Wyman Mountain - North Hudson, NY - 10/8/12

Continuing on with our theme from Sunday (a great bushwhack hike in the Dix Mountain Wilderness), we went back for more on Monday.  It had snowed 4 inches in the High Peaks overnight, but we didn't know about it until we could see the mountains on our way in.

 

Trailhead access sign from Route 9 in North Hudson

Our chosen hike for Monday was the 3304' Wyman Mountain (just southeast of East Dix).  The way we chose to access Wyman was to bushwhack from the end of the West Mill Brook Trail. 

 

 

Easy gravel road access

 

 

A private land owner has been kind enough to allow hikers to access across his property to the West Mill Brook Trail. This access is across a gravel pit and is driveable for the 1.1 miles to the trailhead if you have a little underclearance on your vehicle. One small section of the access road was under a couple inches of water, but under the current conditions, it would be no problem to drive through it.

 

  

The West Mill Brook (near the end of the trail)

 

You can even drive through the culvert under I-87 to get to the trailhead.  Once at the trailhead, there is a barrier preventing vehicle access to the wilderness area.  The West Mill Brook Trail begins at this point.  It is still shown on DEC maps, but is not marked.  There is no trail register either.  In any case, the trail is really an old jeep road, and is in fine shape.  It is also relatively flat, climbing only 350' in 2 miles.

 

 

 

Beaver Pond between Wyman and Bear Mountains

 

Near the end of the trail, the trail hooks left and begins a small climb.  At that point we hooked right and departed the trail to drop down to Mill Brook.   There is a confluence there of a drainage with Mill Brook and we found some great waterfalls.  We continued in a northerly direction into the draw between Wyman Mountain to the west and Bear Mountain to the east.  After passing a beaver pond, we began to angle up Wyman.

 

 

Reaching some walls of rock on the east face

The southern approach to Wyman looked pretty steep on the map, so we wanted to approach from the east.  A northerly approach looked even easier, but would have added another mile or two onto our hike. 

 



 

Huzzah!  A great false summit

 

 

We knew that the east approach contained two sizeable bumps with a draw between them.  The "bumps" were quite sizable walls of rock.  The draw contained lots of car sized boulders.  We hit the left wall and skirted right trying to stay between the wall and the boulders.  It mostly worked.  Leesa was getting tired from the steep climb, but she was game to continue.

 

 

 

 

At the top of the draw, we were between to fantastic mound of rock at 2600' .  We continued a little further to 2750', but it was 1:30 PM.  I was worried that at the pace Leesa was going, it would take another hour to reach the summit, and we probably wouldn't be out before dark.  She wouldn't like that.

 

 

 

 

 

I said, "Let's turn around here and see if we can get on top of the false summit mound of rock for a view, and then we'll go down to be out before dark".  She agreed.  It looked like the more northern of the rock formations was larger and would definitely offer fantastic views.  I found a rock seam in the western flank of the rock, and up we went.  Wow, what a spot!

 

 



 

False summit of Wyman, but it couldn't be better

We got the top of the false summit and were floored.  It was just fantastic.  We stayed there for an hour and couldn't get over it.  Great views of the Dixes, Giant, Rocky Peak Ridge, the Vermont skyline and all the other nearby small rocky summit peaks (Bear, Buck, Saunders, Spotted).

 

 

 

 



Looking North to Giant Mountain and Rocky Peak Ridge

 

Eventually we had to leave.  It was 2:30, and I told Leesa I'd have her out before dark.  Neither one of us wanted to leave.  We retraced our route and made it back to the car by 5:45 PM.  It was just a spectacular day.  We are both ready to return to this area for further exploration.

 

 



Looking South

Looking west at Wyman Mountain (upper right)

 

Mike and Rev... with a 360 degree open view

 

Some nice waterfalls at a drainage into Mill Brook

 

 

 

Hike Stats:

Hike Distance:  9 miles

Hike Time:  8 hours (including all stops)

Total Vertical Gain:  2130'

 

Our approximate route.  (Click image to enlarge)

 

My version - approximate route overlaid on USGS topo

A screen shot of our route (from Google Earth)