The Quixotic Jedi

My dreams were tortured again last night, dear reader.  Something’s coming.  Something’s going to happen or change, but I can’t tell what.  I dreamt of love and sex last night.  Separately.  I dreamt again of pursuit, as well.  And of inevitability.  I have no idea how to interpret these dreams.

Normally, my dreams fall into one of two categories:  muddled and forgotten re-hashings of the recent past, or clear and memorable conundrums that don’t relate in any linear fashion to what’s currently happening in my life.  Last night’s dreams were a mix of both.

It took me forever to fall asleep.  Before I actually did, I spent some time in that middling area where I’m dreaming but some part of me wakes and becomes cognizant of the fact that I’m dreaming without actually leaving the dream.  I dreamt that my ex-wife was lying by my side – in my bed at that very moment.  It was very comforting and comfortable.  But it wasn’t real, so I woke fully and walked a circle around my apartment to clear my head before it hit the pillow again.

There’s probably something buried there.  I’ve dated women since being married, but those relationships did not have the same weight and depth of my relationship with my wife.  I suppose I was just dreaming a pleasant memory – but not one in which I’d prefer to get lost.  What did Brad Warner say?

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea.  Stick with reality.  Reality’s all you’ve got.  But here’s the real secret, the real miracle:

It’s enough.

#truth.  I’m glad I woke and didn’t allow myself to get too far down that path of fantasy.

Later on, I dreamt of being on an island with a bunch of other people.  The water was rising and the island was being flooded – albeit relatively slowly.  But there wasn’t much time.  We needed to get things together and onto a boat so that we could get off the island before it was too late.

One of my companions had a huge dick – and I mean like fucking GARGANTUAN – and all he wanted to do was f*ck the big-breasted, wide-hipped naked women that somehow seemed to be flooding our little community.  I don’t know how many other communities there were on the island, but mine wasn’t the only one.

I mostly wanted to get everyone together, gather supplies, and get the hell off the island, but for whatever reason, I seemed to know that the gesture and my desires were futile:  that the dude and the brown-skinned sirens were going to spend their last days effing, instead of doing something to save themselves.

Again, my dreams are painted more in emotions and feelings than actual happenings.

Ha – one of the chicks picked up an STD from the dude (“it burns,” she said, “that’s what you get for being so promiscuous”) – but that didn’t stop her from being next in line to impale herself on him.

In retrospect, I suppose that those voluptuous young ladies were sirens.

I think I just either woke up or slipped into another dream sequence, as much as it might please me to write a happy ending to the story – maybe that I gave up and escaped on my own, or with a single just-right-for-me virgin – but I don’t remember anything like that happening.

So yeah, dreams of love, dreams of sex (with, lol, consequences), dreams of some semi-unnamed relentless, inevitable doom creeping ever closer . . . I’m really not sure what all that means or what I’m supposed to do with it.

I suppose I’ll just try to make it to work on time again tomorrow.

I just finished writing my comment to The Naked Redhead’s post Not Very Nice Things.  I think it may have been a bit too much to include in the comments section of her post, so I’m posting it here:

This past winter it was really cold, right?  Well, it was really cold here in NNJ – I don’t know where your readers are from, TNR.  So I was at the diner with a couple of buddies one evening:  we finish eating, go outside to smoke (in the freezing cold) and then peace-out.  As I’m walking to my car at the other end of the lot, I watch this dude pull in right next to me on the driver’s side – one of those really ugly hatchback something-or-others with the wide tailpipe and racing stickers on the back.  Anyway, he pulls in about 9 inches from my car – doesn’t hit it or anything, but he’s too close for me to open my door and get in on the driver’s side.  So, like 5 seconds after he gets out of his car, I pass him in the lot and say “hey man, could you move your car over a bit?  I don’t think I’m going to be able to get into my car with you that close.”  He turns around, looks at his parking job (there are other spots in the lot, and he had PLENTY of room on HIS driver’s side), and says something along the lines of “pfft.  Whatever dude; you got lotsa room.” 

Sure enough, when I get to my car, there’s like 9 inches between us.  I have to crawl in from the passenger side, which is kind of a pain in the ass because I drive a stick shift Mini Cooper with bucket seats (not that they make ‘em with bench seats – but if they DID, I’d sure as hell have one, a la that Cake song “stick shifts and saftey belts, bucket seats have all got to go…”).  Anyway, as I’m warming up my car – like you do when it’s like 4 degrees F outside – I’m getting more and more pissed at the dude’s plain lack of human decency.  And I start to have to pee.  Not because I’m pissed, but because I drank about 3 large glasses of water in the diner.  And then it hits me:  “it’s better to be pissed off than pissed on.”

