Mountain Climbing

It has been several years since we have been up Whiteface Mountain in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks. Today was another one of those windy days that makes it too rough to do anything on the water, so we hopped in the PT Cruiser Convertible and up we went! We stopped at the toll booth on the Veteran's Memorial Highway to pay our admission fee and were told that the elevator that goes from the parking lot to the summit was not in service. Well, that makes it even more interesting since the only way up would be the hiking trail. What a great horse and carriage weather vane on top of the toll booth though...

The highway rises more than 2,300 ft. over the five miles it takes to get up to the upper parking lot. The scenes are gorgeous even before you get all the way up, with unbelievable rock walls built to make the roads (it opened in 1935).

We parked the car and headed to the summit nature trail with the temps having fallen to 60 degrees and the west wind howling. Between me being unsure of hiking with my ankle and especially my fear of heights (my brother and I 'inherited' this from my mother), I was very leery of going any higher (you can see how high up the summit is from the parking lot in the above photo). The elevator goes up 27 stories, so the climb is quite intense. Dave said he would go up a bit and check it out, but came back a few minutes later saying even he was nervous about it, and he has no fear of heights at all. No way would I make it, but he wanted to give it a try, so up he went another 200+ ft. from the gift shop.

He made it, but said it was challenging and looked like he was climbing the Great Wall of China. Sometimes there were metal railings over the rocks and other times it was just cables.

The view from the top is spectacular. There are many lakes and this one is Lake Placid (he could see Lake Champlain too).

This is the view looking down over the Whiteface Ski Resort...

For some reason it wasn't as windy at the summit as it was at the base parking lot, which was good, because it was even more challenging going down the rock trail, which I overhead others saying also. Dave claims his adrenalin was really flowing during the hike.

Back in the PT Cruiser, we headed down the mountain and we were so glad that the car is standard shift. No smell of burning brakes for us as we inched our way in 2nd gear.

Another fantastic adventure!