Yesterday (November 19) I hiked to the summit of Seymour Mountain. Seymour is one of the shorter summits in the Adirondack High Peaks. The map says it's 4091'. It's part of the Seward range but sits largely by itself adjacent to the main ridge.
The hike itself has three main sections. The first is about 5.5 miles and is a flat, official trail. I made good time here, covering this in about two hours. From here it's about a mile and a half to the summit. The unofficial, unmaintained trail up Seymour starts at about 2000', and the first half of this is a pretty pleasant. It's a nice continuous climb, gaining elevation consistently but undramatically. I covered that stretch, about half the distance to the summit, in about 45 minutes. Then I hit the first bare rock slab.
Many trails, both official and unofficial, follow streams. Streams make natural openings in the vegetation, but they also expose the mountain bedrock. The difficulty of these rock slabs vary, with few of them being easy. Standing at the bottom of the first such slab, it looked like two or three primary climbs. Making my way up usually means finding sturdy trees to grab as I find footholds. I try to take care to not make the erosion worse, but the unfortunate reality is all hikers contribute to the loss of soil along these trees.
At the top of this section, I see it keeps going. Pressing on, this continued most of the way to the summit, and it took me over an hour to cover less than a mile. Near the summit the steepness faded. I found the summit marker. A few feet from the summit is a good view of the Santanoni range to the southeast.
In the center of the photo in front are Panther Peak to the left and Couchsachraga to the right. Behind them is Santanoni Peak.
I heard there was a second viewing spot, and going back the way I came found a short side path with this view of the other three Seward peaks.
From the far left, that's Emmons, Donaldson and Seward. The body of water is Ampersand Lake.
Heading back down wasn't too bad, despite the steep rock slabs. I made decent time, and once below the tricky stretches it was a piece of cake walk out. The total distance was 14.3 miles with 3440' of elevation gain. It took me eight hours, eighteen minutes. It was a perfect day for it, probably the last fall day for the Adirondacks. They got snow last night, and it might stick around.
Seymour puts me at 27 of the 46 summits complete.