So I back my car out of the spot I was in (my car is nice ‘n toasty now) and pull in to the spot on the other side of monsieur douchenozzle’s car.  I back in, so that I can open my door so nobody walking through the parking lot will see me pissing on the door-lock on HIS driver’s side. 

Now, Red, I know that most of your readers are women, but this is one of those times where men have certain advantages in life:  the ability to aim our urine and to stanch the flow via gentle pressure to the urethra.

I spent the next five or so minutes peeing in his lock, giving it a second to freeze, and peeing some more on top of that.  “Ha-ha,” you say:  everybody knows that car door-locks have those little metal things on them specifically to keep water (urine) out.  Yes, but I own several paperclips.  I used one of these to hold the little metal flap up/aside as I did my work.  No splashes or anything.

Power door-locks?  I thought of that too.  When I finished peeing, I took one of the half-finished gallons of water I had left from hiking and poured it in the joints of BOTH of his shitty little racecar’s doors.  Slowly.  A little at a time.  So it would have time to freeze.

I’d love to say “then I took a big dump on the hood of his car (and it was shaped like a mountain lion),” but I didn’t.  Mainly because I didn’t have to poop and, again, it was witch-tit cold outside.  The whole thing took about fifteen minutes and I totally boogied out of there when I was done.

Booo Don Cheedle…

Um, the people who live there?  I don’t know, but I’m glad I don’t (live there):

Via: Online Schools

Well, I did it:  I climbed Friday, Balsam Cap, Rocky and Lone in one day.  In the snow.  It was a long day.  I hit the trail around 10:30 and got back to the car around 9:30.  Yes, in the Post Meridian.  That’s 11 hours of hiking, dear reader:  pretty much all of which (except for maybe the first and last 1.5 miles) was bushwhacking.

I parked at the Denning Road trailhead and headed along the Neversink about 5 miles to the summit of Friday, then looped back around, summitting Balsam Cap, Rocky and Lone.  It was pitch black when I found the canister on Lone.

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Yes, all four of these mountains were bushwhacks, but there’s no way I would have been able to physically handle that hike (probably between 12 and 14 miles) in the snow without other people cutting at least part of the trail for me.  Mad props go out to Drama and SoloJoe (aka John and Joe) for cutting the trail along the Neversink up to Rocky, as well as the trail from Rocky to Lone.  I wouldn’t have bagged that fourth peak if someone hadn’t been out ahead of me.

The Catskill 3500 Club had an outing to climb Rocky and Lone this past Saturday – 11 hikers total, from what I heard.  They followed John’s and Joe’s tracks along the Neversink and up Rocky.  I was well behind the club outing (they started a couple of hours before me), so I followed their tracks to the turnoff for Rocky and broke my own trail another mile to the summit of Friday.  Summitting Friday was a nightmare.  Thick pine trees all the way up, so I got wet, dirty and scratched.

I was kind of counting on someone having cut a trail between Friday and Balsam Cap, but no one had been there since February 22d, so I had to cut that trail myself.  Through more thick pine trees pretty much the whole way down & up.  Because it’s rare (I think) that the four mountains are climbed together, I wasn’t expecting a trail between Balsam Cap and Rocky.  And there wasn’t one.  I was, however, planning on being able to follow the 3500 Club’s tracks from Rocky to Lone, but they pussied out and followed their tracks back down after summitting Rocky.

By the time I signed in at the canister at the summit of Rocky, I was spent.  The charge on my iPhone was out, and, even though I charged it the night before, there wasn’t any juice in my portable charger, so I don’t have the whole hike plotted out, which is a major bummer because it’s probably the most badass one I’ve done to date.  You can view the first 7.3 miles of it on my EveryTrail page.

With no trail to follow, I just didn’t have the energy to get over to Lone, so I resigned myself to bagging it another day.  On the way down, however, I noticed two sets of snowshoe tracks that led off toward Lone, instead of back to the Neversink, so I followed them.  I figured they’d either be headed back to the trailhead via a shorter route or to the summit of Lone.  It was the latter.

I ran out of water and sunlight on the way up Lone.  As the tracks started going downhill, I turned back around, figuring I missed the canister turnoff.  Which I did.  What I found was a warren of showshoe tracks where John and Joe walked all around the summit looking for the canister.  At this point it was pitch black out and I could only see as far as the light from my headlamp.  The sky was clear and the stars were gorgeous.

