Fall Hike, or...

I considered many alternate titles for this post, among them "In Praise of Flexibility," "Turns Out Maps are Helpful After All," "Lost in Translation," and "Mental Health Day." At any rate, I decided I needed to get out of the city for a bit and, after consulting the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference's informative and thorough website, headed north yesterday on a train that traces the Hudson River. I caught it in Harlem and rode it for about an hour, ending at a stop called Garrison. The ride over was peaceful and the scenery was gorgeous. I think if, upon reaching Garrison, I'd simply gotten on another train and headed back to NYC I'd have called the day a success.

I began here,

rode by this,

and ended here. A pretty sweet trade.

I was relying on directions I'd copied from the NYNJTC website for a hike that went up Sugarloaf Hill and alongside Castle Rock. It was supposed to provide 7 miles of great views before looping back to the Garrison train station. Alas, I ended up having to take their word for it. The directions I was using were clear and explicit on the screen, but trying to apply them to a tangle of trails which criss-crossed and intersected merrily every hundred feet or so proved easier said than done. According to the directions, there is a trail south of the parking lot that leads to the trail head for the hike I had planned. I followed it, decided it was wrong, retraced my steps, went up several roads, decided they were all wrong, re-retraced my steps, and after 45 minutes ended up back in the parking lot again. Hmmm. Time to whip out the smartphone and find a map. My BlackBerry had other ideas, however. It lethargically loaded a few very unhelpful pages and didn't yield any maps, only services that would sell me a map of the area, which was not helpful.

Finally, I gave up the BlackBerry and headed back down the trail I'd originally started on. It was marked with blue blazes, which changed from blue to white to red to orange and back to blue again in rapid succession (or perhaps I wasn't following the same trail). I figured I'd just walk around for a while; even if I wasn't on the Sugarloaf trail, it was still a chilly, beautiful fall day and the woods were indescribably lovely. I wasn't worried about getting lost, as the Hudson was never too far away, and I knew I could always follow it back to Garrison.

Next time I go hiking in upstate New York, will bring a book of Robert Frost along with me. I had his poems running through my head just about the whole time I was out. This image made me think of "Mending Wall."

I saw only one other person during the hours that I walked around, a guy about my age who said a cheerful hello and continued on his way. I followed a series of trails until each of them ended because they ran into a peninsula or private property. It was a much-needed respite from New York City, and I had a fantastic time. It was a breezy day that couldn't decide whether it was going to be sunny or overcast, and the only sounds were made by leaves, crunching below my feet or rustling above my head. Every now and then my trail would spit me out on the banks of the Hudson, where I could look across the water at blazing fall trees and West Point looming rather ominously in the distance. I walked by burned, overgrown ruins of houses that the forest slowly taking back, all kinds of fungi, squirrels, birds, and even some intrepid wildflowers still hanging on. At one point a stream turned into a small waterfall. It was pure bliss.

West Point

One of the blazes marking one of the trails I followed.

I guess it's been a while since the blazes were affixed. This tree has grown attached it its blaze.

Bride over the railroad tracks

After I'd exhausted every hiking possibility, I sighed, not yet having had my fill of the outdoors, and headed back to the platform where I caught the next train back to Harlem. Back home, before even taking off my hiking boots, I ordered a set of trail maps of the East Hudson area and plan to head back as soon as they arrive to do this thing once and for all. I'm viewing yesterday as a fact-finding mission.