Lake Minnewaska: Before the Blaze

For weeks, I’d been looking forward to taking my brother from Denver for his inaugural visit to Lake Minnewaska. Over the years, he’d heard me rave about how it’s one of the most beautiful state parks I’d ever experienced, east or west.

Lake Awosting

I went on about how it’s a place where you could go biking, hiking, climbing, and swimming alongside gorgeous mountain laurel blooms in June, wild blueberries in July, and colorful foliage in autumn, and it never disappoints. Although he didn’t actually say it, I assumed that his attitude was, “yeah, but I live in Colorado, so we’ll see.” While pulling into the Peter’s Kill parking lot last week, I wondered if I’d oversold our ride.

Continue reading

Mohonk Ramble to Guyot Hill

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.

lowland near Shawangunk ridge

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.

Continue reading

Shawangunk Ridge Trail Run

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.

Continue reading