Back in May, I set a goal of hiking four Adirondack high peaks before the end of the year.

Now, I’m not one of those hardcore hiking types who hikes every single weekend. But I like to hike, and at the time this seemed perfectly doable. It was early. I had all the time in the world.

The high peaks are the 46 highest mountains in the Adirondacks. I’ve always thought it would be cool to hike every high peak and become a 46er, as they’re called, but I’m a little tentative about expressing this goal, because when I set goals, I like to complete them, and, well, I’m not sure I can hike all 46 high peaks. So instead, I like to set smaller, more realistic goals.

I reasoned that if I hiked four high peaks this summer, that would give me 10, and 10 is such a nice, round number — I’d much rather say, “I’ve hiked 10 high peaks” than “I’ve hiked nine high peaks.” It just sounds so much better.

But by August, I was getting a little worried, because I hadn’t hiked a single high peak. In fact, I’d barely done any hiking at all, which meant I wasn’t in very good shape. Where had all the time gone? It had seemed so plentiful back in May. Now, suddenly, there was pressure, and I recruited a friend to hike two of the easier high peaks, Cascade and Porter. I’d hiked Cascade in the past, but Porter would get me one step closer to my goal. We had a nice time, and I felt like I was back on track.

Then Tongue Mountain happened.

Tongue Mountain is a series of connected peaks that run along a peninsula that juts into Lake George. It’s not a high peak, but I didn’t want to do a high peak — I wanted to do a nice, long hike that didn’t require a drive to the Adirondacks. Everyone had told me that this was a beautiful hike, and when we set out, on a hot and humid August day, my friend and I were in high spirits. We made our way across the ridge before descending to the tip of the peninsula, called the Point of Tongue, and although the ridge portion of the hike was tiring, I knew the final stretch, a fairly flat shoreline trail, would be much easier.

At least in theory.

Instead, my friend had what I’ll just call a complete mental collapse. He looked at the sign indicating that our trailhead was five miles away, and announced that he couldn’t go on. “What do you mean you can’t go on?” I said. “Do you mean that you’re physically unable to hike any longer?”

This was, he confirmed, exactly what he meant. “I cannot go on,” he repeated, in a voice tinged with hysteria and exhaustion. “We’ll have to get to the road, and hitchhike.” This was, of course, complete insanity, as we were surrounded by water. “You can leave me here,” my friend suggested. “I’ll figure something out.”

I had no plans to abandon my friend in a rattlesnake-infested wilderness, but I was a little perplexed as to how to solve this problem. Fortunately, a friendly family had docked their boat at the Point of Tongue. Feeling like the most pathetic human being on the face of the earth, I walked over to them, explained the situation, and asked if they could ferry us to the mainland. “You’re a Red Sox fan,” they said, eyeing my baseball cap. “That’s going to be a problem.”

The friendly family deposited us at a private dock on the other side of the lake, where we made our way up a steep driveway that emerged on Route 9N. At some point, an indignant tourist emerged from a vacation home, and asked where we had come from; I explained that we were lost hikers. “If my dogs had been out here, they would have attacked you,” the indignant tourist said. We started walking down the road; after about a mile, my friend announced that he couldn’t go on. “Wait here,” I said, and left him at the guardrail. “I’ll go get the car.”

This incident gave me pause. I understand that stuff can go wrong on hikes, but stuff had gone spectacularly wrong on this hike, and it had left a bad taste in my mouth. Any hike where you’re coordinating your own rescue by boat is simply a complete and total disaster — there’s just no sugar-coating it. In any case, I wasn’t sure I had the energy to do any more hikes, and I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to meet my goal. The whole thing had put me in a pretty foul mood.

Fortunately, a friend of mine who happens to be a 46er took pity on me. She invited me to hike two high peaks, Nippletop and Dial, and so we set out early in the morning last week on a warm, clear day. It was a long hike, and along the way she shared some insights into the process of becoming a 46er. She told me that the Adirondack Forty-Sixers, a group composed of 46ers, do not ask you to provide visual evidence that you’ve hiked every single high peak, but that they do want a list of dates. When I got home, I printed out the list of peaks, checked off the ones I’d done, and made some notes. It seemed like a good start. But it also symbolizes a real commitment to the idea of hiking all of the peaks. What if I fail?

As for right now, well, I’ve hiked nine of them — which is, you know, better than eight.

Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.