Suday I took another 3500 winter hike in the Catskills.  Bearpen and Vly.  Started off late for me, and started up the road with my hiking companion.  This hike is mostly snowmobile trails, and there had been deep enough with snow that they've been well used, so were almost as if they were groomed trails.  We decided to start in snowshoes so we didn't have to put them on later, and we got to the hunters cabin without any issue and made our choice to do Vly first.

Vly is the steeper of the 2 peaks, and is considered trailess, but it follows the property line, and that's marked with paint on the trees.... so yeah, no official trail, but there are essentially markers to follow.  It wasn't a big deal to follow though.  The bigger issue though is the people that had come in earlier had postholed the trail the whole way.  It was annoying, especially on the steeper sections.  I would like to say our snowshoes covered all the holes up, but the snow was solid, so that wasn't happening.  We get to the peak, signed the book, and got back to the cabin in no time.  

Then it was Bearpen.  Technically all the trails to Bearpen were snowmobile trails.  The good news though is about 1/2 the distance is on an abandoned trail.  We got up to there being passed by 2 snowmobilers, and were happy to get off their trail.  This trail was better than Vly's, the bare booters did less damage and the trail was rather hard, yet narrow.  Before we knew it though, we had reached the peak and gone the 500 or so feet past to the firepit and the views of the Schoharie valley.  Coming back down we reached the cabin and were surprised at how quickly we made it, and were back to the car in just under an hour for that 2.4 miles.

This marks 19/33 for winter 3500, and 55.6 miles over 37.5 hours and up/down 3.22 miles since Jan 1.