Just after I started trying to figure out which of the myriad sets of tracks led back to the trailhead, I bumped into the cansiter, which was a real blessing.  I signed in and spent another fifteen minutes or so trying to locate the homebound tracks (on top of the fifteen or so I had already spent looking for the canister).  I’m guessing it was around 7:30 or 8 at this time.

As I was following the tracks back down the mountain, I saw a couple of lights ahead of me.  Then a couple of dudes voices were calling out to me, asking me where I was going.  I figured it was the park rangers and that they’d be pretty pissed they had to come this far to find my skinny ass.  (This was a few hundred yards off the summit.)  It turns out that it was John and Joe and that I was following their tracks down.  It was fortuitous that I met up with them at that point, because I had just come into a clearing where the night wind had blown snow over their trail.  Joe asked me if I was getting worried (it being pitch black outside and that we were in the middle of the woods with no trail to follow back home) and I said hell no in a tone of voice that kind of suggested it was a dumb question to ask.  What I meant was that I wasn’t worried because I had tracks to follow that could only lead back to the trailhead (snowshoeing – or hiking in general, for that matter – really doesn’t get any easier than that.  Joe later thanked me for putting his mind at ease, because he was getting a little worried at that point.

They asked if I wanted to roll with them back to the trailhead and I said hell yes.

So I spent the next three miles or so getting to know John and Joe on the way down the mountain.  We took turns breaking the trail and telling hiking stories.  Comradeship is fun.

I have some relatively philosophical things to say about the hike as a whole, but I think I’ll save them for another time.

After reaching the trailhead and warming up our cars and shooting the shit for another hour or so, we made our goodbyes.  As we were doing so, Joe said to me “hey man, nice traverse.”  I can’t tell you how good that made me feel.  I guess it ended up being repayment for my not-worried comment/attitude.

So that’s it for now.  Maybe more later, but I have to get to work tomorrow.  I only have Bearpen and Kaaterskill High Peak left to go in my winter peakbagging extravaganza.

My dreams have been haunted of late, dear reader.  As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t dream so much in colors and shapes and things said as I do in feelings, emotions and events.  I suppose the overriding feeling that has pervaded my dreams in the past week or so has been that of being (unwillingly) on the defensive.  Defending me and mine, but in a futile-gesture sense – as though whatever I’m defending against is inexorable.

Last night I dreamt of things biting my hands – I think they were smallish dogs, but I’m not sure.  Whatever they might have been, it would have been easy enough for me to kill them, but I didn’t.  My non-desire to kill things in my dreams (despite my eminent ability) is not unusual.  I can only conclude that I’m a pacifist at heart, and that any violence in my life is necessarily calculated and comes from my mind.  The violence itself (and I’m speaking more-or-less metaphorically here) isn’t any source of pleasure for me, but the sense of accomplishment resulting from setting my mind to something and completing it is.

A couple of nights ago I dreamt of zombies.  Nothing particularly creative:  the usual doomsday we’re-outnumbered-and-dwindling-whilst-they’re-only-growing-in-number-with-no-end-in-sight scenario.  I remember thinking that it was pointless to be fighting the zombies – not that they would undoubtedly win, but rather that there wasn’t any reason why they should be coming for us.  We were holed up in some sort of mountainside river enclosure, which is to say that the mountainside and river were enclosed by some larger structure.  As I think back, the best way to describe it would be that gravity acted differently there:  the pieces of the river flowed around mountain outcroppings at a steep angle, but though they should by all rights have been waterfalls, they were just deep, slow moving bits of water.  Zombies spread like a virus, and that virus kept breaking out within our theoretically sealed and secure holdfast, for no apparent reason.  I think I remember triage decisions to euthanize – to put it kindly – friends and whatnot who had been recently infected.

The night before that was more of the same, though it wasn’t dogs or zombies.

I’m kind of at a loss as to where these dreams are coming from.  They seem to speak of an underlying source of anxiety in my life – a feeling of being hunted or chased.  But when I examine these feelings in the light of day, they seem to be naught but dreams.  Because my dreams are generally so pedestrian and easily recognizable as my brain rehashing recent events, I rarely have cause to remember them.  So when I have dreams like these, it’s reason for me to pause and consider.  I don’t believe in discounting them.

