5.1 miles | 1,394 ft gain | Difficulty: Moderate | Rating ★★★★ Pitchoff is one of the Lake Placid 9ers. The west trail climbs though the woods, first moderately, then much steeper. Though there are a few nice view points along the way, including the Cascade Slide (people hike that?!), but the summit is marked by a large boulder, deep in the woods. A bit of an anticlimactic ending to our 9er journey. Luckily, Balanced Rocks more than makes up for that.
Lake Placid 9er
Hike 27: Indian Head
10.5 miles | 1,847 ft gain | Difficulty: Moderate | Rating ★★★★★ Not a high peak, but what I would consider one of the premiere hikes in the high peaks region. Many do this a quick stop on their way up (or down) Blake and Colvin or Dial and Nippletop. We orphaned Blake and have to do that pair again, but we always find ourselves too exhausted for just another half mile or couple hundred feet up. With the Adirondack Mountain Reserve's (AMR) newly created parking reservation system, this felt like a low stakes way to test the system.
Hike 26: Catamount Mountain
5.6 miles* | 1,572 ft gain | Difficulty: Difficult | Rating ★★★★ The hike to Catamount Mountain, a Lake Placid 9er, offers all the hallmark features of a high peak in a much smaller package. Rock scrambles, slides, cliffs, a false summit and beautiful forest trails. The trail head claims 4 mile round trip but with our zigzagging, we recorded 5.6 miles. And I can guarantee that extra 1.6 mile is completely real. This was the longest little mountain I ever climbed.
Fifty-Two Hikes 