Today it was Hurricane Fire Tower. I chose to go up this one as training for winter hiking, being only a week or so before winter, and someone had reported a couple days earlier that they used snowshoes all the way. I was pumped to use my snowshoes again. Sadly, the weather warmed up and all I used was microspikes.
To continue on my fire tower challenge, I did Hadley and Kane fire towers.
First up was Hadley. This trail was a bit icy and I had to put on the microspikes shortly after I left the car. The trail up was overall not bad, just steep and a few open slabs to climb up. The views from the top were lovely, and this is a wonderful hike that I highly recommend.
Saturday I went up to the end of Spruceton and did the last 3 peaks I needed in that area... South West Hunter, Hunter, and Rusk. Planning had this at 10.8 miles, but GPS clocked in at 11.9 which may be true because of a couple of the side trails I did, plus the route I planned had a couple short cuts that were not there in reality.
Saturday May 14, Michael and I went up the Tremper Mountain Fire Tower. The day was very muggy, and that slowed me down some on the way up. Overall, it was a forest road the whole way up once you reached the register. Down low the trees were fully leafed out, but near the top you started to see the trees not fully out, which gave some lovely views to the neighboring mountains on the trail. As I said, it was an old forest road which meant that it was extremely rocky for most of the trail, and on top of that, it wasn't solid rock, there were a lot of them that shifted
Today, I did Overlook Fire Tower making it the first of the Fire Tower Challenge. The entire hike is a forest road, so dirt and gravel. The 2.3 miles up is really not that difficult, but being the start of the season for me, I did take my time, still averaging closer to 2 mph on the way up than I expected. The leaves were not out yet, so the views through the trees into the heart of the Catskills and the peaks I will be hiking at some point, likely this summer. I got to the top about 3 and climbed the fire tower. The gate was open so you could climb, but the pl
So, there are a lot of hiking challenges in New York. the biggest ones are of course the 46ers and 3500 in the Adirondacks and Catskills respectively. Those 2 hit all the highest mountains in those regions. One that is often overlooked is the Fire Tower challenge though. Back before modern technology, it was common practice to build towers on top of mountains so that a ranger could look over the area and spot wild fires before they got out of control. Many of these towers have fallen to ruins and have disappeared to just memories and a few random bits of steel