Saturday January 23rd - Robb's trail to Hemlock Lake - near Hemlock NY - 8.5 miles, about 850 feet elevation gain

 Weather forecasts in Rochester are, in my opinion, notoriously, unusually useless.  This hike was planned with a friend and as late as Friday afternoon I looked at the forecast and it was to be a cold but dry day after some modest snow Friday.  Cue waking up this morning to the sounds of a snow plow working its way through the apartment complex.  We probably got 3 inches cold fluffy easy to move around snow last night to go with the maybe 3 we had Friday. 

Thankfully, to his credit, our friend Gene didn't even flinch or ask if we still wanted to do the hike.  He arrived a few minutes before us at the empty but very snowy trail head parking lot.  The roads close to Victor were mostly plowed well etc but NY-15A (which we were only on for 5 or 6 miles) was very snowy and icy.  I flung the car into the snowy lot relying on momentum to get through the 6 or 8 inches that were mounded up at the entry to the parking lot, probably accentuated by whatever trips the snow plows had made down NY-15A throughout the night.

Being the first people to head down the trail today, we were breaking fresh deep snow, especially at the start of the hike which is more exposed and open than the tree lined majority of the downhill part of the trail.  Surprisingly, we saw about 5 groups of people walking today, some coming up from the lake while we were heading down and later as we headed up, others heading down.   Having lived in places like Oregon, Tennessee and California, I kind of assume most 'normal' people are put off by the snow and would not choose to hike in it.  I forget that in these far northern places where winter is long and relatively severe, at least some people make it a point to get out and embrace the snow and celebrate it.  There were a lot of those people out today.  Honestly we saw more people today than we have on our other 2 weekend non winter hikes on this same trail.  Not like it was crowded or anything but it was surprising.  

The scenery was stunning all day today.  The fresh mostly untouched snow, blowing down occasionally in flakes and flutters added a snow globe like effect.  The temps were pretty low, about 20 degrees at most but there was only a bit of wind near the parking lot at the top of the ridge.  Most of the walk was not at all windy and we wore long johns and our best winter socks etc and comfort wasn't really a problem.

Unsurprisingly, the miles seemed longer today in the snow.  The amount of meandering trail between where most of the elevation loss is done and the trail drops you onto a big gravel (or snowy) road that runs along the lake seemed a lot longer than I remembered.  We started walking at about 9:15 am and got to the easier road part of the hike at about 10:15.  We decided to walk 45 minutes further before turning around.  Total hike time was a bit over 3.5 hours so it was a really long amount of time to be in deep snow the whole time.  Of the 3 of us, I was seriously dragging on the way back up the trail.  I stayed at the back of our group of 3 and tried to just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

It was a really great day of exercise and camaraderie with our hiking friend we're so excited to have found here in NY.

 Pics mostly by Brian.

















 

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