A through hike on the long path

Timeline:

• 2:30 PM Stash car and start hiking
• 3:35 PM Pisgah viewpoint
• 6:10 PM Alex picks me up at the end of the dirt road

Alex and I had borrowed her mother’s car when we moved up the Catskills at the start of the pandemic and had recently purchased our own car. So for a brief window, we had two cars! I very much wanted to take advantage of this to do a through hike. My company was giving us Wednesday afternoons off during the pandemic, so I drove out to the nearby Mt. Pisgah trailhead and made arrangements for Alex to pick me up at the other end (Partridge Rd) a few hours later.

I remember listening to some pre-election podcasts on my hike, then getting worried about batteries and mostly going back into airplane mode. The trail was predictably quiet, I didn’t see a single other person the entire seven miles.

A big discovery was that there was a viewpoint on the Mt. Pisgah trail, which Alex and I had hiked many times. We’d just never hiked far enough to see it.

I continued on the ridge towards Ashland Pinnacle (red blazes) and walked out on that side. The last bit of the road was hillier and more treacherous than I’d expected. Alex wasn’t comfortable with hilly dirt roads, so I knew I’d have to walk farther to meet her. Fortunately I only had to go another half mile or so. The people living on that road were very surprised to see someone they didn’t know driving there!

Not a spectacular hike, but I was glad to find the viewpoint and take advantage of having two cars.