This site chronicles my hiking in New York’s Catskills Mountains and my progress towards joining the Catskills 3500 Club. I was inspired to do this by the NJ/NY Hikes blog, which I found very helpful in planning my hikes. Hopefully you’ll find this blog helpful, too!
Progress:
Check out the posts below for individual hikes, or this nifty interactive map view:
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Bearpen & Vly, Spring or Winter?
A special dinner presents an opportunity to knock these two remote peaks out on what the 3500 club considers the last day of winter. -
Fir Snowshoe: The Bushes Whack YOU!
A long, snowy bushwhack through beautiful woods and a surprising first high peak. -
Winter Six (Catskills 3500 Club)
After hiking Blackhead last week, I’d completed the Catskills 3500 Club’s four required winter peaks. But I wasn’t quite done. I’d quit my job March 1st and suddenly found myself with lots of free time. I’d known about the 3500 Club’s organized hikes for years but never gotten around to doing one. If ever there was a time, it was now!
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Blackhead Snowshoe Adventure
The last of the four required winter peaks and my first Catskills snowshoeing adventure. Alex's "personal Everest". -
Winter Slide
Third of the four required winter peaks, part of a "very upstate day" that involved birding, boiling maple syrup and going to a dinner party. -
Balsam (Winter)
Second of the four required winter peaks, in which Alex, Max and I become the very first customers at the Eastwind bar. -
Panther (Winter)
First of the four required winter peaks, in which Alex and I finally summit Panther and do a surprise bushwhack on the way down. -
Late Fall in the Blackhead Range
This was originally planned as another backpacking trip but plans and constraints shifted so much that it just made more sense to do a day hike. We stashed Max and Sarah’s car at Big Hollow Rd, crammed into Big Blue and drove over to the Barnum Rd Lot. Both lots were quite small. Especially the Barnum lot it was unclear what was lot and what was snowplow turnaround.
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Plateau: Peak Fall
Quick afternoon hike prompted by Alex reading that the Catskills were hitting peak fall colors. The color were, indeed, magnificent! If anything they were slightly on the early side of peak – still lots of green mixed in with yellow and orange. There was a clear transition from mixed Maple / Birch at lower elevations to just Birch at higher elevations. You could see this in the change from a yellow/orange/red mix to just yellow starting around 3000 ft.
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The Nine
Hiked as an overnight backpacking trip with two friends. This was our first time bushwhacking and overall it went great! Conditions were perfect. After really being in the woods, the blazed trails felt so tame in comparison.
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Hunter and Southwest Hunter aka the COVID hike
This was a slog — I really struggled up the ascent. I initially thought it was because I was sore from climbing yesterday and Millbrook a few days before. But in retrospect I may have been starting to feel Covid booster side effects (I’d gotten the omicron booster the previous day).
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Kaaterskill High Peak (look, it's a plane!)
Quite surprising to find an airplane in the woods at the top of your hike! -
Indian Head & Twin: Baby Birds!
Did a loop with Alex. I found out later that I’d done Twin years ago with Max, so I somewhat regret pushing Alex to go to the summit over her protests about doing two peaks in one trip. I wanted to check out the Jimmy Dolan Notch viewpoint on our way down, but Alex wanted to head down. Bird highlights on this hike included finding a Junco nest with young in a rock face and seeing our first Blackpoll warbler.
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Table & Peekamoose aka "The Blackburnian Hike"
Alex, John G and I hiked Table and Peekamoose. The birding was spectacular – we heard thrushes and winter wrens throughout the hike and saw at least ten Blackburnian Warblers, including a family!
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Panther (failed) aka "The time when Google Maps took us to the wrong trailhead"
Not the hike we expected to do, and we didn't bag the peak we wanted, but we did see some great birds (including a lifer!) and views along the way. -
Fall Windham
We wanted to see fall colors on this hike.
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A through hike on the long path
I remember wanting to do this while we still had two cars. I stashed one car at the Mt. Pisgah trailhead and through-hiked to another exit (Partridge Rd), where Alex picked me up. The last bit of the road was hillier and more treacherous than I’d expected, so Alex didn’t want to drive it and I had to walk another half mile or so. I remember listening to some pre-election podcasts on my hike, then getting worried about batteries. A big discovery was that there was a viewpoint on the Mt. Pisgah trail, we’d just never hiked far enough to see it.
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Foggy Black Dome
We’d hoped to see fall colors on this hike, but it was an incredibly foggy day and there was no visibility at the summit. I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d done this hike with Max before. This turned out to be partially true!
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Balsam Summer Hike
Alex & I did this via Rider Hollow trailhead on our way to Andes.
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Summer Slide
We took the shortest, most direct route which I remember being quite dull (it was a carriage road).
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A dull pandemic hike on the Long Path
After hiking the Long Trail to Mt Pisgah last weekend, I was curious what the trail was like in the other direction. No views (at least not when there are leaves on the trees) but some lovely fern groves and steep climbs. There was a vehicle trail that I thought might go up to the top of Mt Nebo but it petered out into another fern grove. Not a spectacular section of the Long Trail, but nice if you want to avoid crowds during a pandemic.
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Windham with Alex
Afer my rave review from the previous week, Alex wanted to check it out. I remember finding wild ramps on this hike.
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Windham (solo)
My first hike of the pandemic. Not sure why I did this on a Thursday rather than a Covid Wednesday. I remember this feeling like a great release from being cooped up during March/April 2020 and then our self-imposed two weeks of quarantine after moving upstate.
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Indian Head
I have no memory of this hike! We must have hit it up on the way back from Bovina. It also looks like we drove to Platte Clove Falls (which I do remember).
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Windham and Blackhead overnight
Overnight hiking / camping with Max & Gabe. This track is reconstructed based on my photos. Some memories of this are struggling to start a campfire in damp conditions and meeting a happy trail runner at the top of one of the peaks.
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Sugarloaf and Twin overnight (my first Catskills hike)
Overnight hiking w/ Max. My first visit to the Catskills!