Escarpment Trail

Last week I met up with an old friend for a backpacking trip - a bit more than a year from the previous trip, only this one was planned to be a bit longer and harder than the last one. I looked for some places closer to home, but ended up choosing the Escarpment Trail in the Catskills mountains of New York.

I met Jason at lunch near the trailhead, where we had our last hot meal indoors for a couple of days.  We drove to the trail's end, loaded up my car with his gear, and then drove to the trail head.  It was spitting snow, but nothing that stuck.  We hit the trail with a couple of hours of daylight remaining.  We both had heavy packs - Jason's was the heavier and he was working on a couple of hours' sleep.  We made it a couple of miles in to a shelter, where we had enough time to set up our hammocks and start dinner with some daylight.  We had a nice fire to drive off the cold - but just like last year, that didn't last long.  It was a cooollldd night.

We woke up the next morning and hit the trail.  The trail, while I'm told is popular, was fairly rough for a good majority of the hike.  These roots comprised the trail for a little section of the first climb up High Windham mountain.

We made it to the top, along with a bunch of other people, pausing long enough to catch our breaths and snap a couple of photos.

That night we settled down at another shelter, ate a quick meal in the darkness, and then crawled into our hammocks almost immediately.  It was a long day of hiking.  Next morning, we got up, filled out water bottles and set up for a steep climb right off the bat.  We climbed up Blackhead mountain, which was the highest point (almost 4000 feet) of the hike.

From there, we hiked up and down the surrounding mountains.  For lunch, we found this nice spot overlooking the valley with a lake, below.  While the wind was cold, the sun felt great, and it was nice to get our backpacks off our backs for a bit.

We then hiked a good ways down, where we had to get water for the rest of the hike.  Thankfully Jason brought his water filter, since the "spring" water had a bunch of leaf litter in it.  You can see the ugly brown water before it was filtered into clear, delicious water.

We didn't get as far as we had hoped, but missed that by maybe a mile or so.  We ended up camping on a mountaintop not too far from a plane crash.  We woke up extra early, and walked out from there.  The final high section of the trail was at these cliffs overlooking a couple of lakes.

We had to hike down these cliffs - probably the gnarliest part of the hike - to get back to Jason's car.

All told, we hiked about 25-26 miles in three days over some decent elevation with poor trail conditions (in places, otherwise just rugged).  Once we got to our cars we found a little diner where we had a hot meal, and then we parted ways to head home.

It was a great hike, glad I had someone to share it with.  I'm looking for the next hike, I need to do a bit of planning to get it for warmer weather.  Have a great day,

Marc