News photo — Chris Gaige Staring down a steep ledge on the Cliff Mountain trail on Monday, March 3.

NEWCOMB — I knew it was going to be a cold start to a long day of hiking, but when I glanced down at the car thermometer to see it was 24 below zero, I entertained second thoughts on venturing out.

Then again, I had already driven nearly two hours to the trailhead. I pulled my hands away from my car’s heating vents, shut off the engine and stepped into the woods. It was “go time.”

Faithful readers may have picked up on a point of pride I have in crafting these Visiting Lake Placid columns is that the destinations are accessible and able to be visited, and enjoyed, by the general public.

If you’ll indulge me, this week’s column departs from that venerable tradition, something that — as you may gather by the end of this story — I very much look forward to returning to next week. This week is a VL-Pino: Visiting Lake Placid in name only.

I would not in good faith recommend this week’s destination to anyone who isn’t (a) an avid hiker (b) in strong physical shape (c) extremely familiar with High Peaks trails (d) for this time of year, versed in winter hiking — including having all of necessary gear and unknowing the many pitfalls it carries (e) is comfortable with heights scaling exposed ledges and other somewhat technical terrain and (f) at least a little crazy, in a good way, of course. Am I missing anything?

Provided photo — Rob Thomas Chris Gaige fakes a smile on Cliff Mountain’s false summit shortly after the decision was made to turn around on Monday, March 3. Mount Marcy can be seen through the trees on the right in the background.

This week, we headed south from Lake Placid and into the High Peaks wilderness.

The intended, and I say intended, destinations were Cliff Mountain and Mount Redfield, both located in the town of Newcomb. While I am normally at my desk on Monday’s, the day seemed to afford an opportune window of weather to attempt these two peaks as part of a larger pursuit of hiking the 46 High Peaks during the winter season.

Yes, it was a bitterly cold start — and it ended up being about 20 degrees colder than was forecasted — as noted above. But, ample sunshine and temperatures rapidly rising into the mid 20s (above zero!) with little to no wind was in order, a true rarity for the High Peaks in early March.

Beyond that, one of my usual hiking partners, Rob Thomas, was available and ready to get after it that day.

He’s the brother of my uncle (who is married to my mom’s sister and also an avid hiker, but was unfortunately not available for the day’s hike). I’ve dedicated the better part of 10 minutes of research to this very query, and still cannot find any official genealogy term for what we are to each other.

News photo — Chris Gaige Rob Thomas smiles at the Flowed Lands on Monday, March 3. Mount Colden can be seen in the background.

We’ll just go with extended family.

At 64 years of age, Rob is 40 years my senior. Don’t let the numbers fool you. I’m not exaggerating this one bit: his pace — especially on the downhill stretches of trail — leaves me in the dust. In addition to being in superior shape, Rob has scaled each of the 46 High Peaks at least four times over. Mount Marcy leads the pack with 12 ascents. Just for good measure, he’s done 39 of the 46 in winter so far. Suffice to say, he satisfies the prerequisites laid out on page one.

With a hiking partner and the weather both aligning, I took the day off on Monday, March 3, awoke at 4:45 a.m. and made the trip to the Upper Works Trailhead to meet up with Rob, who lives in the southwestern Adirondacks. While Cliff and Redfield could be climbed starting at the Adirondak Loj, which is only 15 or so minutes from downtown Lake Placid, we opted to start from the south at the Upper Works Trailhead. The drive was shorter for Rob and the trail — while essentially equidistant to the peaks from either the Loj or Upper Works trailhead — the latter of which had less ups and downs walking up to the peaks.

As the crow flies, the Upper Works trailhead is less than 14 miles from downtown Lake Placid. However, that cuts through the most rugged terrain of the High Peaks. The most direct highway route from Lake Placid to the trailhead bows around the mountains in a 67-mile circumnavigation through the Keene Valley, down the Northway, along the Blue Ridge Road and back up Tahawus and Upper Works roads.

The route in itself could comprise its own column. The final two roads pass through the vicinity of Tahwaus, now a ghost town and formerly a major iron mining hub. Industry is still at work. There is an active stone quarry along the road, and I passed two loaded-up logging trucks exiting Tahawus road on my way in. No mud for the loggers to worry about on a morning like this.

My car’s thermometer remained in the single digits below zero for most of the drive, but started to take a nose dive as I drove the final 10 or so miles along Tahawus and Upper Works roads. The trailhead is in a valley and under clear skies that night, the temperatures there had plummeted. It felt like the area was under its own localized and cursed weather pattern.

