Mistakes on Mount Marcy

It is often said that good judgment comes from experience, and that experience can only come from bad judgment. In other words, screwing up is the only path to not screwing up –something I discovered firsthand earlier this week.

As the first part of my journey, my friend Pierre and I decided to attempt a winter hike up Mount Marcy (5,343 feet), the high point of New York State and of the Adirondack Mountains. While Mount Marcy may not be a big mountain, it does present certain difficulties, which are magnified in winter. In addition to being prone to poor weather, the mountain is remote, precluding any cell phone service, and presents a winding approach over ice and snow –a round trip to the summit means upwards of a fifteen-mile hike. To shorten the distance, we started up with the goal of setting up a base camp at Marcy Dam, a primitive camping site 2.3 miles into the hike. We would then only face ten miles to the summit the following day, with light packs and the prospect of returning to an already established campsite.


Having often slept in the White Mountains and twice on the upper slopes of Mount Rainier, I know that winter-camping presents unique challenges, most of which can be solved by bringing the right gear. We packed a two-person winter tent, a stove with plenty of fuel, enough food for four days, zero degree-rated sleeping bags, insulating camping pads, an ice-axe, snowshoes, micro-spikes, winter-rated boots, GORE-TEX hard-shells, heavy down jackets, a bivy sack, and a myriad other essential items.


I felt confident as our snowshoes crunched into the ice. The forecast was clear, only indicating a chance of rain showers between two and three o’clock, and we were carrying eighty pounds of gear between the two of us. Lastly, I had just had a conversation with the State Park employee at the lodge about not underestimating even the smallest of mountains. Surely, such a potent combination of clement weather, equipment, and humility could not be run aground.

We made short work of the approach to Marcy Dam. As expected, we encountered light rain at around 2:45 P.M. –no big deal; we donned our hard-shells and hiked on. Soon, the rain passed and we reached the campsite in good weather. Near the trail, the dam encroached onto the river. Further behind the trees, we found several lean-tos and a few campsites. For a few seconds, I toyed with the idea of foregoing the tent and simply setting up our sleeping bags in the first lean-to, or even pitching the tent inside one. I dismissed both options quickly.


Too cold to sleep in our bags in one of those, I thought, and they act like a big windsock. We can’t even set up the guy lines properly in there; it’s better to just pitch our tent on the ground.

We moved past the lean-to and found a nice spot in a small clearing. The snow was mushy, but we managed to find a compact platform on which we could sleep comfortably. We took off our packs, put on our puffy jackets, and I unfurled the tent into the ground. As I dashed inside it to set up the first of three support poles, I heard Pierre’s voice.

“Hurry up man, it’s starting to rain again.”

I managed to click the first pole into place and clambered back out of the tent. It was four o’clock, an hour past the end of the forecasted period of “rain showers,” and yet a thin but intense, freezing winter rain was peppering the landscape.


That's when I made my first big mistake of the day.

Should we stop? Take all our stuff into a lean-to and wait for the rain to pass? It could get worse. It could also stop in a few minutes –the forecast does call for good weather. I can get this tent up quickly. I’m going to keep going.

I jumped back into the tent and struggled with the second pole for a while, then went about the business of fastening about a dozen straps to the poles. Finally, I climbed back out of the tent to put up the vestibule. A good ten minutes had passed, and the rain had only gotten worse. Our two packs, which had been lying in the snow, were thoroughly soaked. Dejectedly, I threw my drenched hard-shell over my pack and fussed with the vestibule pole for a few minutes. This time, I had no half-set up tent to protect me from the elements, and the rain soon inundated my puffy jacket, my fleece, and even reached my base-layer. By the time Pierre and I rushed into the finally erect tent, we were wet to the bone.

Still, our spirits were not as damp as our gear. Our sleeping bags, stuffed into waterproof compression sacks, had remained dry. We hung up our clothes to dry on the tent’s support poles and crawled into our bags, where we quickly regained some warmth. We spent the next two hours or so recovering from hauling our heavy loads up to camp, laughing, joking, and chitchatting as two old friends are wont to do. By dinnertime, our clothes were still fairly damp, and I was only wearing my now (mostly) dry base-layer in my sleeping bag.

We were starting to grow cold, but I was confident that as soon as I fired up the stove, we would not only get some warm food and drinks in our bellies, but also be able to dry our clothes. I carefully assembled my brand new stove, and hung it from the middle of the tent roof. We opened the back flap and the seal to the vestibule to create some ventilation. I poured water into the pot, and clicked the igniter, expecting to see a bright spark turn into three small flames. Nothing happened. I clicked it several more times. Nothing. I exchanged a crestfallen look with Pierre. My brand new stove, which had cost me a fortune, and had functioned perfectly when I had tested it out a few days prior, was broken. I took a closer look. The igniter was no longer working, and even though the gas was flowing, the actual stove was failing to ignite without the crucial spark.

That's when I made my second big mistake of the day.

Okay, so the igniter is broken, but the stove seems okay. I just need some other way to light it. I don’t have a lighter, but I have waterproof matches in my emergency kit. I’ll just turn on the gas and use that to ignite the stove. It might get a little smelly with the gas and the match, but we have some good ventilation. Besides, we really need the stove to dry our clothes and eat some hot food. We just won’t be able to warm up without it. I’m going to do it.

