The Gunks Blog

Let’s get the bad news outta the way first: I didn’t get up to Skytop, so no photos with stupendous views. It would have added 60 minutes to what was becoming a long day. Sunday was partly cloudy anyway. The good news: I found an important artifact of New York ski history, as we shall see.

When I think that there can’t possibly be anything I haven’t seen in a place, I’m often proven wrong. On Sunday morning, I flogged the shooting brake up the Thruway to New Paltz. Objective: Mohonk Preserve. Instead of the Spring Farm Road trailhead, or parking at the Mohonk gatehouse, I went to a trailhead off Butterville Road to explore the lower part of the trail network.

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Recently an adventure presented itself, the Shawangunk Ridge Trail Run. A 13, 30, or 70-mile hike/run, the SRT is organized by Run Wild, a non-profit dedicated to preserving open space. The 70-mile starts at High Point on the NY/NJ border, the 30 at Sam’s Point and the 13 at Peterskill all finishing at the restored train trestle in Rosendale.

My buddy Freebird suggested the 30. He and I had completed the 24-mile Devil’s Path in a day earlier this summer so we deemed ourselves qualified. This would be my biggest distance by far. “We got this” was part of our foolish banter. On 9/11 at 9 am, after a moment of silence for the victims of the 2001 attacks twenty years earlier, we took off in a swarm.

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Since my last trip to Lake Placid in March, I’ve stayed close to home. But recently, being fully vaxxed and in need of a change in scenery, I headed northwest. There’s a last segment of the Shawangunks that I’ve not explored, southwest of Sam’s Point.

Diving off Route 17 on to Roosa Gap Road, I picked my way up to Wurtsboro Ridge State Forest. The roads here are narrow, with blind rises and blind curves. For a change, I was content to drive below the speed limit.

Parking at the trail head, I set out. On a rough trail, In the first kilometer, I descended a rough trail to a valley floor. At the bottom, running through a dry stream bed littered with glacial rubble, I ran into the Long Path and took a hard right.

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