5/30/16

Parking: St. Huberts
Group: Shawn & Emily

We knew this one would be a long day, so we obviously carbed up for it throughout the long Memorial Weekend (aka beer).

 

We both still needed Colvin & Blake and Shawn hadn’t been to Dial & Nippletop yet, so we decided to make it a challenging day and string them all together.

The majority of the trip reports I found online prior to our hike started with Dial and then went over Nippletop, Colvin, and then Blake.  However, I had heard and read terrible things about the col between Colvin and Blake so I didn’t want to save that for last, and ending the long day almost seven miles away from the car on Lake Road just didn’t seem appealing to me.  We collectively decided to start with Colvin and end with Dial.  And we were sure glad we did.

But first! Let’s start at the beginning.  We parked the car and headed off at 6:22am on the dot.  Fifteen minutes later we arrived at the trail register, signed in, and started down Lake Road.  Fifteen minutes after that we passed the junction for Dial & Nippletop, which was nice because we knew that we would only be half an hour from the car once we hit Lake Road at the end of the day.

We continued down the Lake Road trail, and Shawn kept a keen eye out for our junction.  There are a couple ways to get over to Colvin (one of which takes you by Indian Head, but we’re saving that for another day). At 7:20am, an hour after leaving the car, we reached the sign for the Gill Brook Trail and turned left.  We could have turned at the next left turn too, I think, but we were glad we picked this one as there were gorgeous views along the way!

You can just ignore where the trail splits and the signs make you choose either the “Easy” or “Scenic” option (we came across two of these) because they both meet up together literally ten seconds later….which made us feel bad for taking the “Easy” routes…both times…

An hour after we started on the Gill Brook Trail, we reached the junction to Colvin and Nippletop.  We turned right and stayed on the red trail for the 1.1 mile climb to the summit of Colvin.  It was rocky and steep but doable.

Time at Colvin summit: 3 hours & 6 miles since leaving the car

The summit was amazing!  I had no idea it would be so great.  There were a few clouds when we got there, but they had all left by the time we started our climb towards Blake twenty minutes later.

Now, I was nervous about this next part of the hike.  Shawn always tells me “Hiking is mostly mental!” to which I argue “Uh, my legs are mostly physical”.  He tried to keep me optimistic about the section from Colvin to Blake (and back), but I was fearing the worst.

And maybe that’s why, in comparison with what I had envisioned, it didn’t seem so bad.  It was definitely steep and rocky, but I don’t think it’s the worst we’ve ever climbed.  It’s also nice when you can see the mountain you’re heading towards throughout the hike, which you can for a good portion on the trail to Blake.

That’s Blake up to the left.

There were two ladders on the way to help with some steep points.

Also, there’s this junction right in the bottom of the col (below).

An hour after leaving Colvin we reached a flat area that we had to assume was the top.

Summit of Blake: 4.5 hours and 7.3 miles since the start.

Not our best summit pic, but it’ll have to do.

We sat down for less than ten minutes, the bugs started to attack us, and we got up to retrace our steps back to Colvin.

The return trip to Colvin took an hour, too.  By this time it was noon which meant LUNCHTIME.  We enjoyed the beautiful summit for 20 minutes before heading back down to the Nippletop junction.

By the time we reached the junction between Colvin and Nippletop, it had been almost seven hours and 9.7 miles since we started the day (and this is when we switched to the blue trail).  We knew we still had two more peaks to go, and we would need to refill our waters soon.  Did I mention it was 85 degrees out?? Yeah, not sure what we were thinking.  We saw a body of water on the map that was not much further from where we were and that we would come to before the start of the ascent up Nippletop, so we planned to refill there.  That body of water turned out to be a boggy little pond…we tried filtering it anyways, but it still tasted like warm pond water.  Note to self – bring powdered flavorings next time to mix in.

I don’t have many pictures or memories of this next part of the day…mostly because I would like to erase if from my head for good.  It was hot, we were tired, and the ascent was longggg.  The trail was pretty wet, and steep, steep, steep.  And we were running out of good water.  Ugh.

Finalllyyy, over an hour and a half after we left the junction at the bottom of Colvin, we reached the junction (above) and shortly after that – the summit of Nippletop!

Nippletop summit time: 8.5 hours & 11.6 miles

The trail to Dial is marked in yellow, and 1.9 miles from the junction at Nippletop.  It took us a little over an hour to get there; it was flat for awhile and gradually got steeper towards the summit.

Dial summit time: 10 hours & 13.5 miles

It was sunny but windy.  Now that we were ten hours into our hike and had conquered all the peaks, we were looking forward to beginning the trip back to the car.

It took a little over half an hour to hike the 1.3 miles to Bear’s Den on the red trail (where we did not see any bears, dens, or views) but there is a junction letting you know you’re not at Lake Road yet.

We did get a nice look out on the next hill we hiked over though (Is this a mountain? Does it have a name??).  The trail also started to be surrounded by these “fairy trees” which I’m sure is not their technical term, but that’s what I thought they looked like.  It was a totally different kind of foliage than we normally see in the Dacks; I loved it.

Then we FINALLLYYY reached Lake Road, an hour and fifteen minutes after leaving Bear’s Den.  For a short time, we considered walking further down the road to see if we could get closer to water, but then decided to just leap through the brush and fill our Camelbacks up right there.  And it.was.heaven.

Not much beats arriving at a stream like this when you’re hot, tired, and thirsty

This is a picture of a much happier Shawn, with a bottle full of cold water

Fifteen minutes later, we signed out at the register and started the .6 mile walk back to the car.

Boots off! 7:16pm.  Almost 13 hours, 18.6 miles, and 4 peaks later.

 

This is a long and hard day, so make sure it’s not your first trip out of the season.  We knew what we were getting into, and we were still exhausted for the last half of the day.  It is doable as a day hike though, and personally I would do the loop the direction that we did here (instead of starting with Dial).  It was a great day though!  Happy to have the long daylight hours and not too many black flies 🙂

 

Happy hiking!