OK; it was cold. I’ve beat that point to death. Fortunately, Rob and I had prepared our gear so we didn’t have to spend much time in the parking lot fiddling around. My snowshoes were already strapped to our boots. I quickly slipped off my driving sneakers, put on the boots and threw on my pack. We signed in at the register and pushed at a brisk clip to keep warm.

The trail from the Upper Works is a pleasant and straightforward walk through the woodlands. It sees a lot of foot traffic, as the trail is a starting point for numerous other peaks. The trail follows Calamity Brook, which feeds into the Hudson River, and gently gains in elevation.

As my colleagues at the Lake Placid News can attest to, I am a big-time coffee drinker. Each morning, I guzzle down, let’s just say, enough coffee to justifiably put me on an FDA watchlist. On hiking days, however, I take a decidedly different approach — I forgo caffeine, and man alive do I feel it.

As crazy as it sounds, there is a method to madness. I find that being in a drowsy state for the first couple hours is mentally quite helpful for me personally. The reason, you may ask?

Many hikes in the Adirondacks tend to have a rather dastardly reputation — compared to, say. the White Mountains in New Hampshire or the Green Mountains in Vermont — of having to walk great lengths through the backcountry just to get to the base of the actual mountain, where the serious ascension begins. This is exemplified by Cliff and Redfield, where one has to trek roughly 7 miles from either the Loj or Upper Works to get to the base of the trail.

With such a long day ahead, being in that “groggy” state at the start actually helps. For some reason, I’ve found that if I’m sleepy out of the gate, my mind tends to forget about and not tally the first few miles, especially if they’re relatively flat and generally monotonous. Conversely, on hikes where I’ve been well awake and/or caffeinated, the first few miles do indeed feel like … the first few miles. Who needs to feel that on a full day? Not me.

With that being said, I don’t have much to report on the first 4.5 miles of the hike, the segment from the trailhead to the Flowed Lands. As promised, the sun rose (phew) and it got warmer, slowly but surely. No bodily aches, pains or any sort of red flags. The trail was well-packed, and the snow-covered woods were a peaceful start to the day.

We reached the Flowed Lands in about 2 hours. The area is a formerly dammed segment of the Opalescent River. The dam washed out in the 1980s and was never repaired. The land on which a larger waterbody — from the dam — once sat is still a smaller area of standing water and surrounding marsh in the summer. The clearing provides breathtaking views of several high peaks, with Mount Colden taking the cake for the most prominent peak from that vantage point. The sun was almost blinding, certainly intense enough to rouse me from my recent state of slumber.

In the warmer months, the trail skirts around the jagged edges of the lake. In the winter, provided that the ice is thick enough, some people elect to cross the Flowed Lands directly, saving distance. I should note that this decision should be made considering the risks of walking over a waterbody and that the official trail does not cross the lake.

Being as cold as it was the night before and seeing a well-defined path blazing across it, Rob and I decided to make a go of it, and had no issues. Again — this column is purely for informational purposes and not intended to provide advice on what to do when hiking — and those venturing into the backcountry should remain cognizant of the latest weather forecasts and trail conditions.

To our right, we could see Cliff Mountain. It seemed so close. But, as it would be, the trail up the mountain begins on the opposite side as the Flowed Lands. For reasons that still boggle my mind, the route up the mountain tracks up the steeper, eastern face rather than the — based on the topographical maps I have observed — the more gradually-sloped north face. Oh well.

After crossing the Flowed Lands, we made our way past the Lake Colden lean-tos, and began a steadier but still relatively moderate climb along the Opalescent River. It was another 1.5 miles from the lean-tos to the turnoff for Cliff and Redfield. The trail was still pristine. It was hard-packed and perfect for snowshoeing. The temperature was getting warmer and warmer. Rob and I were exchanging stories, jokes and pressing onward at a fast clip. Everything was going great. I figured we would be up and down both peaks lickety-split, as was the case when we submitted Saddleback Mountain via the Orebed Brook Trail two weekends ago under similar conditions.

And then, our fortunes turned on a dime.

Cliff and Redfield are two of the least visited High Peaks. They’re remote, technical and offer little in the way of views from their summits compard to most other High Peaks.

Oh, and one more tangent before we get back on the metaphorical trail: Cliff Mountain is not even above 4,000 feet — the elevational threshold for a mountain to potentially qualify as a High Peak! Its summit stands at 3,960 feet, according to the Adirondack Forty-Sixers’ website. It was originally mismeasured as at or exceeding 4,000 feet but was kept as a High Peak for traditions’ sake after the error was discovered.

