits are paid to the bodies that issue them. No money passes through this office in either direction, and there is no card field anywhere on this site to put one in. The agreement you sign is with the operator, not with an agency in Louisiana.
The flight is yours to arrange and this office does not sell airfare of any kind. Most people out of the Gulf come in through the airport two hours and fifteen minutes south of the lodge and pick up the car there; the drive is a hundred and thirty miles, the last twenty six of them the two lane road through the notch, and doing that stretch for the first time after dark is a long slow hour.
A worked quote with your dates on it, the exact room, the exact car class and both permit dates named, needs two to four working days at this end, because the permit calendar and the lodge calendar have to agree before a figure means anything. Tell us the seven nights you have in mind and how early you are willing to get up, and we will come back with what can actually be held. Pine Gazette Bookings LLC operates under the name The Pine Gazette from 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, LA 70001, takes requests on +1 (504) 832-6194 or in writing at bookings@thepinegazette.com, and works the New Orleans metro; if a name or a date on a confirmation already in your hands is wrong, send it to corrections@thepinegazette.com and it gets corrected.
Send a booking request
This form takes booking requests 24 hours a day. A person reads it and answers within one business day. Sending it is not a reservation, it costs nothing, and this office will not telephone or text you unless you ask it to.