winter hike

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bills328

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Hi,

I am relatively new to winter hiking and am hoping to do another one of the Adirondack peaks (within the next few days). I know about the distances, elevation gains, etc, but I like to get your opinions on how challenging/safe they are.

How do Big Slide via the Brothers, and Esther and Whiteface compare to Cascade and Porter? I expect that they are considerably more strenuous.

What other hikes would you consider?

Your replies for the Cascade and Porter hike were very reassuring, and my friend and I (who I will be hiking with again) had a great time. Having all of the necessary gear won't be a problem. Thanks for your advice.
 
never been up brothers to big slide in the winter, but having done it in the summer I would say crampons would be essential. I have read other trip reports on this forumn and they say the same thing. I believe it should be packed snow becouse it gets enough travel to pack it down and we havent had alot of snow latley. The verticle climb is on 2400 feet so it would be close to doing cascade and porter. WHiteface and esther would be more difficult I believe. Did this trip last summer and it is a much more verticle climb. Both together come to about 4000 feet verticle. plus i dont know how much ravel this trail would get in the winter seeing that a lot of people do the toll road. If it is not well traveled i believe you would have to break trail all the way. I hope this helps. I notice your tread was getting a lot of views and no answers so I though I would chim in. :cool:
 
Big slide gets a lot of traffic via the Brothers and from the Garden, expect crampons to be used at least for the final push to the summit after the trail that goes steeply down to JBL. If there is a decent snowfall or no traffic, obviously snowshoes are the choice, but at the minimum, crampons would be useful for any kind of ice/snow at the end, it's steep. There are also some blowdown on the route across the brothers but you'd have to find somebody whos hiked this with fresher beta than mine. (I did this a few months ago).

My opinion, is it's longer and harder than cascade/Porter, given equal conditions.

Jay
 
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