There are three other High Peaks that are also under 4,000 feet and ironically, despite the shorter height, three of the four sub-4,000-foot peaks are some of the toughest to climb of the 46 High Peaks (with the arguable exception of Nye Mountain, although even there, the trail includes a significant stream crossing). They are either steep, remote or some combination thereof. Three of the four, including Cliff, don’t even have officially-designated trails, just defined herd paths through the woods from previous hikers.

That last point gets us back to where we left off. When Rob and I arrived at the turnoff for the two peaks, we discovered that the trail had not been broken out since the last significant snowfall. There was barely a faint semblance of a trench in the snow, indicating a previous path. Even that was fleeting, as the trail was completely indiscernible for the most part.

We were flummoxed. We were floored. Use whatever adjective you want, but it was no bueno. Choice words were exclaimed — none of which were particularly family-friendly — although nobody was in earshot, to be fair. We had only passed by one other hiker all morning back at the Lake Colden lean-tos, and he was headed to a different mountain.

As much experience as we — mostly Rob — brought to the table, we were not expecting to need to break trail. That requires superhuman strength that we soon found out we didn’t have. I tip my cap to those who inevitably do and will continue to break trail in the High Peaks after big snowfalls.

The path up to the turnoff was so well-traversed and packed down that we surmised that surely at least one other person had recently climbed Cliff and Redfield. Nope. It was not to be. We reassessed our options. We contemplated turning around, but it was still early in the day, and figured it was worth a go.

We threw Redfield — the longer and taller of the two peaks — out the window. No way in heck would we be able to summit that. But Cliff, while the more technical of the two peaks, gained less elevation and had a shorter trail. We thought we had a chance. The silver lining in all of this was that, being a calm day, it would be straightforward to turn around and follow our tracks back if needed.

Rob was able to pick up our location by GPS through an app on his Smartphone. The app had the trail up Cliff superimposed on the map, allowing us to determine if we were on the trail or not. We also, of course, carried physical maps given battery limitations in the wilderness. The satellite map, however, provided our moving location relative to the trail and served as our primary source of navigation.

Precision became very important. The snow was mightily deep at that elevation, around 5 feet in many spots. Stepping off of whatever faint semblance of a previous path carried the risk of sinking or getting stuck in a spruce trap. A spruce trap occurs when the pine boughs trap air around the tree as the snow falls around it. If you step on it, you collapse down into the ground. For the most part, they are a nuisance and are physically demanding to pull yourself out of. They can be dangerous if deep enough, especially for people hiking alone who don’t have a (presumably, un-trapped) partner to assist them in climbing out.

We each fell into several of those on the way up. It felt a boxing match against the trees, each blow wearing you down bit by bit. The trail was incredibly difficult to find and even with a GPS that was as precise as pinning us within 10 feet from the path, we struggled to nail it. On top of that, making our way up the various ledges that Cliff Mountain owes its name to took extensive time.

While I love hiking, I am not particularly well-suited to scaling cliffs and ledges. Sometimes, I would pause for 30 seconds between each step just to regain my composure and make sure my hand and foot holds were solid.

As we made our way up the cliffs, the trail got even harder to find. The route up Cliff, after passing through the steep sections, arrives at a false summit, before descending a bit and making its way to the true summit. We reached the false summit around 1 p.m. It had taken us three hours to cover a half mile of trail. I couldn’t believe it, looking at my watch.

The area between the false and true summits had even more snow, more spruce traps and a more elusive trail. We made the decision to turn around then and there. We still had a half mile or so to the true summit, and that would have surely taken us several more hours to navigate — or get into trouble trying to do so.

While it was clearly the logical choice to turn back given the circumstances, it still felt gut-wrenching. Not only because of the long distance to get to where we did, but the subtle undertones of, if not fear, lamentation that I would have to scale those danged cliffs — which made me borderline nauseous getting my way up — once again in order to complete the mountain to become a winter 46er. C’est la vie.

The descent flew by. Getting down the ledges was relatively easier, given how much snow there was to cushion any slips. We were back on the packed trail in about 30 minutes, after again having taken three hours on the way up. As disappointing as it was, the sun was shining, birds were chirping and we were still intact. As they say, it could have been much worse.

We made it back to the trailhead around 4:30 p.m., the car thermometer reading almost the same digits as when we started, although this time without the “negative” symbol in front of the numbers.

Although I’m not sure when, we’ll return for a second winter attempt of Cliff and Redfield at some point, hopefully with packed trails and better results. In the meantime, the Visiting Lake Placid column will return to the beaten path next week. Stay tuned!