Mount Colden

Mount Colden Information

Mount Colden is one of the great mountains of the central Adirondacks. At 4,714 feet, it’s the 11th-highest of the High Peaks, wedged dramatically between Mount Marcy and the MacIntyre Range and providing crazy-dramatic views of both.

Colden is especially famous for its wild western face, which rises above Avalanche Lake in a great wall of cliffs, slides and exposed rock. Cutting through that face is the Trap Dike, a massive natural cleft that has become one of the Adirondacks’ best-known climbing routes. It is not a marked hiking trail, however, and requires technical scrambling and climbing skills.

Mount Colden has history, too. Its first recorded ascent was made in 1849 by Robert Clark and Alexander Ralph, two employees of the McIntyre Iron Works. Remarkably, they climbed Colden via the Trap Dike! Nineteenth-century Adirondack writer Alfred B. Street later described Colden as “the most savage mountain” in the Adirondacks.

Today, hikers have two maintained approaches to the summit. The more straightforward route climbs past Lake Arnold, one of the highest bodies of water in the Adirondacks. The alternative approaches from Lake Colden and can be combined with Avalanche Pass to make a spectacular but way more demanding loop.

Whichever way you get there, Colden has one of the finest summit areas in the High Peaks, with open rock and enormous views across to Mount Marcy and Algonquin Peak, and down into the deep valleys containing Avalanche Lake, Lake Colden and the Flowed Lands.

All in all, Mount Colden makes for a thoroughly banger day hiking in the Adirondacks.