Maybe I’ll get some clarity from the hike tomorrow.  I’m going to attempt the Friday/Balsam Cap/Rocky/Lone range traverse.  It looks to be around 12 miles.  Twelve miles isn’t unmanageable, but the peaks of these four mountains are covered with near-impassable pine trees, so the going will be slow.  I’m going to leave early in the hope that I’ll have enough daylight to bag all four peaks.  If the snow is too wet, deep and heavy, I’ll turn off the trail (which is a misnomer, because almost the entire 12 miles will be bushwhack) sooner rather than later and just climb Rocky and Lone.

It’s supposed to be in the high 30s in the Catskills tomorrow, and I’m not sure what that will mean for the snow cover.   If it melts evenly and I can stride atop it cleanly, all will be well.  If it’s heavy and deep, the hike will be a real pain in the ass.  We’ll see what happens.  I have six mountains left to climb in the next three weekends.  If I can bag all four in the range tomorrow, I’ll take Sunday off.  If not, I’ll go back and finish off Bearpen on Sunday.

Yay technology.  I can now check my six email addresses from my iPhone.  I just added two new ones – one is a brand-new gmail account for copywriting stuff, and the other is my already-existing MobileMe account.

Nobody likes blog posts that start off with anything that even vaguely resembles “…haven’t blogged in a while…”, especially not ones that include an apology to the reader.  So, to wit:

Fuck you, dear reader; I’ve been busy.

Blogging isn’t really any kind of a chore for me – I really dig it, in fact.  It’s cathartic and does wonders for the organization of my thoughts – past, present and future.  But I usually leave that for the end of the day, which has been getting later and later (again) of late.  It’s after midnight right now and I really should have been in bed a while ago.

Things are going very well at work.  I’m a fuckin’ animal.  Projects that used to take me a day or two to complete two years ago (or half a day, a year ago) are only taking me a couple of hours now.  I’m able to find answers to people’s questions in seconds – and some of said people have been doing this kind of work for many more years than me.  I blame regular chess for my refined ability to switch gears and come at problems from different angles.  In the last couple of weeks, my boss has seemed genuinely happy to see me every day.  And I’m not getting into the office any earlier.  I’m also a lot more confident – my answers and solutions to questions or issues have been coming quicker and with more assurance than ever before.

That said, I’ve been a little low on the self-confidence scale of late.  Not in any overt manner – I’m not all cowed or anything – but I seem to have something niggling at the back of my head, something stirring the hairs on the back of my neck that feels like a lack of self-confidence.  I’m not sure quite what it is.  Every time I turn around (figuratively speaking), there’s nothing there.  Any general inventory or stock-taking I’ve compiled in the last few weeks has come up well in the black.  I really have no idea what exactly is going on – and the funny/ironic thing is, whenever I examine my feelings, I’m not really all that worried about it either.  I’m pretty chill, which is pretty fly.  What will be, will be:  I’m cool with whatever comes.

So yeah:  writing.  I’ve been doing kind of a lot of that lately (I’m including editing in there, because it uses the same or similar muscles), most of which consists of emails and reports for work.  I have a couple of irons in the fire for copywriting work, which is pretty cool.

But I haven’t really been writing for me all that much.  Not much blogging; no real thought-recording.  I know that’s partly to do with the hour at which I tend to sit down to blog.  It’s also partly due to the fact that I’m verbose – I mean “loquacious” – for whatever effin reason, I can’t bring myself to write a 250-word blog post.  And certainly not during the work day.  WTF.  Everybody else does.

I really need a few hours to sit down and read – zone out from the world and get lost in fiction.  Soon, Ted, soon.

Anyway, I’m off to bed.  Here’s the video from Tuesday night’s Flogging Molly show of If I Ever Leave This World Alive (recorded on my iPhone – god I love that thing):

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) I’ll be at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC to see Flogging Molly.  I’m going to guess that this will be the sixth or so show of theirs I’ve attended.  I haven’t listened to any of their albums in pretty much forever, though.  I’m not even sure if I can tell you which one is the most recent.  Float?

What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?

Elephino.

So yeah.  I’m pretty psyched, but mostly because I enjoy attending dance-your-face-off concerts with my sister Katie (who never fails to bring the awesomeness).  Our cousin Danny (excuse me, Dan or Daniel) will be attending as well; our brother John bailed because he’s a poopyhead.

As long as they play “If I Ever Leave This World Alive”, I’ll be happy.  Here’s the album version (crappy video, though):

And here’s a live video:

That song rarely fails to bring a tear to my eye.  Happily, as it rolls down my cheek, that tear generally mixes with the sweat from the rest of my face, and I’m generally too smiling and out of breath from screaming the lyrics to notice.

