Street and Nye Mountains

Date: December 28, 2025

Distance: 14km

Elevation gain: 808m

GPS: Alltrails Link

Street and Nye Mountains are two “46er” peaks in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The summits are treed, and they have a bit of a reputation for being underwhelming. I personally think this is a bit unfair: there are several nice viewpoints along the way, and this hike is one of the shorter Adirondack high peaks hikes. It made for an excellent half-day snowshoe trip. At the same time, if the weather is clear at all, I’d recommend visiting the nearby Mt. Jo as well: it’s a short detour and offered the best views of the day.  

I was back in Montreal for a few days, so I wanted to do one more Adirondack trip with some old friends. With my 5:30am alarm, I became the worst person in the hostel, so I left quickly. Finn, Yuanyuan and I met up very early and drove south. The temperature was quite cold as we crossed the border but warmed to a much more reasonable -8 as we approached the mountains. 

The trailhead is at the popular Adirondak Loj parking lot. Parking costs $18 usd (ouch) and some of us rented snowshoes from the information centre for an additional fee. 

The trail starts by heading along the shore of Heart Lake. There are many junctions but they're well-marked. We took a short side trip to Mt. Jo which had excellent views over Heart Lake towards the Great Range. 

Once back on the main trail, the next obstacle was the infamous crossing of Indian Pass Brook. The creek had fully frozen over and the crossing was easy. 

There's a second creek crossing further along the trail, but it was even easier. 

Past here, the trail began climbing uphill. As we gained altitude, the trees closed in, forming a sort of tree tunnel. At one point there was a nice view across the valley to Algonquin. 

We soon arrived at the junction between Street and Nye Mountains. Nye is really just a small bump on the side of Street. The trail to Nye passes through a section of forest that is apparently quite lush and green in the summer,  but snow buried everything. There is a decent viewpoint of Street to the west just before the summit, but the summit has no views whatsoever. 

I took a detour to climb Street. It was about one kilometre from the turnoff. The summit was also treed, but if you walk past the summit, some increasingly nice views open up. A few minutes south of the summit, the snowshoe trail led to an especially nice view. 

It was quite cold and windy so I didn’t stay long. I returned the way I came and ran into the rest of my group on the way down. 

On the return, we took a short side trip to the shore of Heart Lake. 

We reached the information centre just before it closed, then began the long drive back to Montreal. There was a much longer line at the border than I’d ever seen, and the agent asked far more questions and acted far more aggressively than on previous visits. I don't know if this is a consequence of the new administration, or if there was some sort of end of year quota, but it was alarming. Eventually we were allowed through and made it to Montreal.