You Are Here: Mt Shaw, Black Snout & Tate Mountain

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Mt Shaw, Black Snout & Tate Mountain

With only 2 days left until my big Summer adventure, I was feeling invincible. My friend Robin and I went on a hike in the Lakes Region Conservation Trust as a final "taper".. in retrospect, I'm not sure 10 miles was a great idea, even though I'm feeling great now. We shall see in a couple of days whether this was a good idea or not. Anyway, today was another gorgeous day (I feel like I use that adjective way too much, note to self think of another way to describe nature's beauty). As you may have figured out, I like to take on the challenge of completing any sort of list check. The Lakes Region Conservation Trust has a patch for completing all 5 peaks and 19 trails (30 miles total). Having already visited Mt Roberts and Bald Knob, we headed for Mt Shaw, the tallest peak in the range. The LRCT keeps the trails in impeccable shape. I always think of it as a forest highway system. The signs even remind me of road signs! I love it over there. We reached Mt Shaw and had our morning snack. There was 1 other gentleman up there enjoying the views also. We then headed on down for Black Snout. Now our adventure really started. There are trails off the LRCT official map that were created by the "Trail Bandit".. they are marked on a separate map and lightly maintained but are way different in condition than the official LRCT trails. We took the Banana Trail from near the Black Snout summit.. which if you weren't looking carefully, you wouldn't even notice, except for a small cairn marking the trail entrance. It was steep, it was technical, it was a lot of fun! We made our way over to Tate Mountain (sometimes called Big Ball) and enjoyed looking back up to where we had come. After looking at the map for a while, we attempted to make our way over to Little Ball.. but ended up off the trail and while not lost, we decided to not continue onwards as we didn't want to actually end up lost.. and knowing we had a couple of huge days ahead of us, we didn't want to end up having to hike more miles than our legs could handle right now. So we made our way back to Tate Mountain and down the Tate Mountain Trail to the Mt Shaw Trail and Robin's car, which she had spotted earlier that morning before meeting up. I think I'm ready to tackle the Pemi Wilderness now.

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