Caption: There's a trail in there somewhere... A particularly rough patch of the brutal Lake Arnold Trail.
We took this trail in order to bypass Mount Marcy (New York State's highest point at 5,344 ft.) since we would not have made it to the summit and back to the trailhead while there was still sunlight out. The small flashlights we carried would not have gotten us all the way back had we needed them.
Adding to the torture of this trail were our encounters with the 2 young French Canadian women whom we came across then hiked with on 2 occasions. One was friendly, but the other icily distant, to say the least. Like I said, it was a brutal trail.