That’s not true.  I always notice that tear – right around “…hey if I never…” and “…she says: I’m ok, I’m alright…”

No, I’m not getting all choked up right now.  I’m not.  At all.

Other than that, not much is going on.  At this point, I’m trying to come up with something that qualifies as “among others” so that the title of this post isn’t a total lie.

I had a good meeting with my friend Ed Pirone this evening, talking about copywriting, web design, CMSs, social media crap, iPhone apps and other computer/internet related stuff.  Ed’s got good energy and I dig being around it.

Thievery Corporation is on my playlist right now (big time).  I downloaded their album The Richest Man in Babylon last night and I’m really digging it so far.

My fucking Trails iPhone app is still effing with me (big time).  I have six or seven hikes to upload, but they don’t seem to be going through.  I hit “Export to EveryTrail” and get the “Export to EveryTrail Successful!” notification, but it doesn’t actually show up on my EveryTrail page.  Vly uploaded last night, and I was able to upload Windham High Peak this evening, but I haven’t been able to get anything else to upload.  If anybody’s interested, I can send the .gpx or Google Earth files to you via email for any of my winter hikes so far.  Just email me at QuixoticJedi[at]gmail[dot]com and I’ll shoot them over to you.

One of these days I’ll get some free time and figure out what exactly is going on with that.  I’ve also found a cool site called GPS Visualizer (via CatskillHiker.com) that will enable me to embed Google Maps with my hikes plotted out on them.  That’s going to take some finagling:  I’ll need to expand my Google account and copy & paste some code during the embedding process, but it shouldn’t be too hard.

One of these days I’ll also figure out how to upload some fucking images to this blog.  I’ve tried several times and spent quite a bit of time bouncing around the WordPress Codex/support forum, but for whatever reason, it just hasn’t been working for me.  I’ve tried both from here at my dashboard and from my cPanel on BlueHost, but no joy.  WTF.  Seriously, WordPress is one of the most user-friendly platforms (dare I say CMS?) out there, and it’s just not working.  It’s got to be something I’m doing wrong.

But I’ll tell ya, dear reader, when the day comes that I can upload images and other files, it’ll be pretty sweet.  I have a shit-ton of pics on my AyePhone just waiting for your eyes.

Fuck me, but I’m tired.  Saturday’s hike was a fucking nightmare.  Fucking.  Night.  Mare.  It took me almost 7 hours to go 5.95 miles.  I had to fight for every step.  There were about four or five feet of snow on the mountain.  Even with my snowshoes, I was sinking in up to my knees.  And the snow was heavy, to boot.

Imagine doing one of those tire-runs – you know, the ones where there’s a field of tires and you have to get from one end to another by stepping in the center of the tires.  Now imagine that they’re BIG tires:  not quite monster-truck-big, but like the fat tires that they put on Jeeps to do some major four-wheeling or mud-running.  Now imagine that you’ve got five pound weights strapped to your ankles while you’re doing it.  Then put the tire field on the side of a mountain and you’re pretty close to what my day was like on Saturday.

The five pound weights stand for the snow that was on the tops of my snowshoes every time I lifted my foot out of the hole my last step made.  I can’t tell you how many times I thought – seriously thought – about turning around.  As it was, I was only able to climb Vly mountain.  Bearpen will have to wait for another day.

Last weekend, on my way up Windham High Peak, I met an old hiker (I forget his name) who was “training” for the Appalachian Trail this spring.  He told me that he’s planning on giving it a shot, that only about one in five people complete the AT.  I told him there’s no reason he shouldn’t be one of the five.  Later in our story-swapping session, he told me about a few hikes during which he wasn’t able to find the canister at various mountains.  (Canisters are located at the summits of trail-less mountains, for which a bushwhack is required.  They’re for sign-in purposes.)  With the exception of the very first bushwhack Scott and I did, I’ve never failed to find the canister on any one of the peaks I’ve climbed.  Come to think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever climbed a mountain and not reached the summit.

There are many kinds of people in this world, two of which are those who find the canister and those who don’t.  The guy I talked to on Windham is one of the latter.  I’m not.

Bearpen and Vly are right next to one another, and the hike to climb both is not a hard one.  I now have three weekends in which to climb six mountains (Bearpen, Kaaterskill High Peak, Rocky, Lone, Balsam Cap, and Friday).  Notwithstanding my desire to climb the latter four in a single hike, that means I’ve got four trips left for those three weekends.  I’m technically behind schedule.

