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| Mountain top view. |
This morning we started the day off early, not so much to
get an early start, but to go into town and get one last good breakfast. Oh man, people food is amazing. We went to the same breakfast place as
yesterday, and ordered roughly the same thing; only a different kind of
muffin. A while later we set out on the
trail.
Pretty much the first thing we did on the trail was hike up
a mountain, go figure. It was then that
Miles realized how much stuff he had bought in town, the pack was heavier than
it had ever been before. We figure it
was in the forty-three, forty-four pound range.
The trail was just as steep as it had ever been; we were going to have
one hell of a day.
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| A look at the Devils Path. |
After a while of hiking we merged onto a Catskills trail
called the Devils Path. At this point
let us warn you if you ever see a trail called anything like the Devils Path,
that trail is probably HARD. Ours sure
was, it seemed to have the sole mission to ascend and descend every peak it
could find as steeply as possible, and it achieved its goal. We would scramble up one side of a mountain,
then immediately scramble back down the other.
In the mountains we had discovered it was very hard to tell
time; if the sun was out it was easy enough, but if it was cloudy, the early
afternoon would seem like early evening.
Today it was cloudy, and in what we thought was early afternoon we
reached a decision point. We had reached
one shelter, but there was another one ahead that we wanted to make. It was six and a half miles more but in that
distance there were also four more high peaks.
Of course if you know Miles at all this was no decision, we set out to
reach the next shelter. The first peak
about killed us, it was a twelve hundred foot ascent in a mile. After we completed that one there was
another, it was like really big waves in the ocean. Each wave just beats you down and rubs your
face in the sand, and they keep coming.
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| Across a valley. |
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| The next wave. |
We topped the third mountain as the sun set; which was
gorgeous, but we knew we were not going to make it to the shelter in the
daylight. We pushed on anyway; Miles was
not giving in now. As we neared the top
of the fourth peak it was no longer light enough to be able to see where you
were walking. Miles traded in the floppy
black hat for his neon green head lamp, and we pushed on. He explained to me that he figured anyone
could night hike a nice flat trail but night hiking down the side of a mountain
in the Catskills, where you had to climb down rock faces and such, well that would
be a true test of skill.
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| Sunset from |
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| the mountain top. |
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| A city in the night. |
We hiked for about another hour and a half by headlamp. The descent off the mountain was steep at
times, but was not the hardest we had done.
There were only a couple times where we had to climb over an edge on all
fours. The descent went for about two
miles, and then we turned up a side trail to reach the shelter. As we arrived at the shelter there were
already some tents there, we made camp as quickly as possible and immediately
crashed into bed. It was an exhausting day.
Traveled 23.33 miles of trail.
-SM-
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