Dix and Hough 17'th and 18'th High Peak Ascent

Dix and Hough Mountains

The 6'th and 23'rd highest peak in New York State with an elevation of 4,857 and 4,400 ft.

8-3-13 For our third climb in 2013 my eldest son and I decided to climb our first venture into the Dix Mountain range. We left Speculator at around 5:45 am and pulled into the Elk Lake parking lot at around 7:00. Things were wet in Elk Lake and the sky was overcast.  We signed in at the trailhead register and set off down the trail at 7:20 am. 

The first three miles or so were flat and muddy but uneventful except for the eyeglass incident. 

 After a short distance my son asked me to look at something on the GPS. I reached for my glasses and they were gone. I was hoping that I had dropped them at Lillian Brook so we went back and sure enough I found them in the water on the far side of the brook! What are the chances? 

The trail was again mostly flat with some slight inclines. There are several nice campsites and two lean-tos along the way. This was all about to change as the trail split off to the right on the Beckhorn Trail. Most describe this trail as relentless, and it is. Not necessarily steep but always on the incline and no sections of the trail that are flat so you can catch your breath. The Beckhorn goes up, up, and up. 

Most of the trail is over forest turf but there are also a couple of rock scrambling sections. 

Finally you come upon the Beckhorn itself. Getting up on and over the Beckhorn was the trickiest part of the day for me. The footing was not great and there were no good handholds that I could find. Needless to say I made it. 

It is just a short jaunt over to the summit of Dix once you are at this point. It was very windy on top and we were getting chilly so we put on our rain gear to keep warm. Kind of a weird thing to say in August but you never know in the Adirondacks and especially in the High Peak Alpine region. 

In Dix we actually found not just one but three summit survey benchmarks. They say you haven’t climbed a mountain until you step on the benchmark so we made sure we touched all three. 

On Dix there is the neatest benchmark I have seen. It is one that is dated 1870 something, maybe a 3, and on it actually has the initials of VC for Verplank Colvin! Really neat to think that we were actually on the same spot as Colvin himself stood many years ago, and how much the world has changed since then. 

Colvin and his men used to drag surveying equipment weighing around 300 pounds up to these summits in order to survey them and now we carry iPhones in our back pockets weighing almost nothing and can do so much more. 

When then headed off the backside of the Beckhorn and on to Hough.

The descent off of Dix and down to the col in between and up to Hough was typical of what you would expect. Overall not too difficult and nothing like the Beckhorn Trail. We actually passed more people coming from Hough toward Dix than we had seen the entire rest of the day. Seems most people were hiking a counter clockwise direction as opposed to our clockwise direction. 

We then headed down off of Hough and down to the Lillian Brook trail. 

The hike out was long and muddy but relatively flat. 

By this time we were both getting hungry. We finally signed out in the register a little before 5 pm. We decided to drive into Keene to our favorite local restaurant for dinner, the ADK Café. 

Happy, Happy, Happy.