Today I went back and tackled MacNaughton, or as I've been calling it, MacNaughty from the south.  The day was perfect for hiking, with a brisk 32 degrees at the parking lot, and it was a new moon without any clouds so it was dark with some stars visible through the trees.  Really making me itch for winter hiking to start, I just love that weather.

The hike began as expected.  Headlamps in until we got a bit past the Indian Brook crossing.  There was a bit of mud buried under leaves on and off the whole way in, but nothing horrible.  We stopped by the canoe landing for Upper Preston and were welcomed with a low fog over the pond, but the leaves were loosing their vibrancy, and based on what we were walking on, we are past peak in the area.  Still beautiful though.  In no time we found ourselves at Hunters pond, and around it and at the artifact that starts the bushwhack.

Unlike all the other "trailless" peaks that are part of the 46, or even most of them in the Catskill 3500, this is really a bushwhack.  There are hints of a herd path for most of the way up, but with all the leaves down, the trodden path was not always readily seen.  Before tackling this peak, you really need to have had some experience with bushwhacking and the terrain in this part of the park.  This can be dangerous to do, it would be easy to get lost, and if you're not careful, there are plenty of holes that you could step in to that could cause serious injury.  Even knowing that, I found a lot of holes, and my legs are nicely bruised the next morning.  The bushwhack portion will easily take as long as it did for you to get in to the start, and probably longer, so plan for it to be very slow (took us 3 hours to get up the 1.5 miles, while it took us a bit over 2 hours to get the 4.5 miles in to the start)

The general idea for this bushwhack is to keep close to the right (south) side of the drainage as long as you can.  For the most part, you'll keep that stream in view until you get above it.  About 1/2 way up, things start to get thicker, the terrain starts to get rockier, and it gets to be difficult to figure out where to go.  I was fortunate enough to have the track of someone that successfully went up this way, and it looks like in that spot they got a bit confused on where to go.  This being my second time up in this spot, it was the second time I had trouble with it, and really, there is no clear way up at that point.

We kept going, and once you get to the top of the drainage, it is small walls of dense spruce within a lot of cripple brush.  We ended up keeping more towards the pre-planned bearings to go to the center of the col than what the track was, and I'm not sure if that was better or worse.  Pushing through and keeping on going up, and eventually up and to the left (about due north) you eventually get through all of the tough stuff and find yourself on the ridge.  At this point, there is a pretty well worn herd path from all the people looking for the sign, most likely coming in from Wallface Ponds as that herd path down was very obvious when we reached it.  The sign though is on the far north-west end of the ridge (turn right when coming up from Wallface Pond) and not where the maps say the peak is.  While walking the ridge, we saw something totally unexpected, a singular hoof print from a moose!  Why they were that high (about 3950 feet) I have no idea, but it was the size of my hand, so big animal.  We didn't see who made the print though.

We eventually got to the sign, took our pictures, were impressed with the view that we really weren't expecting from a treed in peak, and had our lunch.  Then it was back down.  Bushwhacking downhill is much easier than uphill.  Not because things are easier to push through, but because you have better visibility for paths to get down.  We started down a little bit before where we came up, and we did find ourselves in the drainage a bit quicker than expected.  There were a couple places where we were faced with a bit of a ledge to get down, but they were only a few feet, and nothing too bad.  We have butts for a reason.  We did stick to the south side of the drainage once it appeared, and stuck a bit longer than we were wanting to.  Next thing I knew we were in the campsite about 150 feet further down the trail than where we went in.

The hike out from there was beautiful, and quick as the trails in general were in good shape.  On the way out we stopped by the dam at the end of Henderson Lake and took in the views from there.  That is a very nice, flat, and short detour that is worth taking.  In the end though, we got the 47th 46er.