Finally, Moose Mountain offers a couple of fine small rock-ledge lookouts to the south. Here, a fine panorama of Lake Placid unfolds, with the distant high peaks in the background. These lookouts also offer a good look at nearby McKenzie Mountain and the ridge which connects it with Moose. You can see from here that the ridge route will involve a fair bit of elevation loss and gain, and also a path that is not a direct line (the ridge is quite curved). Meaning that the foot-trail distance from Moose Mountain's summit to McKenzie's is significantly longer than the as-the-crow-flies distance.
We didn't dally long on Moose's summit. We had a fair distance to cover, and we'd promised Peggy that we'd be at her place before the start of the winter 46r dinner at a reasonable time. Again, the complete lack of a track to follow meant that we had to very carefully look for trail markers. Much of the route along the ridge is open enough forest that there's no discernable cleared-out section that indicates where the trail goes. There were many points where Jenn would stop at the last trail marker while I scouted ahead, looking for the next, after which she would go to the next marker and we'd repeat the operation. On the plus side, the rock-hard styrofoam-like snow meant that I could wander about in the forest as easily as in an empty Wal-mart parking lot. Exploring in the woods had never been so easy!
With the trail scouting slowing us down a bit, we finally reached the 3200-foot low point between Moose and McKenzie, and started heading back up. There are a few sharp changes of direction that the trail takes as it goes over some intermediate bumps that threw us for a loop, wasting a bit more time, but eventually we figured it out and reached the top of the Bartlett Pond trail just shy of McKenzie's summit. A bit of high, hazy cloud had slid in, somewhat dulling the distant views of the high peaks and making it hard not to take flat-looking pictures.
Marcy-Haystack from the North
Lake Placid from McKenzie
McKenzie offers a few very nice views down towards Lake Placid, and one decent view to the north (overall I'd say Moose offers better views). Again, with our time schedule on our minds, we didn't dally long, taking a few pictures and then heading on over the summit of McKenzie. Jenn was somewhat disappointed to learn that McKenzie has a subsummit that is almost as high as the highpoint, and a quite steep bit of trail leading up to it (I think she thought that was it for the uphill for the day).
