Saturday’s Hike

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.

Tagged as: Balsam Cap, Catskill 3500 Club, Catskill 3500 Club winter patch, Friday, Lone, Rocky