At this moment, I have 19 high peaks left to complete my winter round of 46. I went out on the first day of winter and got Colden, and found that winter hiking is what I remember, and did better than I expected on the hike. That is good because I have a bunch of long hikes ahead of me. At the moment, this is what I have left, and my concerns on each of the hikes.
This coming holiday weekend, I'm going to be doing an ambitious hike to red-line a few more trails. First, I am going to hike in to Panther Gorge from Elk Lake on the afternoon/evening of July 3. Right now the weather looks like thundershowers, but nothing too bad. This is going to be the first time I have ever hiked this trail, and the 8.75 miles will be interesting as it is going through Marcy Swamp, that supposedly has a lot of boards and low bridges that sometimes are out. I'll be doing this with a full pack, twice.
Hough (pronounced Huff) and I have a history. First off, when I did it in the summer of 2020, it was #45 for me on my way to finishing on Dix, and I was riding that hikers high at knowing you're almost done with the big challenge, and also on fumes since I camped out the night before, it rained, and another 2 tents popped up around 1 in the morning.
This weekend, I plan to do Kaaterskill High Peak. This is another of the "trailless" peaks, but in reality, the majority of it is either the Long Path or snowmobile trails. Looking at the elevation for this, there's really not much steep until the very end. I may try to cut a little bit of distance off of the mapped 7.6 miles by bushwhacking when I get to the plateau.
This coming Saturday, I plan to get back to hiking after a couple weeks off. The plan for the day are North Dome and Sherrill in the Catskills. These are both trailless peaks, but they do have established herd paths. The problem is that there are multiple ways to go up/down these mountains. The guidebook mentions one going up Sherrill from Shaft road. There's a route up North Dome from Spurceton road, and there's another that is a mile or so in on the Devils Path from Spruceton. The guide also says there's a path between the 2 peaks, but the col is narrow
The next peaks I am going to do will start the bushwacks. First up, I'll be doing Bear Pen and Vly. These 2 are described as relatively easy as it starts off with woods road and then it's snowmobile tracks to Bear Pen and following the park border the opposite side to vly. I can come in to that ridge "trail" from the north or the south, and I believe I' will do it from the north as it allows me to get to Halcott easier. The only issue I'm having with map planning is that these are not trails so I'm relying on someone's All Trails GPS tracks for how to do these,
So, this weekend looks like it is going to be pretty free for hiking. Saturday looks to be iffy weather in the form of light rain, and Sunday looks to be good weather. So, my plans are to do a few hikes this weekend to add to the 35er count. So, I'm going to start with some of the bushwack trails. First up will be Bearpen and Vly. These 2 are not really much of a bushwack from what I've read. Going in from the south, the herd path to Vly is following the state park border. Bearpen is turning the other way and following snowmobile trails.
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
So, last time I ended up going up Cascade and skipping Porter. The biggest reason was I got to the top right about my turnaround time. This was based off of not knowing how fast I would be heading out. It took 4 hour up but only 1.5 down. If it was 4 down I would have been off the trail at 5 and in the mountains where the sunset is around 6, it can get dark quickly and I don't really want to be hiking in the dark. Now I know better about my abilities. My turn around time won't be 130 like it was last time. It will be more like 3. Looking back