50 Adirondack Places To Visit Outside The High Peaks This Holiday Weekend

For Labor Day Weekend, Protect the Adirondacks has published online hiking trail guides for 50 hikes that lead to great destinations outside of the heavily-used High Peaks Wilderness.

Labor Day weekend is one of the biggest hiking weekends in the Adirondacks each year. Many trailhead parking areas will fill to capacity and the High Peaks Wilderness Area is expected to see unprecedented crowds in 2020.  Protect the Adirondacks’ online trail guides are an effort to lessen the flow of visitors to the High Peaks.

The trail guides spotlight mountains, firetowers, waterfalls, bogs, and remote lakes across 10 counties in the Adirondacks.   They include directions, descriptions of hikes, pictures, and maps. They also include information about the trail length and difficulty as well as education about “Leave No Trace” principles.

“These are wonderful places,” said Peter Bauer, Executive Director of Protect the Adirondacks, “many off the beaten path, that are far outside the busy High Peaks Wilderness. Getting a parking spot to the hike of your choice is a crapshoot in the High Peaks. These other places offer high quality Adirondack Park outdoor experiences.”

“We left off the list a number of hikes in places that have been overwhelmed this summer and are seeing numbers and parking problems that rival the High Peaks. Places like Kane Mountain in Caroga, or a number of the Lake George mountains, like Shelving Rock, Cat Mountain, and Thomas Mountain, or Bald Mountain in Old Forge, were all left off the list because they’re seeing overuse challenges and we did not want to create more problems” he said.

The trail guides are organized by county in the northern Adirondacks, central Adirondacks, western Adirondacks, and southern Adirondacks. The 50 published for Labor Day 2020 are expected to expanded to 100 guides by the end of the year.

Featured hikes include mountains in the northern Adirondacks, such as Lyon Mountain, Catamount Mountain, Silver Lake Mountain, Debar Mountain, Loon Lake Mountain, St. Regis Mountain, Azure Mountain, Mt. Arab, Floodwood Mountain, Poke-O-Moonshine, Coon Mountain, Jay Mountain, Cobble Lookout, McKenzie Mountain, and Split Rock Mountain. In the southern Adirondacks guides were published for Sleeping Beauty Mountain, Five Mile Mountain, Spruce Mountain, and Hadley Mountain.

In the central Adirondacks online guides were created for hikes to Goodman Mountain, Coney Mountain, Goodnow Mountain, Moxham Mountain, Vanderwhacker Mountain, Owls Head Mountain (Long Lake), Mud Pond Mountain on the Cedarlands conservation easement, Severance Mountain, Treadway Mountain, Blue Mountain, Chimney Mountain, Echo Cliffs, Pillsbury Mountain, Sawyer Mountain, Snowy Mountain, Wakely Mountain, Balm of Gilead Mountain, Crane Mountain, Peaked Mountain, Bartonville Mountain, and Pharaoh Mountain. In the western Adirondacks Stillwater Mountain is featured.

Online guides include waterfalls, like Tenant Falls and OK Slip Falls and lakes like Sagamore Lake and Cascade Pond. Featured hikes also include Bloomingdale Bog, Silver Lake Bog, and Ferd’s Bog.

The 50 online trail guides are posted under “Hiking Trails” on the Protect the Adirondacks’ website. A number of the trails are part the the ADKGO app’s Trails Less Traveled Challenge.

Photo of DEC Trail Markers provided by Protect the Adirondacks.