The Gunks Blog

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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Normally, on the weekend around my birthday, I’d be celebrating at the Climb to the Castle on the Whiteface Toll Road. The new normal has changed all that, but I still wanted to get outside.

Unfortunately, at the end of running the Slide-Cornell-Wittenberg loop in the Catskills in late August, I fell and broke my right wrist. Driving home that night wasn’t fun: I had to reach across and select fifth gear left-handed.

I’ve got a few more weeks with this miserable cast. Anything steep that requires three-point contact isn’t happening: I can’t put pressure on my wrist. So when I returned to Lake Minnewaska, I was looking for something I hadn’t been on before.

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The last few hundred meters of the Jenny Lane trail were wet and squishy as it dead-ended into Lower Awosting Road. Three 20-something women that I’d passed on the carriage road earlier were looking at the trail sign.

“Is this the way to Gertrude’s Nose?” one of them asked.

A rocky outcrop just north of Lake Minnewaska, Gertrude’s Nose offers commanding views towards the Hudson River and beyond. Unfortunately for the three wayward hikers, our encounter was at the junction of the Jenny Lane trail and Lower Awosting Road, diametrically across Lake Minnewaska State Park from Gertrude’s Nose.

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