I turned on the gas, cracked a waterproof match, and shoved it under the stove. The gas lit and a tongue of fire licked the thick air of the tent, but, again, the stove failed to ignite. Resigned, I switched off the gas and blew out the match. At that point, I understood how toxic the air inside our tent had just become –a vicious smell of sulfur and gas permeated everything around us, and the beam of my headlamp revealed thick ribbons of smoke waving around the enclosure. We wafted the air inside the tent as best we could, but still, I knew we had just inhaled some fairly noxious stuff. To make matters worse, we had lost all the body heat we had created and trapped inside the tent while venting it, so we were now cold again with no stove to warm us.


We went to sleep with the prospect of a cold night, two days of eating cold food, and some seriously wet, cold clothing to put on in the morning. However, our troubles did not wait until the morning before ending the short reprieve of sleep.

I woke up at a quarter past midnight, after a fitful hour and a half of sleep, extremely cold, and with a grinding headache. Pierre was already awake from the cold and breathing heavily. I started doing sit-ups in my sleeping bag to generate heat, but I could not get warm no matter what I did. Rain still pitter-pattered against the waterlogged tent fabric, and I realized that thick drops were running along the tent poles and onto the clothes we had hung –it had been raining for more than six hours, seriously compromising the waterproof nature of our shelter. I touched my clothing. Every article was still drenched. Pierre and I talked about our situation, and decided we just needed to get warm and weather the night.

However, no matter what I did, I could not get warm, as I was only down to my base-layer in a large zero-degree rated sleeping bag designed to accommodate down clothing. There was simply too much air for my body to warm, and with wet clothes strewn around the tent, my body heat was escaping into the vacant air within the bag. I grew colder and colder as my headache evolved into a full-blown migraine, doubtlessly from the toxic gases I had inhaled while battling the stove.

As I started nearing hypothermia, we realized that our summit bid was off the table. We had to take down camp and head down to safety as soon as dawn broke. We gave that idea up at around 3 A.M. We were simply too cold (and growing colder) to wait until the morning to flee back down to the trailhead. Our breathing had also grown heavier from the compromised atmosphere of the tent, and we direly need to get the hell out of dodge.

I quickly weighed the risk of hiking out in the dark versus the risk of waiting until morning, and, finally, made a sound decision.

We’re only going to get colder, and my headache is only going to get worse. The trail is very well marked and we can navigate it safely. We have headlamps and we can definitely find our way back down.

I had no sooner thought that than Pierre told me his headlamp was no longer functioning. The rain had stopped, so we broke down camp as best we could. We were both shaking from the cold, and touching wet fabric with my bare hands was painful. With everything out of the tent, I put my damp clothes back on, figuring it would be better than hiking out in my base-layer. My socks were still too drenched, and I had to pack them in my bag. I put on my frigid boots with only my thin sock-liners on, and my toes instantly went numb from the cold.

“We have to move,” I told Pierre. “I can’t feel my toes.”

We clicked into our snowshoes, rolled up the tent, and strapped it to my pack. My waterlogged gear was much heavier than it had been on the hike in, adding a good five pounds to my pack weight.
Since I had the only headlamp, I took the lead and guided Pierre who could barely see, calling out the type of terrain we were going over as I encountered it. On difficult ground, I would sometimes negotiate obstacles as he waited, then shine my headlamp back to them so Pierre could get down safely. We repeated this process several times, slowly warming as we trudged down the mountain. The wind picked up, and soon it was snowing heavily. We had to walk right into the wind, and thick flakes whipped right into my face. With a shiver, I remembered all the stories I had read of hikers getting lost in the dark and disappearing, eventually dying from exposure.


We reached the car after an hour, tossed our wet gear in the back, and cranked up the heat. We slept a couple of hours right in the car seats, grateful to be warm and dry. Later on that morning, we drove back down to Massachusetts for the next part of our trip.

That night, we slept at a motel so we could dry all of our gear, especially the tent, which required a large surface on which to spread out. Before we went to sleep, we decided to grab dinner at a small Greek restaurant near the motel. I walked down first from our second floor room and waited for Pierre in the parking lot, fiddling with my stove to see if I could fix it. No matter how many times I tried, the clicker refused to produce a spark. As Pierre joined me, I gave it one last click, barely looking at the stove, expecting, once again, for nothing to happen.

A large wreath of flames roared out of the igniter and engulfed the entire stove, gas canister and all. I dropped it before it could burn me, and kicked it away from us. The stove, the pot, and the canister were all burning furiously, Pierre ran upstairs and dropped me a full Nalgene, which I emptied out onto the stove. We repeated the operation, eventually putting it out, and I reached into the smoking wreck and shut the gas off. The malfunction had been fatal –the stove’s axis had melted and crumbled, and the foam casing around the pot had sheared right off, revealing ugly burns all along the metal. It was a charcoal briquette. 

Pierre and I exchanged scandalized looks, and erupted into a noisy exchange about what could have happened if the stove had caught fire while inside the tent on Mount Marcy. We imagined ourselves with third-degree burns, disfigured, or shaking in our base-layers in the snowstorm, watching a fireball engulfing our tent, clothing, and gear. But as we spoke, another thought crept into my mind.

Hey, as bad as our time on Mount Marcy was, I guess it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

It made me feel better. Not much better, but better. After all, a stove had just caught fire in my hand.

In the end, we shook it off and went to feast on delicious Greek food.