August 12, 2011

Completed the dreaded one day Devils Path hike in the Catskills, New York. I thought I was prepared for what we were getting ourselves into, but they don’t call it Devils Path for nothing. I was joined on the trail by my hiking friend Alex who was as eager as I was to complete this mammoth hike. The logistics of doing this non-loop hike is fairly complicated and somewhat costly. We left from Kew Gardens Queens at 5:00am in the morning and drove to a town by the trail head. At a gas station we met up with a prearranged taxi that we followed to the trail terminus then hopped in the taxi and he drove us to the start of the trail. As the drive took 45 minutes I knew this was going to be a long, long day. The weather was perfect for hiking, not to warm, no rain and just enough wind to keep us cool.

Devils Path ascends 5 mountains in the Catskills, is 24 miles long and has an elevation gain/loss of 11,000 feet. The crazy part is that for all the hiking up there are not a ton of views. The peaks are in the treeline so you have to go off trail to see the views, but what views they are. Catskills are not very large in comparison to the Adirondacks or the White Mountains, but they are still beautiful rolling bumps across the landscape.

The hike took as 13 hours to complete and we were proud of our time (way below book time). The only thing we would change was our start time next time. We ended up hiking the last 7 miles in the dark. Lucky the ground was not wet so footing was not too much of an issue. The last seven miles were not marked well with tail markers so we had to pull out the map, compass and GPS a few times to find out way. Our biggest concern was startling a bear so we made sure to make a lot of noise as we went through the brushy trail. At the very end with about a half mile to go sitting right in the middle of our trail was a freshly made bear dung…we walked that last half mile faster than we thought possible.

The car was just were we left it. We drove back to NYC (in retrospect should have spent the night up there). I arrived home at 3:30am. A long journey but well worth it.

This year I have done the Presidential Traverse in NH (22 Miles) and Devils Path (24 Miles). At the end of September I am going to do the hardest of them all, The Grand Traverse (24 Miles) in the Adirondacks. Three of the hardest hikes in the country in four months, not bad, not bad at all.