#20 Dix Mountain, #21 Hough Peak, #22 South Dix Mountain, #23 East Dix Mountain, and #24 Macomb Mountain, New York

Sam and I got up nice and early one summer day in late July of 2013 and cruised over to the southern Adirondacks to tackle the Dix range.  We had a commitment later in the afternoon that we had to be back for and were attempting to pack in 5 peaks and 17 miles, so we had to push the pace as much as possible.  This was pretty easy at first, considering the first 2 or 3 miles is basically a flat walk in to get to the base of the mountain.  But then, the climbing began.  We climbed straight up to the "Beckhorn" and then around to the summit of Dix, putting us somewhere between 4 and 5 miles.  Here is Sam at the top.

From here we took the herd path, a non-maintained or well-marked trail over to Hough Peak, which gave a few views back toward Dix but nothing spectacular.  We continued on our way to South Dix mountain along the herd path.

From here, we took a herd path about 1.2 miles east to get to East Dix Mountain.  At this point in the day the clouds were starting to burn off a bit and we had some better views.  Nothing had been to challenging at this point, though because the herd paths are not maintained they are quite narrow, which makes jogging difficult.  

From here we backtracked to South Dix and headed along the rocky ridge to Macomb Mountain.  Things became a bit more difficult here as the trail is poorly marked along the ridge and it took us a while to navigate the rocky section and find the trail again.  We found it, and summitted Macomb, which was a fairly disappointing view, so no pictures.  On the way down from Macomb, however, things got interesting.  We hit a massive rock slide, pictured below, and it took quite a while to make it down in one piece.  

 

Once at the bottom, having bashed our ankles several dozen times each, we struggled to find the herd path back down to the original trail.  The map showed the herd path following close to a brook and we found the brook, so we decided to follow the brook back down to the trail.  It was rough.  A lot of ankle-breaking rocks and slips into pools of water.  But we finally made it back to the trail!  We jogged the remaining 2 miles back to the car, finishing the 17 mile day in 7 hours.  It was quite the day!