I’ve entertained the thought that I might not be able to complete my goal for this winter’s peakbagging extravaganza.  But not for very long.  I’ll finish what I started.

When I parked my car on Saturday, it was about a mile short of the snowplow turnaround at the base of the mountains.  I had to walk that mile up the road in about a foot or so of snow.  The snow was much deeper after the snowplow turnaround.

On the way back, that last mile had been plowed.  At that point, my legs were jelly, so I was pretty psyched to be walking on a flat surface.  That last mile is probably the only one that I’ve put on the actual soles of my boots this winter (the rest of the time, I’d been wearing either snowshoes or crampons).  It occurred to me in that last mile that the snowplow may have inadvertently plowed me in.  I figured I’d count myself lucky if my mirror wasn’t accidentally ripped off, or if the whole driver’s side of my car wasn’t FUBAR.

The snowplow did not, in fact, inadvertently plow me in.  It plowed me in on purpose.  The rest of the road was clear, with the exception of a couple of pretty big piles of snow right in front of and behind my car.  My rear wheels were off the ground.  There was no snow along the side of my car and my mirror and door were intact; I count myself lucky.  I’m actually impressed at the skill of whomever was driving the snowplow – there was no damage to either end of my car.  This wouldn’t have been some dude in a pickup truck with a plow on it, either:  I’m talking about a heavy duty truck with a plow on the front and a plow on the side.  The snow on the sides of the road was piled up about ten feet high.

Luckily as well, the lady who lived across the street from where I parked just got home as I was getting back to my car.  She let me borrow her shovel and it only took me about ten minutes to get my car loose.  I count myself lucky that I have all my teeth and that they’re clean.

In the past couple of weeks, at least two people have told me directly that they’re “living vicariously through” me – specifically with respect to the photos posted on facebook of my winter peakbagging extravaganza.  I can’t tell you how cool that is; how good that makes me feel.

Well, I’m considering dialing that vicarious experience up a notch, dear reader.  I have four trips left, comprising 7 mountains; I’ve climbed 20 mountains since December 26th.  Tomorrow (today) I’ll be climbing Bearpen and Vly mountains.  They’re outside of the Catskill “Blue Line” (meaning they’re not technically in Catskill State Park), so these mountains aren’t accounted for in my Catskills map set.  Which means that not only do I need to find my own way to the tops of these mountains (there aren’t any trails to the summits), I also need to make my own maps.

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It’s not really as hard as it sounds.  I have the National Geographic Topo! software, so I can isolate these two mountains and print out a topographical map on a regular sheet of paper.  It won’t be a very good map, but what the hell, that’s what experience is for.  I’ve climbed these mountains before, and I think I could probably climb them without even bringing a map, but I’m going to print one out anyway just to be on the safe side.

This hike shouldn’t be ridiculously long – maybe 7 miles round-trip – so I’m considering climbing Kaaterskill High Peak on Sunday.  What with all the snow we’ve had here in NNJ in the past week, I’m not sure how bad the Catskills got hit.  If there are three feet of fresh snow on those mountains and no tracks to follow, any of the trips I have left will be a total bitch.  So I’ll check it out tomorrow (today) to see what the conditions are like.  If I can climb Bearpen and Vly without being totally exhausted tomorrow, I’ll bag Kaaterskill on Sunday and be a week ahead of schedule.

That will leave two trips:  Friday/Balsam Cap and Lone/Rocky.  Those four are, in my opinion, the hardest mountains to climb in the Catskills.  The peaks are all covered with extremely dense pine forest – imagine wall-to-wall Christmas trees, then make the Christmas trees a little taller and closer together and you’ll be getting close to what it’s like inside of that obstacle course.  Almost the whole hike is spent ducking under, going around, going through, or getting scraped up by stiff branches poking horizontally out of the trunks of the conifers.

On top of that, the hike just to get to Rocky (passing the base of Lone on the way) is almost five miles in and of itself.  Which means almost five miles of hike on the way out as well (not counting actually climbing those two fir-topped mountains).

Friday, Balsam Cap, Rocky and Lone basically form a northeast/southwest ridgeline.

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I’m considering bagging all four peaks in one day.  Considering – it’s not a plan just yet.  But if the Catskills don’t get too much more snow over the course of next week, and if I can get my lazy ass up early enough next Saturday, I think I might just be able to do it.  That would mean I’d be finished two weeks early.

We’ll see.  It’s just a thought right now, and I have a lot of those that end up growing up into not-so-good ideas.